ike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and
defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits
of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the "donnishness,"
the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he
could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends. He
despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do
with it than he could help--as he lived to regret afterwards. Yet even
then he was in his tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind
above his party. He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley;
he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have
appreciated Mr. Newman's preaching, and to have gallantly defended what
he admired in him and his friends. His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke,
appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to
enforce Mr. Robertson's largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of
giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to
"High Churchism"; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson
estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought,
and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought.
We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to "set at
rest the question about Mr. Robertson's High Church tendencies." "I
hate High Churchism," was one of his latest declarations, when
professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen. One thing,
however, is quite clear--that in his early life his partisanship was
thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most
fanatical of their opponents. Such a representation as this is simply
misleading:--

The almost fierceness with which he speaks against the Tract
school is proof in him of the strength of the attraction it
possessed for him, just as afterwards at Brighton his attacks on
Evangelicalism are proof of the strength with which he once held
to that form of Christianity, and the force of the reaction with
which he abandoned it for ever. Out of these two reactions--when
their necessary ultra tendencies had been mellowed down by
time--emerged at last the clearness and the just balance of
principles with which he taught during 1848 and the following
years, at Brighton. He had probed both schools of theological
thought to their recesses, and had found them wanting. He spoke of
what he knew