[Speaking of two men of letters, with neither of whom he sympathised, he once said:—­]

Don’t mistake me.  One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man.  Erasmus was a man of letters, Gigadibs a literary man.  A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs.  I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus.

[Another time, referring to Dean Stanley’s historical impressionability, as militating against his sympathies with Colenso, he said:—­]

Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the supposed site, but was sceptical where he had not seen.  At a breakfast at Monckton Milnes’s, just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them.  Stanley differed from me.  The account of Creation in Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical; but the call of Abraham, and the historical narrative of the Pentateuch, he accepted.  This was because he had seen Palestine—­but he wasn’t present at the Creation.

[When he and Stanley met, there was sure to be a brisk interchange of repartee.  One of these occasions, a ballot day at the Athenaeum, has been recorded by the late Sir W.H.  Flower:—­

A well-known popular preacher of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, who had made himself famous by predictions of the speedy coming of the end of the world, was up for election.  I was standing by Huxley when the Dean, coming straight from the ballot boxes, turned towards us.] “Well,” [said Huxley], “have you been voting for C.?” ["Yes, indeed I have,” replied the Dean.] “Oh, I thought the priests were always opposed to the prophets,” [said Huxley.] “Ah!” replied the Dean, with that well-known twinkle in his eye, and the sweetest of smiles, “but you see, I do not believe in his prophecies, and some people say I am not much of a priest.”

A few words as to his home life may perhaps be fitly introduced here.  Towards his children he had the same union of underlying tenderness veiled beneath inflexible determination for what was right, which marked his intercourse with those outside his family.

As children we were fully conscious of this side of his character.  We felt our little hypocrisies shrivel up before him; we felt a confidence in the infallible rectitude of his moral judgments which inspired a kind of awe.  His arbitrament was instant and final, though rarely invoked, and was perhaps the more tremendous in proportion to its rarity.  This aspect, as if of an oracle without appeal, was heightened in our minds by the fact that we saw but little of him.  This was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence.  In the struggle to keep his head above water for the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life, he had scarcely any time to devote to his children.  The “lodger,” as he used to call himself at one time, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes spare half an hour just before or after dinner to draw wonderful pictures for the little ones, and these were memorable occasions.  I remember that he used to profess a horror of being too closely watched, or of receiving suggestions, while he drew.  “Take care, take care,” he would exclaim, “or I don’t know what it will turn into.”