Reference > Cambridge History > The Victorian Age, Part Two > Historians, Biographers and Political Orators > Mark Pattison
  Roscoe Sir James Stephen  

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The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.

II. Historians, Biographers and Political Orators.

§ 55. Mark Pattison.


A later, and, to some moderns, less attractive, phase of the renascence movement was brought nearer to English readers by the one larger work published, amidst a number of smaller contributions to the literature of scholarship and adjoining fields of research, by Mark Pattison, the renowned rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Yet, his Isaac Casaubon (1875), though an admirable piece of work, fitly described by Pattison’s pupil and friend Richard Copley Christie as “the best biography in our language of a scholar, in the sense in which Pattison, 66  in common with Casaubon and Scaliger, understood the word,” was not produced till the author found himself anticipated (by Jacob Bernays) in the life of Scaliger, for which, during thirty years, he had been preparing. Although much of what Pattison wrote besides Isaac Casaubon (including the collected Essays and a characteristic life of Milton in the “English Men of Letters” series) is worthy of preservation, it was in his own posthumously published Memoirs (reaching to 1860) that he made an addition of surpassing interest to biographical literature. His express prohibition of the cancelling of a word of these Memoirs, except a few paragraphs at the beginning which seemed to be of too egotistical a character, was conscientiously obeyed; and the result is a book of self-confession—but of the sort that obliges the writer to confess his opinion of others as well as of himself. He tells us how it was only at an advanced period of his life that he had come to understand Goethe’s ideal of self-culture, and the pollution and “disfigurement” of it by literary ambition. Luckily, “the vulgar feeling that a literary life means one devoted to the making of books” so far prevailed with Pattison that his pen was rarely idle, and that he made himself memorable, not only in the educational history of his university, but, also, in the history of learning and letters.   90
Note 66. Of the famous Wellington Despatches, edited by colonel Gurwood (13 vols. 1834–9), which attracted the ingenuous admiration of their author himself, those which have reference to the Peninsular war are contained in vols. IV to XI (1835–8). Sir William Napier’s Life and Opinions of Sir Charles Napier (1857), though written “in the spirit of a knight errant … to vindicate the fame of his brother Charles, as The Peninsular War had been written to vindicate that of his chief, Sir John Moore,” is rendered quite unsafe by partisanship, reproducing, as it does, the assertions of his Conquest of Scinde, and Administration of Scinde, books whose noble qualities are marred by violence of attack as well as by cagerness of defence. No more fiery spirit ever burnt in the heart of a historical writer; yet he was never more himself than when inditing an unfrequent apology.—John Campbell’s Lives of the Admirals (1724–4) went through several editions, and an abridgment appeared so late as 1870. [ back ]

CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
  Roscoe Sir James Stephen  
 
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