or himself in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_
(viii. 515 _a_).

Though nobody was ever much less of a man of the world in one sense, yet
Pattison's mind was always in the world. In company he often looked as
if he were thinking of the futility of dinner-party dialectics, where
all goes too fast for truth, where people miss one another's points and
their own, where nobody convinces or is convinced, and where there is
much surface excitement with little real stimulation. That so shrewd a
man should have seen so obvious a fact as all this was certain. But he
knew that the world is the real thing, that the proper study of mankind
is man, and that if books must be counted more instructive and
nourishing than affairs, as he thought them to be, it is still only
because they are the most complete record of what is permanent,
elevated, and eternal in the mind and act of man. Study with him did not
mean the compilation of careful abstracts of books, nor did it even mean
the historic filiation of thoughts and beliefs. It was the building up
before the mind's eye of definite conceptions as to what manner of men
had been bred by the diversified agencies of human history, and how
given thoughts had shaped the progress of the race. This is what, among
other things, led him to spend so much time (p. 116) on the circle of
Pope and Addison and Swift.

We have let fall a phrase about the progress of the race, but it hardly
had a place in Pattison's own vocabulary. 'While the advances,' he said,
'made by objective science and its industrial applications are palpable
and undeniable everywhere around us, it is a matter of doubt and dispute
if our social and moral advance towards happiness and virtue has been
great or any.' The selfishness of mankind might seem to be a constant
quantity, neither much abated nor much increased since history began.
Italy and France are in most material points not more civilised than
they were in the second century of our era. The reign of law and justice
has no doubt extended into the reign of hyperborean ice and over
Sarmatian plains: but then Spain, has relapsed into a double barbarism
by engrafting Catholic superstition upon Iberian ferocity. If we look
Eastward, we see a horde of barbarians in occupation of the garden of
the Old World, not as settlers, but as destroyers (_Age of Reason_, in
_Fortnightly Review_, March 1877, 357-361).

The same prepossessions led him to think that all the true things had
b