tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind above his party.  He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley; he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have appreciated Mr. Newman’s preaching, and to have gallantly defended what he admired in him and his friends.  His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke, appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to enforce Mr. Robertson’s largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to “High Churchism”; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought, and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought.  We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to “set at rest the question about Mr. Robertson’s High Church tendencies.”  “I hate High Churchism,” was one of his latest declarations, when professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen.  One thing, however, is quite clear—­that in his early life his partisanship was thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most fanatical of their opponents.  Such a representation as this is simply misleading:—­

The almost fierceness with which he speaks against the Tract school is proof in him of the strength of the attraction it possessed for him, just as afterwards at Brighton his attacks on Evangelicalism are proof of the strength with which he once held to that form of Christianity, and the force of the reaction with which he abandoned it for ever.  Out of these two reactions—­when their necessary ultra tendencies had been mellowed down by time—­emerged at last the clearness and the just balance of principles with which he taught during 1848 and the following years, at Brighton.  He had probed both schools of theological thought to their recesses, and had found them wanting.  He spoke of what he knew when he protested against both.  He spoke also of what he knew when he publicly recognised the Spirit of all good moving in the lives of those whose opinions he believed to be erroneous.

It is absurd to say, because he sometimes spoke of the “danger” he had been in from “Tractarianism,” that he had felt in equal degree the “strength of attraction” towards the one school and towards the other, and it is equally absurd to talk of his “having probed both to their recesses.”  He read, and argued, and discussed the pamphlets of the controversy—­the “replies,” Mr. Brooke says, with more truth probably than he thought of in using the word—­like other undergraduates who took interest in what was going on, and thought themselves fit to choose their side.  With his tutor and friend, Mr. Churton, he read Taylor’s Ancient Christianity, carefully looking out the passages from the Fathers.  “I am reading the early Church history with Golightly,” he says, “which is a very great advantage, as he has a fund of general information and is a close reader.”