3 86
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
,vhen they spoke of the future, and describes them, as he once described Carlyle and Ruskin, as prophets having nothing to foretell. At Frankfort, where he spoilt his watch by depositing it in unexpected holy water, and it was whispered that he had put it there to mend it, every- body knew that there was hardly a Catholic in the Parlia- ment of ,vhom such a fable could be told with more felicitous unfitness. For twenty years of his life at Munich, Görres ,vas the impressive central figure of a group reputed far and ,vide, the most intellectual force in the Catholic vvorld. Seeing things by the light of other days, Nippold and Maurenbrecher describe Döllinger himself as its most eminent member. There was present gain and future peril in living amongst a clever but restricted set, sheltered, supported, and restrained by friends who \vere united in aiIllS and studies, who cherished their sympathies and their enmities in common, and who therefore believed that they were divided by no deep cleft or ultimate principle. Döllinger never outlived the glamour of the eloquence and ascendancy of Görres, and spoke of him long after his death as a man of real knowledge, and of greater religious than political insight. Between the imaginative rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was ,vide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and unavailing Mystik, in order to amuse him with ropes of sand: and the severest censure of Döllinger's art as an historian was pronounced by Görres when he said, "I always see analogies, and you ahvays see differences." At all times, but in his early studies especially, he owed much to the I talians, whose ecclesiastical literature was the first that he mastered, and predominates in his Church history. Several of his countrymen, such as Savigny and Raumer, had composed history on the shoulders of Bolognese and Lombard scholars, and some of their most conspicuous successors to the present day have lived under heavy obligations to Modena and San
