ay not
have led to the unhappy situation; and indeed, if he spoke of his
colleagues in his lifetime with the same acrimony with which his
posthumous book speaks of them, the mystery is adequately explained.

His depression and collapse, which he so mercilessly chronicles, after
the disaster, do not appear to me to be cowardly. He was an
over-worked, over-strained man, with a strong vein of morbidity in his
constitution; and to have the great prize of a headship, which was the
goal of his dearest hopes, put suddenly and evidently quite
unexpectedly in his hands, and then in so unforeseen a manner torn
away, must have been a terrible and unmanning catastrophe. What is
ungenerous is that he did not more tenderly realise that eventually it
all turned out for the best. He recognises the fact somewhat
grudgingly. Yet he was disengaged by the shock from professional life.
He gained bodily strength and vigour by the change; he began his work
of research; and then, just at the time when his ideal was
consolidated, the Rectorship came to him--when it might have seemed
that by his conduct he had forfeited all hopes of it.

In another respect the book is admirable. Mark Pattison attained high
and deserved literary distinction; but there is no hint of complacency
on this subject, rather, indeed, the reverse; for he confesses that
success had upon him no effect but to humiliate him by the
consideration that the completed work might have been so much better
both in conception and execution than it actually was.

I feel, on closing the book, a great admiration for the man, mingled
with infinite pity for the miseries which his own temperament inflicted
on him; it gives me, too, a high intellectual stimulus; it makes me
realise the nobility and the beauty of knowledge, the greatness of the
intellectual life. One may regret that in Pattison's case this was not
mingled with more practical power, more sympathy, more desire to help
rather than to pursue. But here, again, one cannot have everything, and
the life presents a fine protest against materialism, against the
desire of recognition, against illiberal and retrograde views of
thought. Here was a great and lonely figure haunted by a dream which
few of those about him could understand, and with which hardly any
could sympathise. He writes pathetically: "I am fairly entitled to say
that, since the year 1851, I have lived wholly for study. There can be
no vanity in making this confession