stinct with
malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences.

Yet such was the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that it
was ever my good fortune to know; and years had to pass away before
misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation, ceased to be the most
notable constituents of the majority of the multitudinous criticisms of
his work which poured from the press. I am loth to rake any of these
ancient scandals from their well-deserved oblivion; but I must make
good a statement which may seem overcharged to the present generation,
and there is no piece justificative more apt for the purpose, or more
worthy of such dishonour, than the article in the 'Quarterly Review'
for July, 1860. (I was not aware when I wrote these passages that the
authorship of the article had been publicly acknowledged. Confession
unaccompanied by penitence, however, affords no ground for mitigation
of judgment; and the kindliness with which Mr. Darwin speaks of his
assailant, Bishop Wilberforce (vol. ii.), is so striking an
exemplification of his singular gentleness and modesty, that it rather
increases one's indignation against the presumption of his critic.)
Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such
specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science
as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of
observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors,
of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person,
who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and
speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as
"utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and
mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's
equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of
conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to
Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it credible that all favourable
varieties of turnips are tending to become men;" who is so ignorant of
paleontology, that he can talk of the "flowers and fruits" of the
plants of the carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can
gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be
"entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar
to themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, "what
advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into wh