[page] 521

The letters which I had from him at this period express the greatest solicitude for the fair consideration of his doctrines, and the warmest gratitude to those who had taken up the advocacy of them; while from any personal bitterness against his opponents, they are entirely free. "I have been of late," he wrote to me, "sufficiently well pitched into about my book to please anybody. But I care very little; which I entirely and absolutely owe to the generous and kind support of a very few men. When I reflect (as I often do) that such men as Lyell, yourself, Hooker, and Huxley, go a certain way with me, nothing will persuade me that I am so wholly and egregiously in error as many of my reviewers think."