Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings,
and Patmore wrote on August 16:
Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done
it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable
of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And
what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have
not lost.
Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up
under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come
up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an
impressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and the
Flower_, dated Lymington, May 1895:
The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately
adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the
weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its
mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the
modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done.
In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from a
letter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of his
forthcoming book, _Principle in Art_, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh,
Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set their
heels on it accordingly.' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by
'readers, zealously Christian,' and the readers, instead of setting
their heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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