practical leader than for an intellectual
discoverer. He did not belong to the class of authoritative men who are
born to give decisions from the chair. Measured by any standard
commensurate to his remarkable faculties, Pattison's life would be
generally regarded as pale, negative, and ineffectual. Nevertheless, it
is undeniable that he had a certain singular quality about him that made
his society more interesting, more piquant, and more sapid than that of
many men of a far wider importance and more commanding achievement.

[1] _Memoirs._ By Mark Pattison, late Rector of Lincoln
College, Oxford. London, 1885.

Critics have spoken of his learning, but the description is only
relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said
of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, _eruditus sane
vir ac multae lectionis_, was not a learned man in the special sense of
the word--not an _erudit_. He was the man of letters. He did not make a
study a part of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument
of culture.' The result of culture in Pattison's actual life was not by
any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly a
quarter of a century, and except as a decorative figure-head with a high
literary reputation, he did little more to advance the working interests
of his college during these five-and-twenty years than if he had been
one of the venerable academic abuses of the worst days before reform.
But his temperament, his reading, his recoil from Catholicism, combined
with the strong reflective powers bestowed upon him by nature, to
produce a personality that was unlike other people, and infinitely more
curious and salient than many who had a firmer grasp of the art of right
living. In an age of effusion to be reserved, and in days of universal
professions of sympathy to show a saturnine front, was to be an
original. There was nobody in whose company one felt so much of the
ineffable comfort of being quite safe against an attack of platitude.
There was nobody on whom one might so surely count in the course of an
hour's talk for some stroke of irony or pungent suggestion, or, at the
worst, some significant, admonitory, and almost luminous manifestation
of the great _ars tacendi_. In spite of his copious and ordered
knowledge, Pattison could hardly be said to have an affluent mind. He
did not impart intellectual direction like Mill, nor morally impress
himself like George