Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/71

 Aristotle's Rhetoric; but such a lecture!—the tutor incapable of explaining any difficulty, and barely able to translate the Greek, even with the aid of a crib’ (, Memoirs, p. 130). He missed the first class, which had been the object of his and his father's ambition. In the class list of Easter term 1836 his name appeared in the second class in classical honours. In fact, though wholly devoted to study, his reading had been at once too discursive and too thorough. Instead of confining his attention to the rigidly orthodox and narrow list of books usually taken up, he ‘frittered away time over outlying books—Lysias, Cicero de Legibus, Terence, and other feather-weights which counted for nothing in the schools, but with which I had the whim to load my list’ (Memoirs, p. 150). Nor had he confined his reading to classics. During his undergraduate course he had been a diligent student of English literature, had spent much time upon the Pope-Addison-Swift circle, and had laid the foundation of his interest in eighteenth-century speculation.

Pattison graduated B.A. in 1836 and M.A. in 1840. In the meantime he had abandoned the narrow evangelical views in which he had been brought up, and had fallen under the influence of Newman. For some time in 1838–9 he lived with other young men in Newman's house in St. Aldate's, and aided in the translation of Thomas Aquinas's ‘Catena Aurea on the Gospels.’ ‘St. Matthew’ was Pattison's work.

In April 1838 he stood for a fellowship at Oriel, in June at University, in November at Balliol, but each time without success. He was in despair. His ‘darling hope of leading a life of study as a fellow seemed completely blocked.’ At last, in November 1839, he was elected to a fellowship at Lincoln. ‘No moment in all my life has ever been so sweet as that Friday morning, 8 Nov.,’ when his election was announced (Memoirs, p. 183). At Lincoln he at first found himself even less at home than at Oriel. It was a rigidly anti-Puseyite college, characterised indeed by no evangelical fervour, but of the type known some years later as ‘low and slow.’ In all respects the college was at a low ebb. Pattison became more and more devoted to Newman, and was for some years ‘a pronounced Puseyite, daily reciting the hours of the Roman breviary, and once getting so low by fostering a morbid state of conscience as to go to confession to Dr. Pusey’ (ib. p. 189). In 1841 he was ordained deacon, and in 1843 priest. He obtained the Denyer theological prize in 1841, and again in 1842, the subjects being respectively ‘The Sufficiency of Holy Scriptures for the Salvation of Man’ and ‘Original or Birth Sin and the Necessity of New Birth unto Life.’ In 1842 his translation of Aquinas on St. Matthew was printed. This was followed by two lives of English saints (Stephen Langton and St. Edmund) in the series edited by Newman, neither of them of great merit, but at least free from the trivialities and childish miracles which appear so frequently in the volumes.

In 1842 he wrote his first purely literary article on ‘Earliest English Poetry,’ for which he spent months of study. It appeared in the ‘British Critic.’

His appointment to a college tutorship in 1843 gave him a serious object in life, ‘beyond holding up one of the banners of the Puseyite party.’ It was necessary to devote his mind to Aristotle, logic, and the classics generally, which he had for some time neglected. The preparation for his lectures took up most of his time, and a series of literary articles in the ‘Christian Remembrancer’ (‘Miss Bremer's Novels,’ 1844; ‘Gregory of Tours,’ ‘Wordsworth's Diary in France,’ 1845; ‘Church Poetry,’ ‘The Oxford Bede,’ ‘Thiers's Consulate and Empire,’ ‘The Sugar Duties,’ 1846; ‘Hugh Miller's First Impressions of England,’ 1847; ‘Mill's Political Economy,’ 1848; ‘Lord Holland's Foreign Reminiscences,’ 1851) occupied the remainder, and thus carried him out of the narrow ecclesiastical range of thought and practice in which he had for some years lived. Hence the secession of Newman to the church of Rome in 1845 was less of a shock to him than to many of his associates. Yet he thinks he ‘might have dropped off to Rome in some moment of mental and physical depression, or under the pressure of some arguing convert,’ in 1847 (ib. p. 221). But he had become devoted to his work as a college tutor, and was growing conscious of the possession of that magnetic influence which first affected his pupils, afterwards the college generally, and latterly so many outsiders with whom he came in contact. His appointment as examiner in the school of literæ humaniores in the spring of 1848 seems to have been the turning-point of his life.

His success as an examiner surprised him, and proved both to himself and to the university that his powers and his learning were not only equal to, but greater than, those of men of much higher reputation. Tractarianism gradually left him, and he became less and less influenced by theological opinion, for which in his latter years he had little regard except as it affected practical life or