Englishmen of Queen Victoria's reign. Their furniture had
nothing shocking for him nor their steel engravings. He
took for granted their probity, their common sense, and their
reading. He knew what they were thinking about and
therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions,
to soothe or to exasperate them, told. He could see the
target.

Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint
of the men around him makes him say things that irritate
more particular and more acute minds than his own, but I
will maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault
and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the
sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt"
and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures
in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these
two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are
something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by
an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must
quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking
of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful
voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but
partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come
bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any
copy of the Spectator picked up at random.

These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of
those great qualities which gave him his position.

And side by side with such faults go an exceptional