e is
talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious
above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often
seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of
the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are
crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have
overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.

The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound
value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all
literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a
philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with
intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he
has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the
progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home
with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and
criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a
leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He
is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of
learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated
with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith
in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at
what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe
and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning
embracing all efforts of human intellect--those which are warning
beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human
mind--is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else
does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of
varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which
knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is
the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects
of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and
unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to
lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its
provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and
protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford
studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true
home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the ani