een said, and one could do no better than hunt them up again for new
uses. Our business was, like Old Mortality, to clear out and cut afresh
inscriptions that had been made illegible by time and storm. At least
this delivered him from the senseless vanity of originality and personal
appropriation. We feel sure that if he found that a thought which he had
believed to be new had been expressed in literature before, he would
have been pleased and not mortified. No reflection of his own could give
him half as much satisfaction as an apt citation from some one else. He
once complained of the writer of the article on Comte in the
_Encyclopaedia_ for speaking with too much deference as to Comte's
personality. 'That overweening French vanity and egotism not only
overshadows great gifts, but impoverishes the character which nourished
such a sentiment. It is not one of the weaknesses which we overlook in
great men, and which are to go for nothing.' Of overweening egotism
Pattison himself at any rate had none. This was partly due to his theory
of history, and partly, too, no doubt, to his inborn discouragement of
spirit. He always professed to be greatly relieved when an editor
assured him that his work was of the quality that might have been
expected from him. 'Having lived to be sixty-three,' he wrote on one of
these occasions, 'without finding out why the public embrace or reject
what is written for their benefit, I presume I shall now never make the
discovery.' And this was perfectly sincere.

The first draft of his _Life of Milton_ was found to exceed the utmost
limits of what was possible by some thirty or forty pages. Without a
single movement of importunity or complaint he cut off the excess,
though it amounted to a considerable fraction of what he had done. 'In
any case,' he said, 'it is all on Milton; there is no digression on
public affairs, and much which might have gone in with advantage to the
completeness of the story has been entirely passed over, _e.g._ history
of his posthumous fame, Bentley's emendations, _et cetera_.' It almost
seemed as if he had a private satisfaction in a literary mishap of this
kind: it was an unexpected corroboration of his standing conclusion that
this is the most stupid and perverse of all possible worlds.

'My one scheme,' he wrote to a friend in 1877, 'that of a history of the
eighteenth century, having been forestalled by Leslie Stephen, and the
collections, of years having been rende