Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance, Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey. George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters. Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives than those which I have set forth at greater length than I intended. Ever yours very faithfully, T. H. HUXLEY [Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL] JOHN TYNDALL In my little book on Faraday, published in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight, I have stated that he had but to will it to raise his income, in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, to five thousand pounds a year. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, the sum might have been doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder, with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid opportunities open to him--refusing even to think them splendid in presence of higher aims--cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House a pittance of two hundred pounds a year. --_John Tyndall_ JOHN TYNDALL