Richard Holt Hutton, who spoke to two generations of English readers with a calm, authoritative voice in the liberal London weekly the Spectator, was a philosophically educated mid-Victorian man of letters who committed his voluminous writings to two related intellectual objectives. The first, influential in his own day, was to shape religious beliefs by rational arguments for and against various doctrines and antireligious positions; the second, of greater interest to modern readèrs, was to interpret and evaluate a few major nineteenth-century writers according to his moral, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic standards. Hutton's two central themes dominate his short Spectator articles, many of which were later collected in books. The same concerns are more fully treated in two popular biographies, Sir Walter Scott (1878) and Cardinal Newman (1890), and in longer periodical essays, the best of them republished in the two-volume Essays Theological and Literary (1871) and in Essays on...