But we must doubt whether this involved “probing to the recesses” the “Tractarian” side of the question.  And we distrust the depth and the judgment, and the impartiality also of a man who is said to have read Newman’s sermons continually with delight to the day of his death, and by whom no book was more carefully studied and more highly honoured than The Christian Year, and who yet to the last could see nothing better in the Church movement as a whole than, according to the vulgar view of it, a revival of forms partly useful, partly hurtful It seems to us the great misfortune of his life, and one which exercised its evil influence on him to the end, that, thrown young into the narrowest and weakest of religious schools, he found it at first so congenial to his vehement temperament, that he took so kindly to certain of its more unnatural and ungenerous ways, and thus was cut off from the larger and healthier influences of the society round him.  Those were days when older men than he took their side too precipitately; but he found himself encouraged, even as an undergraduate, to dogmatise, to be positive, to hate, to speak evil.  He learnt the lesson too well.  This is the language of an undergraduate at the end of his university course;—­

But I seem this term to have in a measure waked out of a long trance, partly caused by my own gross inconsistencies, and partly by the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such it is I feel persuaded.  And to know it a man must live here, and he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful breath of this accursed upas tree.  I say accursed, because I believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he did to the Galatian Church, “I would they were even cut off which trouble you”; accursed, because I believe that the curse of God will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality.  May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth.  But I do not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot speak very quietly.  It is strange into what ramifications the disbelief of external justification will extend; we will make it internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the Lord.

Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson’s sufferings, in the latter part of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the object.  “This is the man,” he says in one place, “who was afterwards at Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom God thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding.”