but then it is not quite the right thing. Huxley gets his Pegasus into the strictest subordination; but one can understand that he had to suppress a good many swervings to right and left, and only found the lucid order after experimental wanderings into the wrong paths. The result is the familiar one. What is easy to read has not, therefore, as the hasty reader infers, been easy to write. An 'unfriendly' but surely rather simple-minded critic declared that the interest of Huxley's lectures was due not to the lecturer, but to the simplicity of the theory expounded. That is the same effect which Swift produced in the Drapier's Letters. He seems to be simply stating obvious facts. Huxley's best essays deserve to be put on a level with the best examples of Swift or other great literary athletes; and any one who imagines the feat to be easy can try the experiment.
Professor Ray Lankester, in describing this quality of Huxley's essays, points out also how this implies a revelation of the man. When Swift's tracts purport to give an unvarnished statement of plain facts and figures, we are all the more sensible of the fierce indignation boiling just below the surface. Huxley's resolution to be strictly logical and to be clear before anything
