or thee to know,
What each day wills, the day itself will tell;
Do thine own task, and be therewith content,
What others do, that shalt thou fairly judge;
Be sure that thou no brother mortal hate.
And all besides leave to the master Power._

At length 'the years of defeat and despair,' as he calls them, came to
an end, though 'the mental and moral deterioration' that belonged to
them left heavy traces to the very close of his life. He took a lively
interest in the discussions that were stirred by the famous University
Commission, and contributed ideas to the subject of academic reform on
more sides than one. But such matters he found desultory and
unsatisfying; he was in a state of famine; his mind was suffering, not
growing; he was becoming brooding, melancholy, taciturn, and finally
pessimist (pp. 306, 307). Pattison was five-and-forty before he reached
the conception of what became his final ideal, as it had been in a
slightly different shape his first and earliest. He had always been a
voracious reader. When 'the flood of the Tractarian infatuation broke
over him, he naturally concentrated his studies on the Fathers and on
Church History. That phase, in his own term, took eight years out of his
life. Then for five years more he was absorbed in teaching and forming
the young mind. The catastrophe came, and for five or six years after
that he still remained far below 'the pure and unselfish conception of
the life of the true student, which dawned upon him afterwards, and
which Goethe, it seems, already possessed at thirty.' Up to this
time--the year 1857, or a little later--his aims and thoughts had been,
in his own violent phrase, polluted and disfigured by literary ambition.
He had felt the desire to be before the world as a writer, and had
hitherto shared 'the vulgar fallacy that a literary life meant a life
devoted to the making of books.' 'It cost me years more of extrication
of thought before I rose to _the conception that the highest life is the
art to live_, and that both men, women, and books are equally essential
ingredients of such a life' (p. 310).

We may notice in passing, what any one will see for himself, that in
contrasting his new conception so triumphantly with the vulgar fallacy
from which he had shaken himself free, the Rector went very near to
begging the question. When Carlyle, in the strength of his reaction
against morbid introspective Byronism, cried aloud to all men in their
sev