Farrar was probably the exact opposite of Herbert Spencer in almost every respect.  He was a litterateur, a rhetorician, an idealist, where Spencer was a philosopher, a scientific man, and a rationalist.  Farrar admired high literature with all his heart; though unfortunately it did not clarify his own taste, but only gave him a rich vocabulary of high-sounding words, which he bound into a flaunting bouquet.  He was like the bower-bird, which takes delight in collecting bright objects of any kind, bits of broken china, fragments of metal, which it disposes with distressing prominence about its domicile, and runs to and fro admiring the fantastic pattern.  The fabric of Farrar’s writing is essentially thin; his thoughts rarely rose above the commonplace, and to these thoughts he gave luscious expression, sticking the flowers of rhetoric, of which his marvellous memory gave him the command, so as to ornament without adorning.

Every one must have been struck in Farrar’s works of fiction by the affected tone of speech adopted by his saintly and high-minded heroes.  It was not affectation in Farrar to speak and write in this way; it was the form in which his thoughts naturally arranged themselves.  But in one sense it was affected, because Farrar seems to have been naturally a kind of dramatist.  I imagine that his self-consciousness was great, and I expect that he habitually lived with the feeling of being the central figure in a kind of romantic scene.  The pathos of the situation is that he was naturally a noble-minded man.  He had a high conception of beauty, both artistic and moral beauty.  He did live in the regions to which he directed others.  But this is vitiated by a desire for recognition, a definite, almost a confessed, ambition.  The letter, for instance, in which he announces that he has accepted a Canonry at Westminster is a painful one.  If he felt the inexpressible distress, of which he speaks, at the idea of leaving Marlborough, there was really no reason why he should not have stayed; and, later on, his failure to attain to high ecclesiastical office seems to have resulted in a sense of compassion for the inadequacy of those who failed to discern real merit, and a certain bitterness of spirit which, considering his services to religion and morality, was not wholly unnatural.  But he does not seem to have tried to interpret the disappointment that he felt, or to have asked himself whether the reason of his failure did not rather lie in his own temperament.

The kindness of the man, his laboriousness, his fierce indignation against moral evil, to say nothing of his extraordinary mental powers, seem to have been clogged all through life by this sad self-consciousness.  The pity and the mystery of it is that a man should have been so moulded to help his generation, and then that this grievous defect of temperament should have been allowed to take its place as the tyrant of the whole nature.  And what makes the whole situation