red useless, I am entirely out of
gear, and cannot settle to anything.' His correspondent urged the Rector
to consider and reconsider. It would be one of the most deplorable
misfortunes in literature if he were thus to waste the mature fruit of
the study of a lifetime. It was as unreasonable as if Raphael or Titian
had refused to paint a Madonna simply because other people had painted
Madonnas before them. Some subjects, no doubt, were treated once for
all; if Southey had written his history of the Peninsular war after
Napier, he would have done a silly thing, and his book would have been
damned unread. But what reason was there why we should not have half a
dozen books on English thought in the eighteenth century? Would not
Grote have inflicted a heavy loss upon us if he had been frightened out
of his plan by Thirlwall? And so forth, and so forth. But all such
importunities were of no avail. 'I have pondered over your letter,'
Pattison replied, 'but without being able to arrive at any resolution of
any kind.' Of course one knew that in effect temperament had already
cast the resolution for him in letters of iron before our eyes.

We are not aware whether any considerable work has been left behind. His
first great scheme, as he tells us here (p. 319), was a history of
learning from the Renaissance. Then he contracted his views to a history
of the French school of Philology, beginning with Budaeus and the Delphin
classics. Finally, his ambition was narrowed to fragments. The book on
_Isaac Casaubon_, published ten years ago, is a definite and valuable
literary product. But the great work would have been the vindication of
Scaliger, for which he had been getting materials together for thirty
years. Many portions, he says, were already written out in their
definite form, and twelve months would have completed it. Alas, a man
should not go on trusting until his seventieth year that there is still
plenty of daylight. He contributed five biographies to the new edition
of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The articles on Bentley, Erasmus,
Grotius, More, and Macaulay are from his pen. They are all terse,
luminous, and finished, and the only complaint that one can make against
them is that our instructor parts company from us too soon. It is a
stroke of literary humour after Pattison's own heart that Bentley, the
mightiest of English scholars, should fill no more space in the
Encyclopaedic pantheon than Alford, who was hardly even