pared to find certain characteristics, and it is difficult to detach
one's mind sufficiently to approach a much-reviewed volume with perfect
frankness. But I have read the book several times, and my admiration
for it increases. It does not reveal a generous or particularly
attractive character, and there are certain episodes in it which are
undoubtedly painful. But it is essentially a just, courageous, and
candid book. He is very hard on other people, and deals hard knocks. He
shows very clearly that he was deficient in tolerance and sympathy, but
he is quite as severe on himself. What I value in the book is its
absolute sincerity. He does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his
own life and character at the expense of other people. One sees him
develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded,
crabbed, ungracious student. If he had adopted a pose he might have
sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made
himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood. He does none of these
things. He shows clearly that the disasters of his life were quite as
much due to his own temperamental mistakes as to the machinations of
others. He has no illusions about himself, and he does not desire that
his readers should have any. The sadness of the book comes from his
failure, or rather his constitutional inability, to see other people
whole. After all, our appreciations for other people are of the nature
of a sum. There is a certain amount of addition and subtraction to be
done; the point is whether the sum total is to the credit of the person
concerned. But with Mark Pattison the process of subtraction was more
congenial than the process of addition. He saw and felt the weakness of
those who surrounded him so keenly that he did not do justice to their
good qualities. This comes out very clearly when he deals with Newman
and Pusey. Pattison was a member for a time of the Tractarian set, but
he must have been always at heart a Liberal and a Rationalist, and the
spell which Newman temporarily cast over him appeared to him in after
life to have been a kind of ugly hypnotism, to which he had limply
submitted. Certainly the diary which he quotes concerning his own part
in the Tractarian movement, the conversations to which he listened, the
morbid frame of mind to which he succumbed are deplorable reading.
Indeed the reminiscences of Newman's conversation in particular, the
pedantry, the hankering