the _Times_, sets too high an estimate on his
intellectual qualities, and on the position which they gave him. He was
full of the passion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in
his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile,
very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care
about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical
criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists
in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite.
But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt
to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at
the moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it
came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to
attend to what limited it or conflicted with it. And thus, with all the
force and sagacity of his University theories, they were not always
self-consistent, and they were often one-sided and exaggerated. He was
not a leader whom men could follow, however much they might rejoice at
the blows which he might happen to deal, sometimes unexpectedly, at
things which they disliked. And this holds of more serious things than
even University reform and reconstruction.

And next, though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison's
distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a
critic of what is noble and excellent and what is base and poor in
literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity
and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good
sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and
just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought
to occupy. Morally, in that love of reality, and of all that is high
and noble in character, which certainly marked him, he was much better
than many suppose, who know only the strength of his animosities and
the bitterness of his sarcasm. Intellectually, in reach, and fulness,
and solidity of mental power, it may be doubted whether he was so great
as it has recently been the fashion to rate him.

XXIV

PATTISON'S ESSAYS[28]

[28]
_Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln
College_. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettleship, M.A., Corpus
Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. _Guardian_, 1st May
1889.

This is a very interestin