If I deserve to be remembered, it will be not so much for anything I have
written, or for any new way of looking at old facts which I may have
suggested, as for having shown that a man of no special ability, with no
literary connections, not particularly laborious, fairly, but not
supremely, accurate as far as he goes, and not travelling far either for
his facts or from them, may yet, by being perfectly square, sticking to
his point, not letting his temper run away with him, and biding his time,
be a match for the most powerful literary and scientific coterie that
England has ever known.
I hope it may be said of me that I discomfited an unscrupulous,
self-seeking clique, and set a more wholesome example myself. To have
done this is the best of all discoveries.