enthusiasm and unconscious excitement swept him sometimes beyond himself.  He could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of ordinary life.  Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer manhood.  He held to his own views with pertinacity.  He believed them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of the views of others having truth in them also.  He was more or less one-sided at this period.  With the Roman Catholic religion it was war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error.  He seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted.”

He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of his friends, that he should prepare for orders.  “With a romantic instinct of self-sacrifice,” says his biographer, “he resolved to give up the idea of his whole life.”  This we can quite understand; but with that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have, besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson’s “characteristic self-distrust disposed him to believe that he was himself the worst judge of his future profession.”  This is the way in which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order to say something proper and becoming.  Self-distrust was not among the graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson’s nature, unless indeed we mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the interval between attempt and achievement.

He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford movement.  He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their rancour.  He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the forwardness with which he took his side against “Tractarianism,” and the vehemence of his dislike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the “donnishness,” the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends.  He despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do with it than he could help—­as he lived to regret afterwards.  Yet even then he was in his