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I was reading the other day an essay by the late head of my old college at Oxford, that very learned and remarkable man Mark Pattison, who was a booklover if ever there was one. He complained that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary English middle class family is shamefully small.
He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen.
He even acquired no mean name in literature, though his work, after an early Commentary on some Epistles of St. Paul, was almost entirely confined to translations, especially of Plato, and though in these translations he was much assisted by pupils. He wrote well, but with much less distinction and elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any means the same taste for literature and erudition in it.
To reckon the subject of this volume among leading minds who have stamped a deep influence on our generation, is not possible even to the friendliest partiality. That was not his position, and nobody could be less likely than he would himself have been to claim it. Pattison started no new problem.
In the words about Newman, one seems to recognise very much more than meets the ear an explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude.
In Pennsylvania the Greenbackers had demanded that currency be issued only by the central government not by the national banks and that measures be taken to curb monopolies; the independent Republicans had revolted against Cameron, and demanded civil service reform and the overthrow of bossism; and the Democrats had elected a governor of the reformer type, Robert E. Pattison.
If these are judged insufficient, my presence could not give them more weight." I find this simple entry in the diary: "July 20, 1880. R. Browning, Sir F. Leighton, Sir J. E. Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Mr. T. Woolner, Mr. G. F. Watts, Professor Seeley, Professor Sidney Colvin, Professor Oliver, Mr. Mark Pattison, Mr. S. Palmer, Mr. Orchardson, Mr. Marks, Mr. A. W. Hunt, Mr. Herkomer, Mr.
The majority of them were no more capable of caring for literature, knowledge, education, books, or learning than Squire Western or Commodore Trunnion. One of them, says Pattison, had been reduced by thirty years of the Lincoln common-room to a torpor almost childish.
But he served the turn by keeping out Pattison's rival, and whatever discredit he brought upon the society must be shared by those who, with Pattison at their head, brought him in against a better man. All this unsavoury story might as well have been left where it was. The reaction was incredibly severe.
Pattison regarded what he calls "the Catholic reaction" over Europe, and in the fact that undoubtedly Calvin's system and influence was the great force which resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good, true, generous, humane. Calvinism opposed the "Catholic reaction" point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr. Pattison.
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