ly a marvel both of knowledge and of the
power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system
in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real
greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world
could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us,
with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as
if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his
absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten;
but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's
_bete noire_ of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger
and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had
provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and
who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his
claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious
difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic
reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.

These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr.
Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the
specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of
high value. Wherever the disturbing and embittering elements are away,
it is hard to say which is the more admirable, the patient and
sagacious way in which he has collected and mastered his facts, or the
wise and careful judgment which he passes on them. We hear of people
being spoilt by their prepossessions, their party, their prejudices,
the necessities of their political and ecclesiastical position; Mr.
Pattison is a warning that a man may claim the utmost independence, and
yet be maimed in his power of being just and reasonable by other things
than party. As it is, he has left us a collection of interesting and
valuable studies, disastrously and indelibly disfigured by an
implacable bitterness, in which he but too plainly found the greatest
satisfaction.

Mr. Pattison used in his later years to give an occasional lecture to a
London audience. One of the latest was one addressed, we believe, to a
class of working people on poetry, in which he dwelt on its healing and
consoling power. It was full of Mr. Pattison's clearness and directness
of thought, and made a considerable impression on some who only knew it
from an abstract in the newspapers; and it was challe