it were gone. Teaching became
as odious to him as it had once been delightful. His Satan, as he calls
the most active of the enemies who had thus ruined his paradise, planned
new operations against him, by trying, on the grounds of some neglected
formality, to oust him from his fellowship. 'Here,' cries Pattison, 'was
a new abyss opened beneath my feet! My bare livelihood, for I had
nothing except my fellowship to live upon, was threatened; it seemed not
unlikely that I should be turned into the streets to starve.
Visitatorial law, what it might contain! It loomed before me like an
Indian jungle, out of which might issue venomous reptiles, man-eating
tigers, for my destruction.'

This is not the language of half-humorous exaggeration, but a literal
account of a mind as much overthrown from its true balance as is
disclosed in the most morbid page of Rousseau's _Confessions_. For
months and months after the burden of 'dull, insensible wretchedness,'
'bitter heartache,' weighed upon him with unabated oppression. More
than a year after the catastrophe the sombre entries still figure in his
diary:--'Very weary and wretched both yesterday and to-day: all the
savour of life is departed:'--'Very wretched all yesterday and to-day:
dull, gloomy, blank; sleep itself is turned to sorrow.' Nearly two whole
years after the same clouds still blacken the sky. 'I have nothing to
which I look forward with any satisfaction: no prospects; my life seems
to have come to an end, my strength gone, my energies paralysed, and all
my hopes dispersed.'

It is true that frustrated ambition was not the only key to this
frightfully abject abasement. We may readily believe him when he says
that the personal disappointment was a minor ingredient in the total of
mental suffering that he was now undergoing. His whole heart and pride
had in the last few years been invested in the success of the college;
it was the thing on which he had set all his affections; in a fortnight
the foundation of his work was broken up; and the wretched and
deteriorated condition of the undergraduates became as poison in his
daily cup. That may all be true enough. Still, whatever elements of a
generous public spirit sharply baffled may have entered into this
extraordinary moral breakdown, it must be pronounced a painfully unmanly
and unedifying exhibition. It says a great deal for the Rector's honesty
and sincerity in these pages, that he should not have shrunk from giving
s