Volume I Part 9 (2/2)
No one indeed, excepthe endured, or the full amount of his wonderful patience For all the latter years of his life she never left hiht; and her days were so planned that all his resting hours ht be shared with her She shi+elded hiht save hiht alleviate the many discomforts of his ill-health I hesitate to speak thus freely of a thing so sacred as the life-long devotion which prompted all this constant and tender care But it is, I repeat, a principal feature of his life, that for nearly forty years he never knew one day of the health of ordinary ainst the weariness and strain of sickness And this cannot be told without speaking of the one condition which enabled hile to the end
LETTERS
The earliest letters to which I have access are those written by e
The history of his life, as told in his correspondence, in with this period
CHAPTER 1IV -- CAMBRIDGE LIFE
[My father's Cae life comprises the time between the Lent Term, 1828, when he came up as a Freshree and left the University]
It appears froe books, that istro Shaw” on October 15, 1827 He did not coh he passed his exaree at the usual ti of the Lent Terree before Ash-Wednesday, when he was called ”Baccalaureus ad Diem Cinerum,” and ranked with the BA's of the year My father's name, however, occurs in the list of Bachelors ”ad Baptistam,” or those admitted between Ash-Wednesday and St John Baptist's Day (June 24th); (”On Tuesday last Charles Darwin, of Christ's College, was ade Chronicle”, Friday, April 29, 1831) he therefore took rank a the Bachelors of 1832
He ”kept” for a ters, over Bacon the tobacconist's; not, however, over the shop in the Market Place, noell known to Cae men, but in Sidney Street For the rest of his time he had pleasant rooms on the south side of the first court of Christ's (The rooms are on the first floor, on the west side of the iven by -rooe for his brother Eras Erasrandfather, had been at St John's, and this collegeconnected with Shrewsbury School
But the life of an under-graduate at St John's seee frorated thence to Christ's to escape the harassing discipline of the place A story told by Mr Herbert illustrates the sa of the October Term of 1830, an incident occurred which was attended with soh ludicrous consequences toith him in the Fens, to search for so
After a very long, fatiguing day's work, we dined together, late in the evening, at his rooe; and as soon as our dinner was over we threw ourselves into easy chairs and fell sound asleep I was first to awake, about three in thethe strict rule of St John's, which required ht, I rushed homeward at the ut that the Dean would accept the excuse as sufficient when I told him the real facts He, however, was inexorable, and refused to receive h duringlate into College, nohen I was a hard-working BA, and had five or six pupils, he sentenced e walls for the rest of the ternation knew no bounds, and the stupid injustice and tyranny of the Dean raised not only a perfect fer my friends, but was the subject of expostulation fro members of the University”
My father see at peace with all aret's other foundation The impression of a contemporary of my father's is that Christ's in their day was a pleasant, fairly quiet college, with some tendency towards ”horsiness”;the races, though betting was not a regular practice In this they were by no ed by the Senior Tutor, Mr Shaas hienerally to be seen on the Heath on these occasions There was a soht or nine, to sixty or seventy Pensioners, and this would indicate that it was not an unpleasant college for reat love of strict discipline
The way in which the service was conducted in chapel shows that the Dean, at least, was not over zealous I have heardchapel the Dean used to read alternate verses of the Psalation to take their share And when the Lesson was a lengthy one, he would rise and go on with the Canticles after the scholar had read fifteen or twenty verses
It is curious that e life as if it had been so h the set studies of the place were barren enough for hies of a University life--the contact with orously It is true that he valued at its highest the advantages which he gained fro with Professor Henslow and some others, but he seemed to consider this as a chance outcoe for which Ale friends was the late Mr JM Herbert, County Court Judge for South Wales, froh to obtain soain an idea of how my father impressed his conte of 1828 that I first met Darwin, either at my cousin Whitley's rooms in St John's, or at the rooms of some other of his old Shrewsbury schoolfelloith reat intimacy But it certainly was in the summer of that year that our acquaintance ripened into intiether at Bar with private tutors,--he with Batterton of St John's, his Classical and Mathematical Tutor, and I with Yate of St John's”
The intercourse between theoodbye to Herbert at Cae I once met Mr Herbert, then almost an old man, and I was much struck by the evident warmth and freshness of the affection hich he remembered my father The notes froium: ”It would be idle for me to speak of his vast intellectual powersbut I cannot end this cursory and ra, and I doubt not all his surviving college friends would concur with enerous, and affectionate of friends; that his syood and true; and that he had a cordial hatred for everything false, or vile, or cruel, or reat, but pre-eood, and just, and loveable”
Two anecdotes told by Mr Herbert show that , whether ofe he told me that he had made up his mind not to shoot anyat his friend's, Mr Owen of Woodhouse; and that on the second day, when going over soround they had beaten on the day before, he picked up a bird not quite dead, but lingering from a shot it had received on the previous day; and that it had made and left such a painful impression on his mind, that he could not reconcile it to his conscience to continue to derive pleasure fro”
To realise the strength of the feeling that led to this resolve, we must remember how passionate was his love of sport Wehis first snipe ('Recollections'), and treun Or think of such a sentence as, ”Upon ht to the 'First,'
then if there is a bliss on earth that is it” (Letter from C Darwin to WD Fox)
Another anecdote told by Mr Herbert illustrates again his tenderness of heart:--
”When at Bars' In the s failed in perfor hi put on a most piteous expression, as if in fear of the whip Darwin seeing it, asked , I can't stand this any longer; how those poor dogs must have been licked'”
It is curious that the sa recurred tosos at the Westminster Aquariu hiht oes on:--”It stirred one's inroan over, the horrors of the slave-trade, or the cruelties to which the suffering Poles were subjected at WarsawThese, and other like proofs have left on my mind the conviction that a more hue friends agree in speaking with affectionate war ain the i with ani a varied healthy life--not over-industrious in the set of studies of the place, but full of other pursuits, which were folloith a rejoicing enthusias in the fens, suppers and card-playing, s at the Fitzwilliam Museum, walks with Professor Henslow--all combined to fill up a happy life He seems to have infected others with his enthusias the same Barmouth summer, he was pressed into the service of ”the science”--asbeetles They took their daily walks together a the hills behind Barmouth, or boated in the Mawddach estuary, or sailed to Sarn Badrig to land there at loater, or went fly-fishi+ng in the Cors-y-gedol lakes ”On these occasions Darwin ento up creatures as he walked along, and bagging everything which see pursued, or of further examination And very soon he armed me with a bottle of alcohol, in which I had to drop any beetle which struck me as not of a coence in my constitutional walks; but alas! my powers of discrimination seldom enabledthe contents ofan exclamation, 'Well, old Cherbury' (No doubt in allusion to the title of Lord Herbert of Cherbury) (the nicknaave me, and by which he usually addressed ain, the Rev T Butler, as one of the Bar-party in 1828, says: ”He inoculated me with a taste for Botany which has stuck by me all my life”