defects in the philosophy
itself. He was, in fact, at the antipodes from Mill in attractiveness of
form as well as in character of doctrine.

There are some who think that Henry Longueville Mansel was actually in
more than one respect, and might, with some slight changes of accidental
circumstance, have been indisputably, the greatest philosopher of
Britain in the nineteenth century. Of the opinion entertained by
contemporaries of great intellectual gifts, that of Mark Pattison, a
bitter political and academical opponent, and the most acrimonious
critic of his time, that Mansel was, though according to Pattison's
view, an "arch-jobber," an "acute thinker, and a metaphysician" seems
pretty conclusive. But Mansel died in middle age, he was much occupied
in various kinds of University business, and he is said by those who
knew him to have been personally rather indolent. He was born in
Northamptonshire on 6th October 1820, and after school-days at Merchant
Taylors' passed in the then natural course to St. John's College,
Oxford, of which he became fellow. He was an active opponent of the
first University Commission, in reference to which he wrote the most
brilliant satire of the kind proper to University wits which this
century has produced--the Aristophanic parody entitled _Phrontisterion_.
But the Commission returned him good for evil, insomuch as he became the
first Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, a post
created in consequence of it. In 1859 he was Bampton Lecturer, and his
sermons in this office again attained the first excellence in style,
though they were made the subject of severe criticism not merely by the
disciples of Liberal philosophy, but by some timid defenders of
orthodoxy, for their bold application of the philosophy of the
conditioned, on scholastic lines, to the problems of theodicy. Mansel
was not a more frequent lecturer than the somewhat indulgent conditions
of the English Universities, especially Oxford, even after the
Commission, required; but his deliverances were of exceptional
importance, both in conception and expression. At the death of Milman,
his political friends being in power, he was made Dean of St. Paul's,
but enjoyed the dignity only a short time, and died in 1870. Besides
_Phrontisterion_ and his _Bampton Lectures_, which bring him under both
the divisions of this chapter, he had published in his lifetime an
excellent edition of Aldrich's "Logic," _Prolegomena