Born in Lottery Hall, Southampton, he was educated at King's College School, London, and at Merton College, Oxford where he achieved a first class BA degree in Classical Mods, (1865), and a second class in literae humaniores (1867). He left Oxford in 1868 having failed to obtain a fellowship, and briefly became a master at the Manchester Grammar School before spending six years in Guernsey as senior classical master of Elizabeth College, where he began his literary career by submitting his first reviews to The Academy. From 1874 until he returned to London in 1876 he was headmaster of the Elgin Educational Institute, with a brief period in 1877 on the Manchester Guardian. For ten years he was actively engaged in journalism, becoming an important member of the staff of the Saturday Review. Some of the critical essays contributed to the literary journals were afterwards collected in his Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (2 vols., 1890-1895), Essays on French Novelists (1891), Miscellaneous Essays (1892), Corrected Impressions (1895). In 1895 he became professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, a position he held until 1915. He retired to 1A Royal Crescent, Bath, Somerset and died there in 1933