o faithful and prominent an account of a weakness and a
self-abandonment which he knew well enough that the world will only
excuse in two circumstances. The world forgives almost anything to a man
in the crisis of a sore spiritual wrestle for faith and vision and an
Everlasting Yea; and almost anything to one prostrated by the shock of
an irreparable personal bereavement. But that anybody with character of
common healthiness should founder and make shipwreck of his life because
two or three unclean creatures had played him a trick after their kind,
is as incredible as that a three-decker should go down in a street
puddle.

It will not do to say that lack of fortitude is a mark of the man of
letters. To measure Pattison's astounding collapse, we have a right to
recall Johnson, Scott, Carlyle, and a host of smaller men, whom no
vexations, chagrins, and perversities of fate could daunt from fighting
the battle out. Pattison was thirty-eight when he missed the headship of
his college. Diderot was about the same age when the torments against
which he had struggled for the best part of twenty arduous years in his
gigantic task seemed to reach the very climax of distraction. 'My dear
master,' he wrote to Voltaire, in words which it is a refreshment under
the circumstances to recall and to transcribe, 'my dear master, I am
over forty. I am tired out with tricks and shufflings. I cry from
morning till night for rest, rest; and scarcely a day passes when I am
not tempted to go and live in obscurity and die in peace in the depths
of my old country. Be useful to men! Is it certain that one does more
than amuse them, and that there is much difference between the
philosopher and the flute-player? They listen to one and the other with
pleasure or with disdain, and they remain just what they were. But there
is more spleen than sense in all this, I know--and back I go to the
Encyclopaedia.' And back he went--that is the great point--with courage
unabated and indomitable, labouring with sword in one hand and trowel in
the other, until he had set the last stone on his enormous fabric.

Several years went by before Pattison's mind recovered spring and
equilibrium, and the unstrung nerves were restored to energy. Fishing,
the open air, solitude, scenery, slowly repaired the moral ravages of
the college election. The fly rod 'was precisely the resource of which
my wounded nature stood in need.' About the middle of April, after long
and anxi