listened, the morbid frame of mind to which he succumbed are deplorable reading.  Indeed the reminiscences of Newman’s conversation in particular, the pedantry, the hankering after miracles, the narrowness of view, are an extraordinary testimony to the charm with which Newman must have invested all he did or said.  Pattison is even more severe on Pusey, and charges him with having betrayed a secret which he had confided to him in confession.  It does not seem to occur to Pattison to consider whether he did not himself mention the fact, whatever it was, to some other friend.

On the other hand the book reveals an extraordinary intellectual ideal.  It holds up a standard for the student which is profoundly impressive; and I know no other book which displays in a more single-minded and sincere way the passionate desire of the savant for wide, deep, and perfect knowledge, which is to be untainted by any admixture of personal ambition.  Indeed, Pattison speaks of literary ambition as being for the student not an amiable weakness, but a defiling and polluting sin.

Of course it is natural to feel that there is a certain selfish aridity about such a point of view.  The results of Mark Pattison’s devotion are hardly commensurate with his earnestness.  He worked on a system which hardly permitted him to put the results at the disposal of others; but there is at the same time something which is both dignified and stately in the idea of the lonely, laborious life, without hope and without reward, sustained only by the pursuit of an impossible perfection.

It is not, however, as if this was all that Mark Pattison did.  He was a great intellectual factor at Oxford, especially in early days; in later days he was a venerable and splendid monument.  But as tutor of his college, before his great disappointment—­his failure to be elected to the Rectorship—­he evidently lived a highly practical and useful life.  There is something disarming about the naive way in which he records that he became aware that he was the possessor of a certain magnetic influence to which gradually every one in the place, including the old Rector himself, submitted.

The story of his failure to be elected Rector is deeply pathetic.  Pattison reveals with terrible realism the dingy and sordid intrigues which put an unworthy man in the place which he himself had earned.  But it may be doubted whether there was so much malignity about the whole matter as he thought; and, at all events, it may be said that men do not commonly make enemies without reason.  It does not seem to occur to him to question whether his own conduct and his own remarks may not have led to the unhappy situation; and indeed, if he spoke of his colleagues in his lifetime with the same acrimony with which his posthumous book speaks of them, the mystery is adequately explained.