y. Nobody who has read the story of John Stuart Mill's
boyhood will wonder that Mill was a skeptic. And nobody who has read the
story of Thomas Huxley's boyhood will wonder at his becoming an
agnostic. As Edward Clodd, his biographer, says, 'his boyhood was a
cheerless time. Reversing Matthew Arnold's sunnier memories:

No rigorous teachers seized his youth,
And purged its faith and tried its fire,
Shewed him the high, white star of truth,
There bade him gaze, and there aspire.

'He told Charles Kingsley that he was "kicked into the world, a boy
without guide or training, or with worse than none"; he "had two years
of a pandemonium of a school, and, after that, neither help nor sympathy
in any intellectual direction till he reached manhood."' And, even then,
as those familiar with his biography know, he had little enough.

What would Huxley have been, I wonder, if the sympathy for which he
hungered had been extended to him? If, instead of badgering him with
arguments and entangling him in controversy, Mr. Gladstone and Bishop
Wilberforce and others had honestly attempted to see things through his
spectacles! Huxley was said to be as cold as ice and as inflexible as
steel; but I doubt it. In his life-story I find two incidents--one
belonging to his early manhood and one belonging to his age--which tell
a very different tale.

The _first_ is connected with the birth of his boy. It is the last night
of the Old Year, and he is waiting to hear that he is a father. He
spends the anxious hour in framing a resolution. In his diary he pledges
himself 'to smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to
science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal
controversies and of toleration for everything but lying; to be
indifferent as to whether the work is recognized as mine or not, so long
as it is done. It is half-past ten at night. Waiting for my child. I
seem to fancy it the pledge that all these things shall be.' And the
next entry runs:

'_New Year's Day, 1859._ Born five minutes before twelve. Thank God!'

Mark that '_Thank God!_' and then note what follows. A year or two
later, when the child is snatched from him, he makes this entry and then
closes the journal for ever. He has no heart to keep a diary afterwards.

'Our Noel, our firstborn, after being for nearly four years our delight
and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This
day week he and I had a great romp