mosities, and,
it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults
over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is
too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what
learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.

The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary
work, which is almost characteristic--the delight which he takes in
telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working
scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose
names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical
authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to
contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual
differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to
the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate
their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour
in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various
readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a
learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic
thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light--perhaps of genius--a man,
too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of
romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for
those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own
chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them,
Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of
several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great
French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also
introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic
observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of
what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the
scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the
account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very
vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume
to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some
fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch.
But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this
remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer
admits, but who was undoubted