y occupy a
much higher place than he has held or ever will hold. For his
appreciation both of books and of nature was intense, and his faculty of
description abundant. But the _ventosa et enormis loquacitas_ of his
style was everywhere, so that even selection would be hard put to it to
present him really at his best.

William Minto, who was born in 1846 and died in 1893, Professor of Logic
and English Literature at Aberdeen, showed fewer marks of the joint
direction of "aesthetic" criticism to art and letters than these two, and
had less distinct and original literary talent. He had his education
mainly at Aberdeen itself, where he was born and died; but he made a
short visit to Oxford. Subsequently taking to journalism, he became
editor of the _Examiner_, and considerably raised the standard of
literary criticism in that periodical, while after quitting it he wrote
for some time on the _Daily News_. His appointment to the professorship
enabled him to devote himself entirely to literature, and he produced
some novels, the best of which was _The Crack of Doom_. He had much
earlier executed two extremely creditable books, one on _English Prose_,
and one on part of the History of English verse, the only drawbacks to
which were a rather pedagogic and stiff arrangement; he was a frequent
contributor to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and after his death some
of his professorial Lectures on the Georgian era were published, but
without his final revision. The strongest side of Minto's criticism lay
in his combination of sufficiently sound and wide knowledge of the past
with a distinct and rather unusual sympathy with the latest schools of
literature as they rose. He was untainted by the florid style of his
day, but wrote solidly and well. If it were necessary to look for
defects in his work they would probably be found in a slight deficiency
of comparative estimate, and in a tendency to look at things rather from
the point of view of modern than from that of universal criticism. But
this tendency was not in him, as it so often is, associated with
ignorance or presumptuous judgment.

CHAPTER X

SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE

The remarks which were made at the beginning of the chapter on
Philosophy and Theology apply with increasing force to the present
chapter; indeed, they need to be restated in a much more stringent and
exclusive form. To give some history of English philosophy and theology
in the nineteenth century, b