With respect to your lordship’s offer to submit my name to Her Majesty for a Civil List Pension, I can but accept a proposal which is in itself an honour, and which is rendered extremely gratifying to me by the great kindness of the expressions in which you have been pleased to embody it.

I am happy to say that I am getting steadily better at last, and under the regime of “peace with honour” that now seems to have fallen to my lot, I may fairly hope yet to do a good stroke of work or two.

I remain, my dear Lord Iddesleigh, faithfully yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

4 Marlborough Place, November 24, 1885.

My dear Donnelly,

I believe you have been at work again!

Lord Iddesleigh has written to me to ask if I will be recommended for a Civil List Pension of 300 pounds a year, a very pretty letter, not at all like the Treasury masterpiece you admired so much.

Didn’t see why I should not accept, and have accepted accordingly.  When the announcement comes out the Liberals will say the Tory Government have paid me for attacking the G.O.M.! to a dead certainty.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Five days later he replies to the congratulations of Mr. Eckersley (whose son had married Huxley’s third daughter):—­]

...Lord Iddesleigh’s letter offering to submit my name for an honorary pension was a complete surprise.

My chiefs in the late Government wished to retire me on full pay, but the Treasury did not see their way to it, and cut off 300 pounds a year.  Naturally I am not sorry to have the loss made good, but the way the thing was done is perhaps the pleasantest part of it.

[There was a certain grim appropriateness in his “official death” following hard upon his sixtieth birthday, for sixty was the age at which he had long declared that men of science ought to be strangled, lest age should harden them against the reception of new truths, and make them into clogs upon progress, the worse, in proportion to the influence they had deservedly won.  This is the allusion in a birthday letter from Sir M. Foster:—­

Reverend Sir,

So the “day of strangulation” has arrived at last, and with it the humble petition of your friends that you may be induced to defer the “happy despatch” for, say at least ten years, when the subject may again come up for consideration.  For your petitioners are respectfully inclined to think that if your sixtyship may be induced so far to become an apostle as to give up the fishery business, and be led to leave the Black Board at South Kensington to others, the t’other side sixty years, may after all be the best years of your life.  In any case they would desire to bring under your notice the fact that they feel they want you as much as ever they did.

Ever thine,

M.F.