The accordance of a resting-place to Darwin's remains among England's illustrious dead in that Valhalla, was an irenicon from Theology to one whose theories, pushed to their logical issues, have done more than any other to undermine the supernatural assumptions on which it is built. Not that Darwin was a man of aggressive type. If he speaks on the high matters round which, like planet tethered to sun, the spirit of man revolves by irresistible attraction, it is with hesitating voice and with no deep emotion. A man of placid temper, in whom the observing faculties were stronger than the reflective, he was content to collect and co-ordinate facts, leaving to others the work of pointing out their significance, and adjusting them, as best they could, to this or that theory. It would be unjust to say of him what John Morley says of Voltaire, that "he had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice," but we know from his own confessions, what limitations hemmed in his emotional nature. The Life and Letters tells us that he was glad, after the more serious work and correspondence of the day were over, to listen to novels, for which he had a great love so long as they ended happily, and contained "some person whom one can thoroughly love, if a pretty woman, so much the better." But strangely enough, he lost all pleasure in music, art, and poetry after thirty. When at school he enjoyed Thomson, Byron, and Scott; Shelley gave him intense delight, and he was fond of Shakespeare, especially the historical plays; but in his old age he found him "so intolerably dull that it nauseated me." This curious and lamentable loss of the higher æsthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects, interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and, if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.