nevertheless suffered from some minor defects disastrous in his public position—fiery vehemence, exaggerated sensitiveness, and an entire lack of humour. He went into fits of passion over his detractors' iniquity without any countervailing perception of their absurdity, and every petty annoyance still further impaired the nervous energy which, apart from all merely external causes, was continually preying upon itself. The fire and emotion of the private correspondence published by Mr. Stopford Brooke (a selection from a great mass) would alone suffice to exhaust a delicate constitution. In February 1853, when he delivered at the Brighton Athenæum a lecture on the poet Wordsworth (who had received his honorary degree at Oxford during Robertson's undergraduateship), his health was visibly declining. Shortly afterwards, yielding to the entreaties of his congregation, he consented to seek rest for a time, and leave his church in the hands of a curate. The gentleman he selected was objected to by the vicar of Brighton on the ground of some personal offence given a few years before. Robertson, with his usual high spirit, refused to withdraw his nominee, and the consequent necessity for continuing to officiate killed him. He died of inflammation of the brain on 15 Aug. 1853, the sixth anniversary of his appearance at Brighton. More than two thousand persons followed him to the grave. His widow remarried, on 5 Feb. 1862, the Rev. Edward Houghton Johnson (d. 1880) of Aldwick, Sussex. Robertson left a son, Charles Boyd, who entered the foreign office; and a daughter, Ida Florence Geraldine, who married, first, Sir George Shuckburgh, ninth baronet, and, secondly, in 1886, Major Henry James Shuckburgh.
Robertson's private letters would alone justify a literary reputation, with their vehemence of emotion, beauty of description, depth of thought, and refinement of taste. His fame, notwithstanding, must mainly rest upon his ‘Sermons preached at Trinity Chapel, Brighton,’ published after his death (1st and 2nd ser. 1855, 3rd ser. 1857, 4th ser. 1859, 5th ser. 1890). These sermons abundantly prove that the secret of the preacher's power was not merely personal. Few compositions of the kind have been read with more eagerness or have exerted a wider influence, yet none have found their way to the public under greater disadvantages. They are for the most part derived either from imperfect shorthand notes or from simple recollections written out by himself in an abridged form for the benefit of friends. Most discourses subjected to a similar ordeal would have become a mere caput mortuum, but the most conspicuous characteristic of Robertson's is their vitality. Eloquent, in the ordinary sense, they are not, nor do they shine by learning or scholarship, which Robertson did not possess in any extraordinary measure. They are simply the effusions of a mind whose genius was turned to preaching, as that of other minds to poetry. Their theology would generally be called broad-church, but presents few traces of influence received from Kingsley, Maurice, or any other broad-church leader. Robertson thought entirely for himself, and, as he was always thinking, the character of his teaching must have undergone considerable modifications. The direction he would have taken may be easily surmised, but cannot be certainly known.
Descended from military ancestors, surrounded with military associations, endowed to the full with military instincts and aptitudes, the description ‘soldier of the Cross’ in relation to Robertson stated a literal fact. He felt towards wrong and sin as a soldier feels towards dastardly enemies, and attacked hostile opinions and uncongenial habits of mind as he would have mounted a breach or stormed a battery. He thus offends by perpetual overstatement, especially in his private correspondence. He was nevertheless preserved from narrowness by his admirable gift of recognising what was excellent in every party. With all his fieriness, he was by no means deficient in tact, and he was always ready to defer to authority in externals; inwardly he would and must have his own way. His intense subjectivity made him indifferent to the authority of antiquity, on which the high-church party laid stress, and, though admiring and venerating many of the tractarian leaders, he became more thoroughly estranged from them than from the evangelicals.
Besides his sermons, hardly any of which were printed in his lifetime, Robertson was the author of several lectures and addresses (published separately in 1858), which, together with a few public speeches and other productions, have been collected and published as his ‘Literary Remains’ (1876, 8vo). The most important are those delivered in connection with the working-men's institute at Brighton, especially the inaugural address (1849) and the two ‘Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes’ (1852), which comprise a defence of ‘In Memoriam’ against the ordinary reviewing of the day. He also made a translation of Lessing on the ‘Education of the Human Race,’ and an analysis of ‘In Memoriam’ (London, 1862, 8vo), ‘an endeavour to give the keynote of
