MARK PATTISON. . 539 



MARK PATTISON. 



In the death, on July 30, 1884, of Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln 

 College, Oxford, whose name has been upon the roll of our Foreign 

 Honorary Members since 187G, Oxford lost her most erudite scholar, 

 and her most competent critic in many branches of learning. 



The son of a Yorkshire clergyman, Pattison was born in 1813- 

 Without having been at a public school, he came to Oxford in 1832, 

 and remained there, with short and infrequent intermissions, for the 

 rest of his life. In his autobiographic " Memoirs," written during 

 the last year of his life, and in full consciousness of its near approach- 

 ing close, he has left an interesting and candid account of his own 

 intellectual development, of his relations to the University, in which 

 his figure was for more than a generation one of the most eminent, 

 and where he has left no one to occupy a position similar to that which 

 he filled. What he calls "the unconscious instinct of a studious life, 

 having its origin in the days of early boyhood," developed by well- 

 directed, conscientious, and steady training, controlled his whole career. 

 " I have never ceased," he says, in almost his final words, " to grow, 

 to develop, to discover, up to the very last." 



He was a vast reader ; his scholarship was of wide range, embracing 

 not only proper classical learning, but a thorough acquaintance with 

 the writers and the history of the early Church, with the movement 

 of theological sentiment in modern Europe, and especially the course 

 of religious thought in England, and with the progress of classical 

 learning from the Renaissance down to Niebuhr. Few men had a 

 more exact and extensive knowledge of English literature, particu- 

 larly of that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like most 

 scholars of such wide attainment, he wrote little in proportion to the 

 amoimt of his acquisitions, but what he wrote was of value in- inverse 

 proportion to its extent. His essays on University Reform and 

 Academical Organization, on the Endowment of Research, on the 

 Tendencies of Religious Thought in England from 1688 to 1750, 

 and other papers contributed to various journals, are of enduring 

 worth ; but it is by his Life of Milton, by his masterly edition of 

 Milton's Sonnets and of Pope's Essay on Man, and his Life of 

 Casaubon, that he is likely to be best remembered. His conscientious 

 erudition made him a standard to all, and a rebuke to those who were 

 not thorough in their work. Careless workers dreadeil him as a judge 

 at once most competent and most merciless. But he applied his criti- 



