Pattison was at this time a Puseyite, and greatly under the influence of John Henry Newman, for whom he worked, helping in the translation of Thomas Aquinas's Catena Aurea,[2] and writing in the British Critic and Christian Remembrancer.

He was ordained a priest in 1843, and in the same year became tutor of Lincoln College, where he rapidly made a reputation as a clear and stimulating teacher and as a sympathetic friend of youth.

In 1855, he resigned the tutorship, travelled to Germany to investigate Continental systems of education, and began his researches into the lives of the philologist Isaac Casaubon and the historian Joseph Justus Scaliger, which occupied the remainder of his life.

The late nineteenth-century English author George Gissing wrote in his diary in 1891 that he "was astonished to find [the biography of Casaubon] on the shelves" of a circulating library in the small north Somerset seaside resort of Clevedon.

His Sermons and Collected Essays, edited by Henry Nettleship, were published posthumously (1889), as well as the Memoirs (1885), an autobiography deeply tinged with melancholy and bitterness.

For many he remains the stereotypical Mr DryasDust and/or the original of George Eliot's Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch; and his best-known twentieth-century commentator and critic, John Sparrow, did little to alter that picture.