ess of his friend and political patron. The language of
the codicil shows that, be the nature of the connexion what it might,
Halifax meant to tell the world that it might be proclaimed in all its
relation to the name of Newton. To those who cannot, under all the
circumstances, believe the connexion to have been what is called platonic,
the probability that there was a private marriage is precisely the
probability that Newton would not have sanctioned the dishonour of his own
niece: and even if the connexion were only that of friendship, Newton must
have sanctioned the appearance and the forms of a dishonourable intimacy:
the co-habitation, the settlement, and the defiance of opinion. Now there
is no reason to suppose of Newton that he would be a party to either
proceeding, which would not apply as well to any man then alive: to Locke,
for instance. Looking at the morals of the day, we are by no means
justified in throwing off at once, with disgust, the bare idea of the
possibility of a distinguished philosopher consenting to an illicit
intercourse between his friend and his niece: we are bound, {432} in
discussing probabilities, to distinguish 1850 from 1700. But, even putting
out of view the purity of Newton's private life, and of the lives of his
most intimate friends, there is that in the weaker part of his character
which is of itself almost conclusive. Right or wrong, Newton never faced
opinion. As soon as he found that publication involved opposition, from
that time forward he published only with the utmost reluctance, and under
the strongest persuasions; except when, as in the case of some of his
theological writings, he confided the manuscript to a friend, to be
anonymously published abroad. The _Principia_ was extorted from him by the
Royal Society; the first publication on fluxions was under the name of
Wallis; the _Optics_ were delayed until the death of Hooke; the first
appearance against Leibnitz was anonymous; the second originated in a hint
from the King. This morbid fear, which is often represented as modesty,
would have made him, had he acted a part with regard to his niece which he
could not avow, conduct it with the utmost reserve. The philosopher who
would have let the theory of gravitation die in silence rather than
encounter the opposition which a discovery almost always creates, would not
have allowed his _name_ to be connected with the annuity which was the
price of his niece's honour, or which car