think, had a finer literary faculty. While entirely free from the mannerism of his prophet, he can be equally vivid. His style is thoroughly masculine, and yet never flat, prosaic, or violent. The other writings upon which I have not dwelt—the lectures at Oxford, for example, the Oceana, and the Short Studies—are full of delightful reading. I have spoken of him from one point of view in the attempt to understand why with his extraordinary gifts he did not produce a more satisfactory result. The general answer seems to be obvious. He suffered from the epidemic which prevailed at Oxford at his time: the 'sick fatigue' and 'languid doubt' of which Matthew Arnold speaks, and which was generated by the controversies which then raged at Oxford. It may seem to us of a later period rather surprising that any man could fancy that either Newman or Carlyle could be a prophet to follow blindly. One cannot quite realise the narrowness of the Oxford horizon at the time (I don't mean that other places were at all better off) in which the only alternatives seemed to be the acceptance of intellectual suicide with Newman or of adherence to the modified Puritanism of Carlyle. The young gentlemen of the day would have been the better for a little more acquaintance
