is Huxley's style adapted to the subject-matter?

2. Can you explain the difference in style of the different essays by
the difference in purpose?

3. Compare Huxley's way of saying things with some other author's way of
saying things.

4. Huxley says of his essays to workingmen, "I only wish I had had the
sense to anticipate the run these have had here and abroad, and I would
have revised them properly. As they stand they are terribly in the
rough, from a literary point of view."

Do you find evidences of roughness?

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY -- AUTOBIOGRAPHY [1]

And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which I have
upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in this manner at
my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in all circumstances,
these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of
greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do.--Bishop Butler to the
Duchess of Somerset.

The "many things" to which the Duchess's correspondent here refers are
the repairs and improvements of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt
if the great apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of
his character, would have considered the writing an account of himself
as a thing which could be put upon him to do whatever circumstances
might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man
might write books and yet be permitted to keep his private existence
to himself; in the pre-Boswellian [2] epoch, when the germ of the
photographer lay concealed in the distant future, and the interviewer
who pervades our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of
time.

At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism "Bene qui
latuit, bene vixit,"[3] is not always able to act up to it. An
importunate person informs him that his portrait is about to be
published and will be accompanied by a biography which the importunate
person proposes to write. The sufferer knows what that means; either he
undertakes to revise the "biography" or he does not. In the former case,
he makes himself responsible; in the latter, he allows the publication
of a mass of more or less fulsome inaccuracies for which he will be
held responsible by those who are familiar with the prevalent art of
self-advertisement. On the whole, it may be better to get over the
"burlesque of being employed in this manner" and do the thing himself.

It was by reflections of this kind that,