accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high.  Perhaps he believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert, and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of moral and religious truth—­perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain:  that there are the real needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they depend—­of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one.  As an instance, we might cite his “Essay on the Theology of Germany”—­elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in spite of his theories believes more than his theories.  But, as a student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what he is talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious above all to be accurate and discriminative.  If he fails, as he often seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.

The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all literature.  He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford.  He is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it.  Learning, with the severe and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning embracing all efforts of human intellect—­those which are warning beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human mind—­is the thing