Points of Friction
centricities won neither respect nor esteem. Byron could not in cold blood have hurt anything that breathed; but there was a general impression that a man who was living with another man's wife had no business to be so kind to animals, and certainly no business to censure respectable and church-going citizens who were cruel to them.
Nevertheless, the battle so inauspiciously begun has been waged ever since, and has found more impeccable champions. It was possible for Charles Lamb to sigh with one breath over the "intolerable pangs" inflicted by "meek" anglers, and to rejoice with the next over the page hallowed by the angler's reverend name. Happily for himself and for his readers, he had that kind of a mind. But Huxley, whose mind was singularly inflexible and unaccommodating, refused such graceful concessions. All forms of cruelty were hateful to him. Of one distinguished and
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