mittee of the London Library, and regularly attended its meetings. But he was singularly inefficient on a board or committee, where his want of self-reliance was painfully apparent, and where his disinclination to express a positive opinion or to vote often caused great embarrassment, and sometimes inconvenience, to his colleagues, who would on many subjects have attached the utmost importance to any definite statement of his views. His occasional addresses, on such varied subjects as ‘Locke’ at the Royal Institution, ‘What is a College?’ before the Ascham Society, ‘Coal Scuttles’ at the School of Art at Oxford (November 1876), ‘The Art of Teaching’ at Bloomsbury, ‘Modern Books and Critics’ at Birmingham, drew large audiences. Several of them afterwards appeared as magazine articles. He occasionally took clerical duty for a few weeks in the summer in some country village, but it cannot be said that his ministrations were well adapted to country congregations.
Pattison's health, which had been for some time feeble, completely broke down in November 1883. But he rallied, and was able to visit London in the spring, and to be present—his last public appearance—at a meeting of the Hellenic Society. In June he was removed to Harrogate, where he died on 30 July 1884. He was buried, as he desired, in the neighbouring churchyard of Harlow Hill.
In 1861 Pattison married Emilia Frances, daughter of Captain Strong, H.E.I.C.S., a lady much younger than himself, who has achieved distinction as a writer on art. There was no issue of the marriage. Mrs. Pattison survived her husband, and, on 3 Oct. 1885 she married the Right Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, bart., M.P.
In the last few months of 1883 Pattison dictated his ‘Memoirs,’ which, however, only come down to 1860. They are largely based upon diaries which he deposited in the Bodleian Library. His later diaries are in the possession of his representatives. The ‘Memoirs’ were published by Mrs. Pattison in 1885. The book is one of deep and painful interest, the only one in existence that can be compared with Rousseau's ‘Confessions’ in the fidelity with which it lays bare the inmost secrets of the heart, but in which, unlike the ‘Confessions,’ the author does himself much less than justice. He gives a far less favourable impression of himself than any impartial outside observer would have done, and draws a portrait not so much of what he really was at the time of which he writes, as of what he seemed to himself through the morbid recollections of the past and the often not less morbid entries in his diary. For his true portrait we must look into his ‘Essays’ and his ‘Life of Casaubon.’ His own personality is evident in whatever he writes. He was essentially a man of learning, using the word in the sense in which he has defined it: ‘Learning is a peculiar compound of memory, imagination, scientific habit, accurate observation, all concentrated through a prolonged period on the analysis of the remains of literature. The result of this sustained mental endeavour is not a book, but a man. It cannot be embodied in print; it consists of the living word.’ He was consequently intolerant, not of ignorance, but of pretended learning, and showed his contempt sometimes too obviously. In his ‘Memoirs’ he is no less unfair to those whom he disliked than to himself, and all through his (later) writings there is a tendency to unduly depreciate both the learning and the actions of those who supported the cause of the catholic church. He sees the hand of the jesuits everywhere, and finds an evident difficulty in doing justice to the opponents of intellectual progress.
Though not in the technical sense of the word a bibliophile, Pattison collected not only the largest private library of his time at Oxford, but one that was extraordinarily complete for the history of learning and philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It numbered about fourteen thousand volumes, and was sold by auction at Sotheby's sale-room in London in July and August 1885.
A volume of his college and university sermons was published in 1885. In 1889 a selection of his essays appeared at the Clarendon Press, in two volumes, under the editorship of Pattison's friend, Henry Nettleship [q. v.]
[Memoirs by Mark Pattison, 1885; Times, 31 July 1884; Athenæum, 2 Aug. 1884; Saturday Review, 2 Aug. 1884; Academy, 9 Aug. 1884; Macmillan, vol. 1.; Morley's Miscellanies (from Macmillan, vol. li.); Althaus's Recollections of Mark Pattison (from Temple Bar, January 1885); Tollemache's Recollections of Pattison (from Journal of Education, 1 June 1885); Pattison's manuscript Diaries and Correspondence; personal knowledge.]
PATTISON, WILLIAM (1706–1727), poet, was born in 1706 at Peasemarsh, near Rye, Sussex, where his father, William Pattison, held a small farm from the Earl of Thanet. By Lord Thanet he was, in 1721, placed at the free school at Appleby, under Dr. Thomas Nevinson of Queen's College, Oxford. He showed considerable promise, and Thomas Noble, a neighbouring clergyman and schoolmaster of Kirkby Stephen,
