s in amount of result than Mill's was even more various in kind,
equipped him with a most admirable philosophical style, hitting the
exact mean between the over-popular and the over-technical, endowing
even the _Prolegomena Logica_ with a perfect readableness, and in the
_Metaphysics_ and large parts of the editorial matter of the _Aldrich_
showing capacities which make it deeply to be regretted that he never
undertook a regular history of philosophy.

The place which might have been thus filled, was accepted but partially
and with no capital success by divers writers. Frederick Denison
Maurice, who will be mentioned again in this chapter, wrote on _Moral
and Metaphysical Philosophy_, but the book, though like all his work
attractively written, does not show very wide or very profound knowledge
of the subject. The _Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy_, by
William Archer Butler, a Dublin professor, who died prematurely, would
probably, had the author lived, have formed the best history of the
subject in English, and even in their fragmentary condition make an
admirable book, free from jargon, not unduly popular, but at once sound
and literary. The most ambitious attempt at the whole subject was that
of George Henry Lewes, the companion of George Eliot, a versatile man of
letters of great ability, who brought out on a small scale in 1845, and
afterwards on a much larger one, a _Biographical History of
Philosophy_. This, though occasionally superficial, and too much tinged
with a sort of second-hand Positivism, had, as the qualities of these
defects, an excellent though sometimes a rather treacherous clearness,
and a unity of vision which is perhaps more valuable for fairly
intelligent readers than desultory profundity. But it can hardly take
rank as a book of philosophical scholarship, though it is almost a
brilliant specimen of popular philosophical literature.

Philosophy, science, and perhaps theology may dispute between them two
remarkable figures, nearly contemporary, the one an Oxford and the other
a Cambridge man--Whately and Whewell. Besides the differences which
their respective universities impress upon nearly all strong characters,
there were others between them, Whately being the better bred, the more
accomplished writer, and the more original, Whewell the more widely
informed, and perhaps the more thoroughgoing. But both were curiously
English in a sort of knock-me-down Johnsonian dogmatism; and bot