he
dignity of scholarship, he never forgot that scholarship faded into
insignificance in presence of the greater issues of life. In his most
scholarly moment, in the Preface to the _Dictionary_, he will throw out
such remark as "this recommendation of steadiness and uniformity (in
spelling) does not proceed from an opinion that particular combinations
of letters have much influence on human happiness." Such a sentence
could not but give plain people a feeling of unusual confidence in the
writer. How different they would at once feel it to be, how different,
indeed, we still feel it, from the too frequent pedantry of critics,
insisting with solemn importance or querulous ill-temper upon trifling
points of grammar or style. We know that this man has a scale of
things in his mind {31} he will not vilify his opponent's character for
the sake of a difference about a Greek construction, or make a lifelong
quarrel over the question of the maiden name and birthplace of
Shelley's great-grandmother. From first to last he was emphatically a
human being, with a feeling for human life as a whole, and in all its
parts. He said once: "A mere antiquarian is a rugged being," and he
was never himself a mere grammarian or a mere scholar, but a man with
an eager interest in all the business and pleasure of life. His high
sense of the dignity of literature looked to its large and human side,
not to any parade of curious information. Everywhere in his writings
plain people are conciliated by his frank attitude as to his own
calling, by his perfect freedom from any pontifical airs of the mystery
of authorship. "I could have written longer notes," he says in the
great Preface to his _Shakespeare_, "for the art of writing notes is
not of difficult attainment." "It is impossible for an expositor not
to write too little for some, and too much for others." "I have indeed
disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I have endeavoured to
perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the
whole work has appeared to me corrupt which I have not attempted to
restore; or {32} obscure which I have not endeavoured to illustrate.
In many I have failed, like others, and from many, after all my
efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse. I have not
passed over with affected superiority what is equally difficult to the
reader and to myself, but where I could not instruct him have owned my
ignorance. I might easily h