could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of
ordinary life. Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise
tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer
manhood. He held to his own views with pertinacity. He believed
them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of
the views of others having truth in them also. He was more or less
one-sided at this period. With the Roman Catholic religion it was
war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the
truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error. He
seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have
attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was
startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted."

He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of
his friends, that he should prepare for orders. "With a romantic
instinct of self-sacrifice," says his biographer, "he resolved to give
up the idea of his whole life." This we can quite understand; but with
that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the
desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have,
besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe
that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson's
"_characteristic self-distrust_ disposed him to believe that he was
himself the worst judge of his future profession." This is the way in
which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order
to say something proper and becoming. Self-distrust was not among the
graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson's nature, unless indeed we
mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a
crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the
interval between attempt and achievement.

He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford
movement. He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen
partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected
the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of
strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and
entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their
rancour. He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the
forwardness with which he took his side against "Tractarianism," and
the vehemence of his disl