I find recorded in a diary of that time (November, 1832) some notes of a conversation with Henry Milman one evening when I, with my parents and sister, had been dining with Lady Milman at Pinner, which are perhaps worth reproducing here. I asked him in the course of a long after-dinner conversation what he thought of Shuttleworth’s book on the _Consistency of Revelation with Itself and with Human Reason_, which formed the second volume of the series called the “Theological Library,” and which I had recently been reading. He said the work had a great many faults, one of the principal of which was its great difficulty. On this point I find, from other entries in my diary, that my undergraduate experience fully coincided with his more valuable judgment. The reasoning in a great many places was, he said, false; and in that part which treated of the Mosaic account of the creation of the world, the great question was entirely blinked. The abstract of moral duties appeared to him, he said, to be by far the most able part of the book. He considered Shuttleworth “a man of very limited reading.” And this perhaps he may have seemed to one of whom it used to be said jocosely in his own family that “Henry reads a book, not as other mortals do, line after line, but obliquely, from the left hand upper corner of a page to the right hand lower corner of the same!” Milman, on the same occasion, spoke much of the decay of a love of learning in England generally, and particularly at Oxford. He said that no four men could be found there who were up to the European level of the day in any branch of learning--not even in theology. And speaking of England generally, he said that in no one public library in the country could the books requisite for a man, who wished to write a learned work on any subject whatever, be found. Germany was, and was, he thought, likely to remain, the great emporium of all learning. As for the Church, he said that it would never be the profession that it had been--that it would not be his choice for a son of his; and that the law was the only profession for talent in these days. He observed that it was very remarkable that no change--no revolution--had ever passed over this country without adding power and wealth to that profession.