His depression and collapse, which he so mercilessly chronicles, after the disaster, do not appear to me to be cowardly.  He was an over-worked, over-strained man, with a strong vein of morbidity in his constitution; and to have the great prize of a headship, which was the goal of his dearest hopes, put suddenly and evidently quite unexpectedly in his hands, and then in so unforeseen a manner torn away, must have been a terrible and unmanning catastrophe.  What is ungenerous is that he did not more tenderly realise that eventually it all turned out for the best.  He recognises the fact somewhat grudgingly.  Yet he was disengaged by the shock from professional life.  He gained bodily strength and vigour by the change; he began his work of research; and then, just at the time when his ideal was consolidated, the Rectorship came to him—­when it might have seemed that by his conduct he had forfeited all hopes of it.

In another respect the book is admirable.  Mark Pattison attained high and deserved literary distinction; but there is no hint of complacency on this subject, rather, indeed, the reverse; for he confesses that success had upon him no effect but to humiliate him by the consideration that the completed work might have been so much better both in conception and execution than it actually was.

I feel, on closing the book, a great admiration for the man, mingled with infinite pity for the miseries which his own temperament inflicted on him; it gives me, too, a high intellectual stimulus; it makes me realise the nobility and the beauty of knowledge, the greatness of the intellectual life.  One may regret that in Pattison’s case this was not mingled with more practical power, more sympathy, more desire to help rather than to pursue.  But here, again, one cannot have everything, and the life presents a fine protest against materialism, against the desire of recognition, against illiberal and retrograde views of thought.  Here was a great and lonely figure haunted by a dream which few of those about him could understand, and with which hardly any could sympathise.  He writes pathetically:  “I am fairly entitled to say that, since the year 1851, I have lived wholly for study.  There can be no vanity in making this confession, for, strange to say, in a university ostensibly endowed for the cultivation of science and letters, such a life is hardly regarded as a creditable one.”

The practical effect of such a book on me is to make me realise the high virtue of thoroughness.  It is not wholly encouraging, because at a place like this one must do a good deal of one’s work sloppily and sketchily; but it makes me ashamed of my sketchiness; I make good resolutions to get up my subjects better, and, even if I know that I shall relapse, something will have been gained.  But that is a side-issue.  The true gain is to have been confronted with a real man, to have looked into the depth of his spirit, to realise differences of temperament, to be initiated into a high and noble ambition.  And at the same time, alas! to learn by his failures to value tact and sympathy and generosity still more; and to learn that noble purpose is ineffective if it is secluded; to try resolutely to see the strong points of other workers, rather than their feeblenesses; and to end by feeling that we have all of us abundant need to forgive and to be forgiven—­Ever yours,