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 animosities, 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