Afterwards talk would go on in the drawing-room, or, on warm summer evenings, in the garden—­nothing very extensive, but boasting a lawn with an old apple-tree at the further end, and in the borders such flowers and trees as endure London air.  Later on, there was almost sure to be some music, to which my father himself was devoted.  His daughters sang; a musical friend would be there; Mr. Herbert Spencer, a frequent visitor, was an authority on music.  Once only do I recollect any other form of entertainment, and that was an occasion when Sir Henry Irving, then not long established at the Lyceum, was present and recited “Eugene Aram” with great effect.

In his “London Letters” Mr. G.W.  Smalley has recorded his impressions of these evenings (Another interesting account from the same pen is to be found in the article “Mr. Huxley,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1895.), at which he was often present:—­

There used to be Sunday evening dinners and parties in Marlborough Place, to which people from many other worlds than those of abstract science were bidden; where talk was to be heard of a kind rare in any world.  It was scientific at times, but subdued to the necessities of the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such bounds that bishop or archbishop might have listened without offence; political even, and still not commonplace; literary without pretence, and when artistic, free from affectation.

There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he cared to, or if challenged.  Nobody was more ready in a greater variety of topics, and if they were scientific it was almost always another who introduced them.  Unlike some of his comrades of the Royal Society, he was of opinion that man does not live by science alone, and nothing came amiss to him.  All his life long he has been in the front of the battle that has raged between science and—­not religion, but theology in its more dogmatic form.  Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and Mr. Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across the table than with pen in hand.  Yet an angry man must be very angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary.  He disarmed his enemies with an amiable grace that made defeat endurable if not entirely delightful.

As for his method of handling scientific subjects in conversation:—­

He has the same quality, the same luminous style of exposition, with which his printed books have made all readers in America and England familiar.  Yet it has more than that.  You cannot listen to him without thinking more of the speaker than of his science, more of the solid beautiful nature than of the intellectual gifts, more of his manly simplicity and sincerity than of all his knowledge and his long services.

But his personality left the deepest impression, perhaps, upon those who studied under him and worked with him longest, before taking their place elsewhere in the front ranks of biological science.