Eliot. Even in pithy humour he was inferior to
Bagehot, who was certainly one of the most remarkable of the secondary
figures of our generation. But he made every one aware of contact with
the reality of a living intelligence. It was evident that he had no
designs upon you. He was not thinking of shaking a conviction, nor even
of surprising admiration.

Everlasting neutrality, no doubt, may soon become a tiresome
affectation. But we can afford to spare a few moments from our solid day
to the Sage, if we are so lucky as to hit upon one; always provided that
he be not of those whom La Bruyere has described as being made into
sages by a certain natural mediocrity of mind. Whatever else may be said
of Pattison, at least he was never mediocre, never vapid, trite, or
common. Nor was he one of those false pretenders to the judicial mind,
who 'mistake for sober sense And wise reserve, the plea of indolence.'
On the contrary, his industry and spirit of laborious acquisition were
his best credentials. He was invested to our young imaginations with the
attraction of the literary explorer, who had 'voyaged through strange
seas of thought alone,' had traversed broad continents of knowledge, had
ransacked all the wisdom of printed books, and had by native courage and
resource saved himself from the engulfing waters of the great Movement.

The Memoirs of such a man may not be one of the monuments of literature.
His little volume is not one of those romantic histories of the soul,
from the Confessions of Augustine to the Confessions of Jean Jacques, by
which men and women have been beguiled, enlightened, or inspired in
their pilgrimage. It is not one of those idealised and highly
embellished versions of an actual existence, with which such superb
artists as George Sand, Quinet, and Renan, have delighted people of good
literary taste. What the Rector has done is to deliver a tolerably plain
and unvarnished tale of the advance of a peculiar type of mind along a
path of its own, in days of intellectual storm and stress. It stirs no
depths, it gives no powerful stimulus to the desire after either
knowledge or virtue--in a word, it does not belong to the literature of
edification. But it is an instructive account of a curious character,
and contains valuable hints for more than one important chapter in the
mental history of the century.

Mark Pattison, born in 1813, passed his youthful days at the rectory of
Hauxwell, a village in Wensley