I used to be searching for one thing else after I got here throughout this letter in The Occasions of 14 October 1892.
It got here after a number of days of correspondence following the dying of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. A relation indicated that Tennyson was the writer (with barely completely different phrases) to enhance his poem entitled Timbuctu which gained him Cambridge’s Chancellor’s Prize in 1829 on the age of 20. Others then wrote in to recommend completely different phrases and completely different authors for the quatrain which had grow to be well-known in the course of the reign of Victoria. An account may be discovered right here. Lately I see the poem is attributed to Samuel Wilberforce however I’ve seen no precise proof that he was certainly the writer of the zoologically nonsense verse. However how scrumptious to see Huxley on the subject, given his well-known put down of ‘Soapy Sam’ (the ‘unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous’ Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce) within the debate on Darwin’s Origin of Species at Oxford in 1860.
And much more entertaining* for me since I used to be one in all many successors to an workplace as soon as held by each Huxley and Wilberforce.
*and but much more so was an internet site describing the Oxford debate as between Wilberforce and Aldous Huxley. Oh nicely, solely a few generations out.