Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/251

Rh, belong to the moral climate of the old country; and it does not need the grouse-shooting, the Cambridge undergraduate suppers, and the proposition that he should choose the Church for a profession to tell us where we are. Indeed, Darwin in his youth, spirited, cordial, and overflowing with health, in his early surroundings of English strength and kindness, was quite as attractive as in his quieter, and in some respects narrower, working life.

He certainly won upon the men whom he met at the outset of his career. "Looking back," he says, "I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths: otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them. Certainly I was not aware of any such superiority; and I remember one of my sporting friends, Turner, who saw me at work with my beetles, saying that I should some day be a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the notion seemed to me preposterous." Of these men Henslow was the most attached to him and interested in his success. He had not done much more than work at