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In a wider space it would be interesting to comment on numerous other exponents of the Movement. Archdeacon afterwards Cardinal Manning (1807-93), the successful rival of Newman among those Anglican clergymen who joined the Church of Rome, was less a man of letters than a very astute man of business; but his sermons before he left the Church had merit, and he afterwards wrote a good deal. Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), elder brother of the historian, had a very great and not perhaps a very beneficent influence on Newman, and through Newman on others; but he died too soon to leave much work. His chief distinguishing note was a vigorous and daring humour allied to a strong reactionary sentiment. Isaac Williams, the second poet of the Movement (1802-65), was in most respects, as well as in poetry, a minor Keble. W. G. Ward, commonly called "Ideal" Ward from his famous, very ill-written, very ill-digested, but important Ideal of a Christian Church, which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a curiously constituted person of whom something has been said in reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, and after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large fortune he finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. His acuteness was great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and logical deftness which made him very formidable to the loose thinkers and reasoners of Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism. One of the latest important survivors was Dean Church (1815-91), who, as Proctor, had arrested the persecution of the Tractarians, with which it was sought to complete the condemnation of Ward's Ideal, and who afterwards, both in a country cure and as Dean of St. Paul's, acquired very high literary rank by work on Dante, Anselm, Spenser, and other subjects, leaving also the best though unfortunately an incomplete history of the Movement itself; while the two Mozleys, the one a considerable theologian, the other an active journalist, brothers-in-law of Newman, also deserve mention. Last of all perhaps we must notice Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), of a younger generation, but the right-hand man of Pusey in his later day, and his biographer afterwards – a popular and pleasing, though rather rhetorical than argumentative or original, preacher, and a man very much affected by his friends. Even this list is nothing like complete, but it is impossible to enlarge it.

Midway between the Movement and its enemies, a partial sympathiser in early days, almost an enemy when the popular tide turned against it, almost a leader when public favour once more set in in its favour, was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester (1805-73). The third son of the celebrated emancipationist and evangelical, he had brothers who were more attracted than himself by the centripetal force of Roman doctrine, and succumbed to it. Worldly perhaps as much as spiritual motives kept him steadier. He did invaluable work as a bishop; and at all times of his life he was in literature a distinct supporter of the High Church cause, though with declensions and defections of Erastian and evangelical backsliding. He was a very admirable preacher, though his sermons do not read as well as they "heard"; some of his devotional manuals are of great excellence; and in the heyday of High Church allegory (an interesting by-walk of literature which can only be glanced at here, but which was trodden by some estimable and even some eminent writers) he produced the well hit-off tale of Agathos (1839). But it may be that he will, as a writer, chiefly survive in the remarkable letters and diaries in his Life, which are not only most valuable for the political and ecclesiastical history of the time, but precious always as human documents and sometimes as literary compositions.

Three remarkable persons must be mentioned among the opponents of (and in one case harsh judgment might say the deserters of) the Movement. These were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett. Stanley, born in 1815, was the son of the (afterwards) Bishop of Norwich and a nephew of the first Lord Stanley of Alderley, and was brought up very much under the influence of Arnold, whose biographer he became. But he went further than Arnold in Broad Church ways. His career at Rugby and at Oxford was distinguished, and after being fellow and tutor of University College for some ten years, he became successively Canon of Canterbury, Canon of Christ Church, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and Dean of Westminster, in which last post he had almost greater opportunities than any bishop, and used them to the full. He also wrote busily, devoting himself especially to the geography of Palestine and the history of the Eastern Church, which he handled in a florid and popular style, though not with much accuracy or scholarship. Personally, Stanley was much liked, though his conception of his duties as a sworn servant of the Church has seemed strange to some. He died in July 1881.

Mark Pattison (1813-84), Fellow and Rector of Lincoln College, had a less amiable character than Stanley's, but a greater intellect and far nicer, profounder, and wider scholarship, though he actually did very little. He fell under the influence of Newman early, and was one of that leader's closest associates in his monastic retreat at Littlemore. But when Newman "went over," the wave swept Pattison neither to Rome nor safely on to higher English ground, but into a religious scepticism, the exact extent of which was nowhere definitely announced, but which was regarded by some as nearly total. He did not nominally leave the Church, but he acted always with the extreme Liberal party in the University, and he was one of the famous Seven who contributed to Essays and Reviews¹¹. The shock of his religious revolution was completed by a secular disappointment – his defeat for the office of Rector, which he actually attained much later; and a temper always morbid, appears, to judge from his painful but extraordinarily interesting and characteristic Memoirs, to have been permanently soured. Even active study became difficult to him, and though he was understood to have a more extensive acquaintance with the humanists of the late Renaissance than any man of his day, his knowledge took little written form except a volume on Isaac Casaubon. He also wrote an admirable little book on Milton for the English Men of Letters, edited parts of Milton and Pope, and contributed a not inconsiderable number of essays and articles to the Quarterly and Saturday Reviews, and other papers. The autobiography mentioned was published after his death.

Despite Pattison's peculiar temper he had warm and devoted friends, and it was impossible for any one, whether personally liking him or not, to deny him the possession of most unusual gifts. Whether his small performance was due to the shocks just referred to, to genuine fastidiousness and resolve to do nothing but the best, or to these things mixed with a strong dash of downright indolence and want of energy, is hard to say. But it would be entirely unjust to regard him as merely a man who was "going to do something." His actual work though not large is admirable, and his style is the perfection of academic correctness, not destitute of either vigour or grace.

There were some resemblances between Pattison and Jowett (1817-94); but the latter, unlike Pattison, had never had any sympathies with the religious renaissance of his time. Like Pattison he passed his entire life (after he obtained a Balliol fellowship) in his College, and like him became head of it; while he was a much more prominent member of the Liberal party in Oxford. His position as Regius Professor of Greek gave him considerable influence even beyond Balliol. He, too, was an Essayist and Reviewer, and he exercised a quiet but pervading influence in University matters. He even acquired no mean name in literature, though his work, after an early Commentary on some Epistles of St. Paul, was almost entirely confined to translations, especially of Plato, and though in these translations he was much assisted by pupils. He wrote well, but with much less distinction and elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any means the same taste for literature and erudition in it. But, as an influence on the class of persons from whom men of letters are drawn, no one has exceeded him in his day.

The dramatic catastrophe of the Disruption of the Scotch Kirk, which, by a strange coincidence, was nearly contemporary with the crisis of the Oxford Movement, set the final seal upon the reputation of Thomas Chalmers, who headed the seceders. But this reputation had been made long before, and indeed Chalmers died 30th May 1847, only four years after he "went out." He was a much older man than the Oxford leaders, having been born in 1780, and after having for some years, though a minister, devoted himself chiefly to secular studies, he became famous as a preacher at the Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1823 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews, and (shortly afterwards) of Theology in Edinburgh. He was one of the Bridgewater treatise writers – a group of distinguished persons endowed to produce tractates on Natural Theology – and his work, The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, was one of the most famous of that set, procuring for him a correspondence-membership from the French Institute and a D.C.L. from Oxford. Chalmers' works are extremely voluminous; the testimony as to the effect of his preaching is tolerably uniform; he was a man of very wide range of thought, and of remarkable faculty of popularisation; and there is no doubt that he was a born leader of men. But as literature his works have hardly maintained the reputation which they once had, and even those who revere him, unless they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge that there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric itself is not of the finest.

Edward Irving, at one time an assistant to Chalmers, and an early friend of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers himself, and died thirteen years before him. But at nearly the time when Chalmers was at the height of his reputation as a preacher in Glasgow, Irving was drawing crowds to the unfashionable quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by sermons of extraordinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities of doctrine which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more strictly literary affinities than Chalmers; he came under the influence of Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both with his eloquence and with his vagaries); and he may be regarded as having been much more of a man of letters who had lost his way and strayed into theology than as a theologian proper.

To what extent this great and famous influence of Coleridge actually worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been debated. It is however generally stated that he, like his friend Sterling, was induced to take orders in the Church of England by this influence. He was not a very young man when in 1834, the year of Irving's death, he did this, for he had been born in 1805, and had been educated at Cambridge, though being then a Unitarian he did not take a degree. He afterwards went to Oxford and took an M.A. degree there, and he was regarded for a time as a sort of outlying sympathiser with the Tractarian Movement. But his opinions took a very different line of development not merely from those of Newman, but from those of Keble and Pusey. He indeed never left the Church, in which he held divers preferments; and though his views on eternal punishment lost him a professorship in King's College, London, he met with no formal ecclesiastical censure. But he came to be regarded as a champion of the Broad Church school, and upheld eloquently and vehemently, if not always with a sufficiency either of logic or of learning, a curious conglomerate of "advanced" views, ranging from Christian Socialism to something like the views of the Atonement attributed to Origen, and from deprecation of dogma to deprecation of the then fashionable political economy. He was made Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866, and died in 1872. Maurice's sermons were effective, and his other works numerous. A very generous and amiable person with a deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing is a sort of elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological Charles Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism of system, and want of accurate learning, were not remedied by Kingsley's splendid pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, or his brilliant style.

Somewhat akin to Maurice, but of a more feminine and less robust temperament, was Frederick Robertson, generally called "Robertson of Brighton," from the place of his last cure. Robertson, who was the son of a soldier, was born in London on 3rd February 1816. After a rather eccentric education and some vacillations about a profession, he went, rather late, to Oxford, and was ordained in 1840. He had very bad health, but did duty, chiefly at Cheltenham and at Brighton, pretty valiantly, and died on August 1853. He published next to nothing in his lifetime, but after his death there appeared several volumes of sermons which gained great popularity, and were followed by other posthumous works. Robertson's preaching is not very easy to judge, because the published sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not rendered easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and then, and remarkable earnestness.

Note. – In no chapter, perhaps, has there been greater difficulty as to inclusion and exclusion than in the present. The names of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, of Dean Alford, of Bishop Lightfoot for England, of Bishop Charles Wordsworth, of Dean Ramsay, of Drs. Candlish, Guthrie, and Macleod for Scotland, may seem to clamour among orthodox theologians, those of W. R. Greg, of James Hinton, of W. K. Clifford among not always orthodox lay dealers with the problems of philosophy, or of theology, or both. With less tyrannous limits of space Principal Tulloch, who was noteworthy in both these and in pure literature as well (he was the last editor of Fraser), must have received at least brief notice in this chapter, as must his brother Principal, J. C. Shairp (an amiable poet, an agreeable critic, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford), in others.

CHAPTER IX
LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS

In a former chapter we conducted the history of criticism, especially literary criticism, and that chiefly as displayed in the periodicals which were reorganized and refreshed in the early years of the century, to about 1850. We have now to take it up at that point and conduct it – subject to the limitations of our plan as regards living authors, and in one extremely important case taking the license of outstepping these limits – to the present or almost the present day. We shall have to consider the rise and performances of two great individual writers, one of whom entirely re-created, if he may not almost be said to have created, the criticism of art in England, while the other gave a new temper, if not exactly a new direction, to the criticism of literature; and we shall have, in regard to periodicals, to observe the rise, in the first place of the weekly newspaper, and then of the daily, as competitors in strictly critical and literary work with the quarterly and monthly reviews, as well as some changes in these latter.

For just as we found that the first development of nineteenth century criticism coincided with or followed upon a new departure or development in periodicals, so we shall find that a similar change accompanied or caused changes in the middle of the century. Although the popularity of the quarterly and monthly reviews and magazines which had been headed respectively by the Edinburgh and Blackwood did not exactly wane, and though some of the most brilliant work of the middle of the century – George Eliot's novels, Kingsley's and Froude's essays, and the like – appeared in them, the ever fickle appetite of readers seemed to desire something else in shape, something different in price, style, and form. Why this sort of change, which is perpetually recurring, should usually bring with it a corresponding change, and sometimes a corresponding improvement, of literary production, is more than any one can say, but the fact is not easily disputable.

On the present occasion the change took three successive forms – first, the raising, or rather restoring, of the weekly sixpenny critical newspaper to a higher pitch of popularity than it had ever held; secondly, the cheapening and multiplying of the monthly magazines; thirdly, the establishment of new monthly reviews, somewhat more resembling the old quarterlies than anything else, but with signed instead of anonymous articles.

The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two remarkably different forms, represented respectively by Household Words, which Dickens started early in the fifties, and by the Saturday Review, which came a little later. The former might best be described as a monthly of the Blackwood and London kind cheapened, made more frequent in issue, and adjusted to a considerably lower and more popular standard of interest and culture – politics, moreover, being ostensibly though not quite really excluded. Dickens contributed to it largely himself. He received contributions from writers of established repute like Bulwer and Lever; but he made his chief mark with the paper by breeding up a school of younger writers who wrote to his own pattern in fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie Collins was the chief of these, but there were many others. In particular the periodical developed a sort of popular, jocular, and picturesque-descriptive manner of treating places, travels, ceremonies, and what not, which took the public fancy immensely. It was not quite original (for Leigh Hunt, Wainewright the murderer-miscellanist of the London, some of the Blackwood men, and others, had anticipated it to a certain extent), and it was vulgarised as regards all its models; but it was distinct and remarkable. The æsthetic and literary tone of Household Words, and of its successor All the Year Round to a somewhat less extent, was distinctly what is called Philistine; and though Dickens always had a moral purpose, he did not aim much higher than amusement that should not be morbid, and instruction of the middle-class diffusion-of-knowledge kind. But there was very little harm and much good to be said of Household Words; and if some of the imitations of it were far from being happy, its own popularity and that of its successor were very fairly deserved.

The aims, the character, and the success of the Saturday Review were of the most widely different character. It was less novel in form, for the weekly review was an established thing, and had at least two very respectable examples – the Examiner, which (under the Hunts, under Fonblanque, under Forster, and under the late Mr. Minto) had a brilliant, if never an extremely prosperous, career for three-quarters of the century, and the Spectator, which attained a reputation for unswerving honesty under the editorship of Mr. Rentoul, and has increased it under that of its present conductors. But both these were Liberal papers first of all; the Saturday Review, at first and accidentally Peelite, was really (throughout the nearly forty years during which it remained in the possession of the same family and was directed by a succession of editors each of whom had been trained under his predecessor) Independent Tory, or (to use a rather unhappy and now half-forgotten name) Liberal-Conservative. It never tied itself to party chariot-wheels, and from the first to the last of the period just referred to very distinguished writers of Liberal and Radical opinions contributed to it. But the general attitude of the paper during this time expressed that peculiar tone of mainly Conservative persiflage which has distinguished in literature the great line of writers beginning with Aristophanes. Its staff was, as a rule, recruited from the two Universities (though there was no kind of exclusion for the unmatriculated; as a matter of fact, neither of its first two editors was a son either of Oxford or Cambridge), and it always insisted on the necessity of classical culture. It eschewed the private personality which had been too apt to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind during the first half of the century; but it claimed and exercised to the full the privilege of commenting on every public writing, utterance, or record of the subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps a longer time than any other paper, the salutary principles of anonymity (real as well as ostensible) in regard to the authorship of particular articles; and those who knew were constantly amused at the public mistakes on this subject.

Applying this kind of criticism, – perfectly fearless, on the whole fairly impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and above all keeping before it the motto, framed by its "sweet enemy" Thackeray, of being written "by gentlemen for gentlemen," – the Saturday Review quickly attained, and for many years held, the very highest place in English critical journalism as regards literature, in a somewhat less degree politics, and in a degree even greater the farrago of social and miscellaneous matters. By consent too general and too unbiassed to be questioned, it gave and maintained a certain tone of comment which prevailed for the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of the century, and of which the general note may be said to have been a coolly scornful intolerance of ignorance and folly. There were those who accused it even in its palmiest days of being insufficiently positive and constructive; but on the negative side it was generally sound in intention, and in execution admirably thorough. It may sometimes have mishandled an honest man, it may sometimes have forgiven a knave; but it always hated a fool, and struck at him with might and with main.

The second change began with the establishment of the Cornhill and Macmillan's Magazine, two or three years later. There was no perceptible difference in the general scheme of these periodicals from that of the earlier ones, of which Blackwood and Fraser were the most famous; but their price was lowered from half a crown to a shilling, and the principle of signed articles and of long novels by famous names was adopted. The editorship of Thackeray in the Cornhill, with the contributions of Matthew Arnold and others, quickly gave a character to it; while Macmillan's could boast contributions from the Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, as well as from many others. From this time the monthly magazine, with the exception of Blackwood, found a shilling, which attempts have been recently made to lower to sixpence, its almost necessary tariff, while the equal necessity of addressing the largest possible audience made pure politics, with occasional exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the credit of the English magazines of this class, however, that they have never relinquished the tradition of serious literary studies. Many of the essays of Mr. Arnold appeared first either in one or the other of the two just mentioned; the Cornhill even ventured upon Mr. Ruskin's Unto this Last; and other famous books of a permanent character saw the light in these, in Temple Bar, started by Mr. Bentley, in the rather short-lived St. Paul's, of which Anthony Trollope was editor, and in others.

Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished from the "Magazine," which came again a little later towards the middle or end of the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisation of the quarterly ideal – to the need for the political and "heavy" articles which the lightened monthlies had extruded – or to a mere imitation of the famous French Revue des Deux Mondes, is an academic question. The first of these new Reviews was the Fortnightly, which found the exact French model unsuitable to the meridian of Greenwich, and dropped the fortnightly issue, while retaining the title. It was followed by the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century, and others. The exclusion of fiction in these was not invariable – the Fortnightly, in particular, has published many of Mr. Meredith's novels. But, as a rule, these reviews have busied themselves with more or less serious subjects, and have encouraged signed publication.

It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or even all the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. We are dealing with classes, not individuals, and the only class yet to be noticed – daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost entirely – are those weekly newspapers which have eschewed politics altogether. The oldest and most famous of these is the Athenæum, which still flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty and fifty years later the Academy was founded on the same general principles. But the Athenæum has always cleaved, as far as its main articles went, to the unsigned system, while the Academy started at a period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper, that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and larger part in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as they appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary to be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the original Pall Mall Gazette, an evening newspaper started in 1864 with one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many of the original Saturday writers and others.

The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many forms has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the latter part of the century has passed through periodicals – that, except as regards Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing, every one who will shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either won his spurs or exercised them in this kind, and that of the others, mentioned in other chapters and in connection with other subjects, a very small proportion can be said to have been entirely disdainful of periodical publication. At the very middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their first generation Nassau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the last a famous talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and essayists, besides Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and Walter Bagehot, a banker, and not a member of either University. Brimley has left us what is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in the time between the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the usual critic, and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or cavilled at as a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tennyson, and from the Coup d'État (which he saw) to Browning. But his distinction of the poetical art of Wordsworth and that of these other poets as "pure, ornate, and grotesque" will suffice to show his standpoint, which was a sort of middle place between the classical and the Romantic. Bagehot wrote well, and possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to be classed here are Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable author of Horæ Subsecivæ, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist, a novelist of some merit and an essayist of more, and author of A Course of English Literature which, though a little popular and desultory, is full of sense and stimulus.

Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75), a country gentleman of some means and of the usual education, who took to a mixed life of official and literary work, did some useful work in regard to Spanish-American history, but acquired most popularity by a series of dialogues, mostly occupied by ethical and æsthetic criticism, called Friends in Council. This contains plenty of knowledge of books, touches of wit and humour, a satisfactory standard of morals and manners, a certain effort at philosophy, but suffers from the limitations of its date. In different ways enough – for he was as quiet as the other was showy – Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English culture during the middle of the century – a stage in which the Briton was considerably more alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere in many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but had lost insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness.

Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during this period, – the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, – considerable mention has already been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical details must be looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr. Arnold was not very early a popular writer either as poet or prose-man, that his poetical exercises preceded by a good deal his prose, and that these latter were, if not determined, largely influenced by his appointment to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He began, however, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, to be much noticed, not merely as the deliverer of lectures, but as the contributor of essays of an exceedingly novel, piquant, and provocative kind; and in 1865 these, or some of them, were collected and published under the title of Essays in Criticism. These Essays– nine in number, besides a characteristic preface – dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with literary subjects, – "The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence of Academies," "The Guérins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus Aurelius," – but they extended the purport of the title of the first of them in the widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but he extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising intentions, as "Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking with ironical faithfulness, the British Philistine – a German term which he, though not the first to import it, made first popular – in literature, in newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. Foreign, and specially French, ways were sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, held up as examples for our improvement; and the want of "ideas," the want of "light," the want of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of sorrow and satire. All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its mannerism became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be assigned to any single original, but which is a sort of compound or eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes exactly, sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably arrested attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the principle formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the words —