a skeleton at a feast who left good fellows for
the sake of going over an essay with a pupil, instead of taking a hand
at whist or helping them through another bottle.

We need not follow the details of the story. Pattison has told them over
again, with a minuteness and a sourness that show how the shabby
business rankled in his soul to the very last. It was no battle of
giants, like the immortal Thirty Years' War between Bentley and the
Fellows of Trinity. The election at Lincoln College, which was a scandal
in the university for many a long day after, was simply a tissue of
paltry machinations, in which weakness, cunning, spite, and a fair spice
of downright lying showed that a learned society, even of clergymen, may
seethe and boil with the passions of the very refuse of humanity.
Intricate and unclean intrigues ended, by a curious turn of the wheel,
in the election of a grotesque divine, whom Pattison, with an energy of
phrase that recalls the amenities of ecclesiastical controversy in the
sixteenth century, roundly designates in so many words as a satyr, a
ruffian, and a wild beast. The poor man was certainly illiterate and
boorish to a degree that was a standing marvel to all ingenuous youths
who came up to Lincoln College between 1850 and 1860. His manners,
bearing, and accomplishments were more fitted for the porter of a
workhouse than for the head of a college. But he served the turn by
keeping out Pattison's rival, and whatever discredit he brought upon the
society must be shared by those who, with Pattison at their head,
brought him in against a better man. All this unsavoury story might as
well have been left where it was.

The reaction was incredibly severe. There has been nothing equal to it
since the days of the Psalmist were consumed like smoke, and his heart
was withered like grass. 'My mental forces,' says Pattison, 'were
paralysed by the shock; a blank, dumb despair filled me; a chronic
heartache took possession of me, perceptible even through sleep. As
consciousness gradually returned in the morning, it was only to bring
with it a livelier sense of the cruelty of the situation into which I
had been brought.' He lay in bed until ten o'clock every morning to
prolong the semi-oblivion of sleep. Work was impossible. If he read, it
was without any object beyond semi-forgetfulness. He was too much
benumbed and stupefied to calculate the future. He went through the
forms of lecturing, but the life and spir