Excerpt from Some Theological Works

What a portrait Holland might have drawn of himself, if only himself might have been someone else! Holland by Holland: brilliancy by brilliancy: sympathy and imagination in sitter and painter! As it was, it is the very last thing that he would ever have done. I never knew a humbler man. Words of compliment or praise to himself seemed to drop off him: he whisked them away with a sort of mixture of dislike and embarrassment. But he had no difficulty (as his Studies have shown) in the praise of others, and in his portraits of them he revealed much of what was most characteristic of himself: the flashing insight, the illuminating imagination, the eager sympathy with every shape of goodness and truth, with every bloom of nature or of grace. There are books (one is not far to seek just now) which paint with vinegar, and seek their interest in irony over the defects of the good and great. Holland painted with the oil of charity, and when we criticized it was that he made his portraits seem often finer than the originals. But there was no fulsomeness in it. Such a word would be ridiculous and intolerable in connexion with him.

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