Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

MARK PATTISON.

IN the death, on July 30, 1884, of Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, whose name has been upon the roll of our Foreign Honorary Members since 1876, Oxford lost her most erudite scholar, and her most competent critic in many branches of learning.

The son of a Yorkshire clergyman, Pattison was born in 1813. Without having been at a public school, he came to Oxford in 1832, and remained there, with short and infrequent intermissions, for the rest of his life. In his autobiographic "Memoirs," written during the last year of his life, and in full consciousness of its near approaching close, he has left an interesting and candid account of his own intellectual development, of his relations to the University, in which his figure was for more than a generation one of the most eminent, and where he has left no one to occupy a position similar to that which he filled. What he calls "the unconscious instinct of a studious life, having its origin in the days of early boyhood," developed by welldirected, conscientious, and steady training, controlled his whole career. "I have never ceased," he says, in almost his final words, "to grow, to develop, to discover, up to the very last."

He was a vast reader; his scholarship was of wide range, embracing not only proper classical learning, but a thorough acquaintance with the writers and the history of the early Church, with the movement of theological sentiment in modern Europe, and especially the course of religious thought in England, and with the progress of classical learning from the Renaissance down to Niebuhr. Few men had a more exact and extensive knowledge of English literature, particularly of that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like most scholars of such wide attainment, he wrote little in proportion to the amount of his acquisitions, but what he wrote was of value in inverse proportion to its extent. His essays on University Reform and Academical Organization, on the Endowment of Research, on the Tendencies of Religious Thought in England from 1688 to 1750, and other papers contributed to various journals, are of enduring worth; but it is by his Life of Milton, by his masterly edition of Milton's Sonnets and of Pope's Essay on Man, and his Life of Casaubon, that he is likely to be best remembered. His conscientious erudition made him a standard to all, and a rebuke to those who were not thorough in their work. Careless workers dreaded him as a judge at once most competent and most merciless. But he applied his criti

cal faculty to his own work, no less than to the work of others. “I have never," he says, "enjoyed any self-satisfaction in anything I have ever done, for I have inevitably made a mental comparison with how it might have been better done. The motto of one of my diaries, Quicquid hic operis fiat pœnitet,' may be said to be the motto of my life."

It had long been his intention to write a Life of Scaliger, for whom, as something more than the first scholar of the modern age, he felt the deepest respect. He imposed it upon himself, "as a solemn duty, to rescue the memory of Scaliger from the load of falsehood and infamy" under which his enemies had contrived to bury it. For nearly thirty years he was getting together the materials for this vindicia. But the work of completing the composition of the Life was postponed too long, and Scaliger must still await a champion. It will be long before one so well equipped is likely to appear in the lists.

The memory of Mark Pattison will be cherished by scholars, and deserves to endure as that of a student faithful to the high ideals of intellectual life.

Since the last Report, the Academy has received an accession of twenty new members; viz. nine Resident Fellows, two Associate Fellows, and nine Foreign Honorary Members; and four members have withdrawn. The list of the Academy, corrected to the date of this Report, is hereto added. It includes 196 Resident Fellows, 84 Associate Fellows, and 71 Foreign Honorary Members.