This was his task, and the public of course set him down for a rustic. "What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page, 'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate, comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, too--not always, but as a rule--from that emotional excess to which he knew himself most dangerously prone. He assigns it confidently to his Manx blood; but his mother was Scottish by descent, and from my experience of what the Lowland Scot can do in the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take leave to doubt that the Manxman was wholly to blame. There can, however, be no doubt that the author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," of "Mater Dolorosa," described himself accurately as a "born sobber," or that an acquired self-restraint saved him from a form of intemperance by which of late our literature has been somewhat too copiously afflicted. To scholarship, too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of lambent common sense. For a few examples:-- "I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on Theocritus. So many French _litterateurs_ give me the idea that they don't go nearer the Greek authors than the Latin translations. . . . Sainte Beuve [_Nouveaux Lundis_, vii. 1--52, on 'The Greek Anthology'] is an enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, he never strikes me as knowing much about the matter!" "Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly enjoy. The dear old Abraham goes straight off into your beautiful lines. Of course he has not a scrap of modern _impedimenta_. You go through the customs at the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You have _nothing to declare_. The blessed old man by your side is himself a Roman to begin with, and you pass together as cheerfully as possible. . . ." "I have also been reading Karl Elze's _Essays on Shakespeare_. He is not bad, but don't you resent the imperturbable confidence of men who, after attributing a play of Shakespeare's to two authors, proceed to suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and self-sought exigency?"