Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11
Literature -- Collections
Darwin's only self-indulgence was snuff-taking. In later years he smoked
an occasional cigarette, but his real "little weakness" was snuff. It is
difficult to suppose that he did not benefit by the habit, careful as he
was to keep it in check. He kept his snuff-box in the hall of his house,
so that he should have to take the trouble of a walk in order to get a
pinch, and not have too easy an access to the magic powder.
The impression made on him by his own success and the overwhelming
praise and even reverence which he received from all parts of the world,
was characteristic of his charming nature. Darwin did not receive these
proofs of the triumphs of his views with the solemnity of an inflated
reformer who has laid his law upon the whole world of thought. Quite
otherwise. He was simply delighted. He chuckled gayly over the spread of
his views, almost as a sportsman--and we must remember that in his young
days he _was_ a sportsman--may rejoice in the triumphs of his own
favorite "racer," or even as a schoolboy may be proud and happy in the
success of "the eleven" of which he is captain. He delighted to count up
the sale of his books, not specially for the money value it represented,
though he was too sensible to be indifferent to that, but because it
proved to him that his long and arduous life of thought, experiment, and
literary work was not in vain. To have been or to have posed as being
indifferent to popular success, would have required a man of less vivid
sympathy with his fellow-men: to have been puffed up and pretentious
would have needed one less gifted with a sense of humor, less conscious
of the littleness of one man, however talented, in the vast procession
of life on the earth's surface. His delight in his work and its success
was of the perfect and natural kind, which he could communicate to his
wife and daughters, and might have been shared by a child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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