g but a very melancholy collection of papers.
They are the remains of the work of a man of first-rate intellect,
whose powers, naturally of a high order, had been diligently and wisely
cultivated, whose mind was furnished in a very rare degree with all
that reading, wide and critical, could give, and which embraced in the
circle of its interest all that is important to human life and society.
Mr. Pattison had no vulgar standard of what knowledge is, and what
goodness is. He was high, sincere, exacting, even austere, in his
estimates of either; and when he was satisfied he paid honour with
sometimes unexpected frankness and warmth. But from some unfortunate
element in his temperament, or from the effect upon it of untoward and
unkindly circumstances at those critical epochs of mental life, when
character is taking its bent for good and all, he was a man in whose
judgment severity--and severity expressing itself in angry scorn--was
very apt to outrun justice. Longing for sympathy and not ill-fitted for
it, capable of rare exertions in helping those whom he could help, he
passed through life with a reputation for cynicism which, while he
certainly exhibited it, he no less certainly would, if he had known
how, have escaped from. People could easily tell what would incur his
dislike and opposition, what would provoke his slow, bitter, merciless
sarcasm; it was never easy to tell what would satisfy him, what would
attract his approval, when he could be tempted to see the good side of
a thing. It must not be forgotten that he had gone through a trial to
which few men are equal. He had passed from the extreme ranks and the
strong convictions of the Oxford movement--convictions of which the
translation of Aquinas's _Catena Aurea_, still printed in the list of
his works, is a memorial--to the frankest form of Liberal thought. As
he himself writes, we cannot give up early beliefs, much less the deep
and deliberate convictions of manhood, without some shock to the
character. In his case the change certainly worked. It made him hate
what he had left, and all that was like it, with the bitterness of one
who has been imposed upon, and has been led to commit himself to what
he now feels to be absurd and contemptible, and the bitterness of this
disappointment gave an edge to all his work. There seems through all
his criticism, powerful as it is, a tone of harshness, a readiness to
take the worst construction, a sad consciousness of distru