ABSTRACT
George Saintsbury was known to say of an essay of which he only partially approved that it was "a string of more or less valuable apercus", and his own lectures had something of the same character. Saintsbury was very much at home, and although his own inclinations were all for liberty and against the purist and the doctrinaire, he did not fail to do justice to the masters of rhetorical theory. For the first few years after coming to Edinburgh Saintsbury lived at Murrayfield House, an old seventeenth-century mansion set in trees on the western outskirts of the city. He praised some of his work, distinguished between the good and the less good, and said a word in extenuation of his critical misdemeanours. Saintsbury had no reason to love Collins, who had attacked him savagely some years before, but nothing could have been more admirable than the dispassionate way in which he received Collins's name.
