assable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must
quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking
of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful
voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but
partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come
bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any
copy of the Spectator picked up at random.

These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of
those great qualities which gave him his position.

And side by side with such faults go an exceptional
lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the
succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to
his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or
bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse
and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest his readers
--all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his contemporaries.

Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults
more serious. You get gross commonplace and utterly false
commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if
indeed he was a man who read his own works) he must
have been ashamed:--

"Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars;
and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its
altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.

"Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions,
natural and moral."

Or again, of poor old Oxford:--

"The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality,
is the great aim of such a noble establishment as this; and
the rewards and honours dispensed there are bestowed in
proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who
receive them."

But the interesting point about these very lapses is that
they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either
the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his
argument. They may be compared to those undignified
and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up
in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic
and wide man.

While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not
unjust to show what other lapses in him are connected
with this common sympathy of his and this very comprehension
of his class to which he owed his opportunity and
his effect.

Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use--
much too commonly--words which have lost all vitality,
and which are for the most part meaningless, b