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Pattison's Milton. Woodhull's The Epic of Paradise Lost. Macaulay's Essay on Milton. Addison's criticisms on Milton, beginning in number 267 of The Spectator, are suggestive. Prose. Manly, II., has selections from all these writers; the Oxford Treasury and Century, from all but Hobbes. Selections may be found in Craik, III., 148-166; Manly, II., 139-143; Oxford Treasury, 83-85; Century, 225-235.
Pattison's high position, and his obvious love and respect for his university, be insufficient to convince the outside world that language so severe is yet no more than just, the authority of the Commissioners who reported on the University of Oxford in 1850 is open to no challenge. Yet they write:
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.
While we were still at Oxford he had brought out most of his books: On Compromise the fierce and famous manifesto of 1874 and the well-known volumes on the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John Stuart Mill.
Pattison's clearness and directness of thought, and made a considerable impression on some who only knew it from an abstract in the newspapers; and it was challenged by a working-man in the Pall Mall Gazette, who urged against it with some power the argument of despair.
But if the subject is not entered into at length, a writer upon it can do little more than repeat what has already been concisely and comprehensively told in Mr. Pattison's well-known essay. The authors, therefore, of this work have felt that they might be dispensed from devoting to it a separate chapter.
Pattison's bête noire of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his claim to descent from the Princes of Verona.
This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr. Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high.
The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the "Catholic reaction," the "Catholic revival" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison's final judgment. It was not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the degradation and ruin of genuine learning.
It is a stroke of literary humour after Pattison's own heart that Bentley, the mightiest of English scholars, should fill no more space in the Encyclopædic pantheon than Alford, who was hardly even the mightiest of English deans. But the fault was more probably with the rector's parsimony of words than with the editor.
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