tless fidelity to the use
of his talent, and after each repulse only came on the more eagerly to
'live and act and serve the future hours.' It was Lessing and not
Rousseau whom Carlyle ought to have taken for his type of the Hero as
Man of Letters.

The present writer will not be suspected of the presumption of hinting
or implying that Pattison himself was a _dilettante_, or anything like
one. There never was a more impertinent blunder than when people
professed to identify the shrewdest and most widely competent critic of
his day with the Mr. Casaubon of the novel, and his absurd Key to all
Mythologies. The Rector's standard of equipment was the highest of our
time. 'A critic's education,' he said, 'is not complete till he has in
his mind a conception of the successive phases of thought and feeling
from the beginning of letters. Though he need not read every book, he
must have surveyed literature in its totality. Partial knowledge of
literature is no knowledge' (_Fortnightly Review_, Nov. 1877, p. 670).
For a man to know his way about in the world of printed books, to find
the key to knowledge, to learn the map of literature, 'requires a long
apprenticeship. This is a point few men can hope to reach much before
the age of forty' (_Milton_, 110).

There was no dilettantism here. And one must say much more than that.
Many of those in whom the love of knowledge is liveliest omit from their
curiosity that part of knowledge which is, to say the least of it, as
interesting as all the rest--insight, namely, into the motives,
character, conduct, doctrines, fortunes of the individual man. It was
not so with Pattison. He was essentially a bookman, but of that high
type--the only type that is worthy of a spark of our admiration--which
explores through books the voyages of the human reason, the shifting
impulses of the human heart, the chequered fortunes of great human
conceptions. Pattison knew that he is very poorly equipped for the art
of criticism who has not trained himself in the observant analysis of
character, and has not realised that the writer who seeks to give
richness, body, and flavour to his work must not linger exclusively
among texts or abstract ideas or general movements or literary effects,
but must tell us something about the moral and intellectual
configuration of those with whom he deals. I had transcribed, for an
example, his account of Erasmus, but the article is growing long, and
the reader may find it f