Of Darwin's pure and exalted moral nature no Englishman of the present generation can trust himself to speak with becoming moderation. His love of truth, his singleness of heart, his sincerity, his earnestness, his modesty, his candour, his absolute sinking of self and selfishness--these, indeed, are all conspicuous to every reader, on the very face of every word he ever printed. Like his works themselves, they must long outlive him. But his sympathetic kindliness, his ready generosity, the staunchness of his friendship, the width and depth and breadth of his affections, the manner in which 'he bore with those who blamed him unjustly without blaming them in return,' these things can never so well be known to any other generation of men as to the three generations who walked the world with him. Many even of those who did not know him loved him like a father; to many who never saw his face, the hope of winning Charles Darwin's approbation and regard was the highest incentive to thought and action. Towards younger men, especially, his unremitting kindness was always most noteworthy: he spoke and wrote to them, not like one of the masters in Israel, but like a fellow-worker and seeker after truth, interested in their interests, pleased at their successes, sympathetic with their failures, gentle to their mistakes. Not that he ever spared rightful criticism; on the contrary, the love of truth was with him so overpowering and enthralling a motive that he pointed out what seemed to him errors or misconceptions in the work of others with perfect frankness, fully expecting them to be as pleased and delighted at a suggested amendment of their faulty writing as he himself was in his own case. But his praise was as generous as his criticism was frank; and, amid all the toil of his laborious life in his study at Down, he could always find time to read and comment at full length upon whatever fresh contributions to his own subjects the merest tyro might venture to submit for his consideration. He had the sympathetic receptivity of all truly great minds, and when he died, thousands upon thousands who had never beheld his serene features and his fatherly eyes felt they had lost indeed a personal friend. Greatness is not always joined with gentleness: in Charles Darwin's case, by universal consent of all who knew him, 'an intellect which had no superior' was wedded to 'a character even nobler than the intellect.' CHAPTER XI. DARWIN'S PLACE IN THE EVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.