As to private affairs, I think I am getting solidly, but very slowly, better.  In fact, I can’t say there is much the matter with me, except that I am weaker than I ought to be, and that a sort of weary indolence hangs about me like a fog.  M—­ is wonderfully better, and her husband has taken a house for them at Norwood.  If I could be rejoiced at anything, I should be at that; but it seems to me as if since that awful journey when I first left England, “the springs was broke,” as that vagabond tout said at Naples.

It has turned very cold here, and we are uncertain when to leave for Florence, but probably next week.  The Carnival is the most entirely childish bosh I have ever met with among grown people.  Want to finish this now for post, but will write again speedily.  Moseley’s proposition is entirely to my mind, and I have often talked to it.  The Royal Society rooms ought to be house-of-call and quasi-club for all F.R.S. in London.

Wife is bonny, barring a cold.  It is as much as I can do to prevent her sporting a mask and domino!

With best love,

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

Hotel Victoria, Rome, Via dei due Macelli, February 16, 1885.

My dear Donnelly,

I have had it on my mind to write to you for the last week—­ever since the hideous news about Gordon reached us.  But partly from a faint hope that his wonderful fortune might yet have stood him in good stead, and partly because there is no great satisfaction in howling with rage, I have abstained.

Poor fellow!  I wonder if he has entered upon the “larger sphere of action” which he told me was reserved for him in case of such a trifling accident as death.  Of all the people whom I have met with in my life, he and Darwin are the two in whom I have found something bigger than ordinary humanity—­an unequalled simplicity and directness of purpose—­a sublime unselfishness.

Horrible as it is to us, I imagine that the manner of his death was not unwelcome to himself.  Better wear out than rust out, and better break than wear out.  The pity is that he could not know the feeling of his countrymen about him.

I shall be curious to see what defence the super-ingenious Premier has to offer for himself in Parliament.  I suppose, as usual, the question will drift into a brutal party fight, when the furious imbecility of the Tories will lead them to spoil their case.  That is where we are; on the one side, timid imbecility “waiting for instructions from the constituencies”; furious imbecility on the other, looking out for party advantage.  Oh! for a few months of William Pitt.

I see you think there may be some hope that Gordon has escaped yet.  I am afraid the last telegram from Wolseley was decisive.  We have been watching the news with the greatest anxiety, and it has seemed only to get blacker and blacker.

...

[Touching a determined effort to alter the management of certain Technical Education business.]