lf in his days as an undergraduate. He was
on the coach between Birmingham and Sheffield. Two men shared the front
seat with him, and conversed during the whole of the journey about the
things which he was yearning to know and to learn. 'I tried once or
twice to put in my oar, but it was a failure: I was too far below their
level of knowledge; I relapsed into enchanted listening. I thought to
myself, "There exists then such a world, but I am shut out of it, not by
the accidents of college, but by my own unfitness to enter"' (p. 148).
Mankind suffers much from brassy incompetency and over-complacency, but
Pattison is only one of many examples how much more it may lose in a man
who has ability, but no fight and no mastery in him. As we have all been
told, in this world a man must be either anvil or hammer, and it always
seemed as if Pattison deliberately chose to be anvil--not merely in the
shape of a renunciation of the delusive pomps and vanities of life, but
in the truly questionable sense of doubting both whether he could do
anything, and whether he even owed anything to the world in which he
found himself.

The earliest launch was a disappointment. He had set his heart upon a
first class, but he had not gone to work in the right way. Instead of
concentrating his attention on the task in hand, he could only in later
days look back with amazement 'at the fatuity of his arrangements and
the snail-like progress with which he seemed to be satisfied.' He was
content if, on his final review of Thucydides, he got through twenty or
thirty chapters a day, and he reread Sophocles 'at the lazy rate of a
hundred and fifty lines a day, instead of going over the difficult
places only, which might have been done in a week. 'There must,' he
says, 'have been idleness to boot, but it is difficult to draw the line
between idleness and dawdling over work. I dawdled from a mixture of
mental infirmity, bad habit, and the necessity of thoroughness if I was
to understand, and not merely remember.' The dangerous delights of
literary dispersion and dissipation attracted him. Among his books of
recreation was Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. 'This I took in slowly,
page by page, as if by an instinct; but here was a congenial subject, to
which, when free, I would return, and where I would set up my
habitation.'

It was probably a reminiscence of these vacations at Hauxwell that
inspired the beautiful passage in his _Milton_, where he contrasts t