which has an echo of Theocritus, with perfect couplets,

as, for instance

"And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,

And the night waxes, and the shadows fall.”

Or, in the concluding portion of the poem, which is blank verse

“While the deep-burnish'd foliage overhead

Splinter'd the silver arrows of the moon,"

where the Virgilian note will strike every scholar. "Stand forth, true poet that you are," should have been the discerning critic's invitation to the anonymous author of "Mycerinus." But it was not.

The contents of this little merit, as in other respects.

hara" is almost prosaic.

volume varied much in "The Sick King in BokMr. Arnold, who hated

Macaulay, sneered at the Lays of Ancient Rome, of which his father was so fond, and selected for especial ridicule the lines from "Horatius

"To every man upon this earth

Death cometh, soon or late."

There is not much to be said for them, I admit. But if a poet is to be judged by his worst things, and not by his best, there are lines from "The Sick King in Bokhara" which may be set beside Macaulay's

"Look, this is but one single place,

Though it be great: all the earth round,

If a man bear to have it so,

Things which might vex him shall be found."

If this is poetry, what is prose? Although I may be rash, I give my opinion for what it is worth, and it is that neither the story of this invalid monarch nor

Mr. Arnold's treatment of it made the poem meet for republication, or for anything but repentance.

"A Modern Sappho," in the style of Moore's Irish Melodies, is chiefly memorable for the fine couplet —

"But deeper their voice grows, and nobler their bearing, Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died."

"The New Sirens" is an especial favourite with Mr. Swinburne, and was republished a quarter of a century afterwards at his request. No poet has been more generously appreciative of his contemporaries, whether older or younger than himself, than Mr. Swinburne ; and in this case, at all events, his insight was sure. "The New Sirens" is not unlike Mrs. Browning's "Wine of Cyprus," but it is less unequal, more musical, more chastened and subdued. The poem "To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore" contains one most beautiful quatrain

"Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labour's dull, Lethæan spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse

Of the soil'd glory, and the trailing wing."

A critic of the Johnsonian school, however, might observe that it is the unsoiled glory and the soaring wing which the lost angels would remember. Remembrance is of the past, not the present. In its delicate loveliness "The Forsaken Merman" ranks high among Mr. Arnold's poems. It is a story of a Sea-king, married to a mortal maiden, who forsook him and her children under the impulse of a Christian conviction that she must return and pray for her soul. Her name was Mr. Arnold's favourite name, Margaret.

The Merman saw her through the window as she sat in church with her eyes on "the holy book." But she came back to him no more. "Alone dwell for ever the kings of the sea." "Alone the sun rises, and alone Spring the great streams," says Mr. Arnold in another poem.

Perhaps the most exquisite, and certainly the most characteristic, poem in the volume is "Resignation." One cannot doubt that into these lines of chiselled and classic perfection Matthew Arnold put his mind and soul. Everything in the book was republished, except "The Hayswater Boat," which hardly deserved exclusion. But "Resignation" is part of Mr. Arnold's life and character. We cannot think of him without it. At the very beginning we read of "the Goth, bound Rome-wards," and we remember Alaric. The "mistwreath'd flock" and the "wet flower'd grass" recall the Sicilian poet he loved so well. But Theocritus is not the poet described here.

"Lean'd on his gate, he gazes: tears
Are in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years;
Before him he sees Life unroll,

A placid and continuous whole;
That general Life, which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace;
That Life, whose dumb wish is not miss'd

If birth proceeds, if things subsist;

The Life of plants, and stones, and rain;

The Life he craves; if not in vain

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul."

If Mr. Arnold was, as he must have been, sometimes sad, he never allowed the shadow of his gloom to rest

upon others. Peace of mind and lucidity of soul he acquired, if he did not always possess them. Probably they were congenital, like the healthier and sounder parts of his father's Puritanism. A fastidious critic, Tennyson for instance, might have objected to the juxtaposition of "gate" and "gazes," or of "wish" and "miss'd." But apart from small blemishes of this kind, the lines are as symmetrical in form as they are full of calm and yet intense feeling. They sum up Mr. Arnold's imaginative philosophy. They are the man. Equal to them, perhaps in expression beyond them, are those which almost immediately follow:

"Deeply the Poet feels; but he

Breathes, when he will, immortal air,
Where Orpheus and where Homer are.
In the day's life, whose iron round
Hems us all in, he is not bound.
He escapes thence, but we abide.
Not deep the Poet sees, but wide."

Shakespeare was not the only poet who saw deep as well as wide. It would be hard to fathom the thought of Wordsworth in his sublimest moments, and Orpheus was a mystic, if Homer was not. Sophocles was perhaps in Mr. Arnold's mind-"singer of sweet Colonos, and its child." He never surpassed the best things in "Resignation," and for life's fitful fever the English language, rich as it is in all manner of refreshing influences, contains no more healing balm.

CHAPTER IV

WORK AND POETRY

ON the 14th of April 1851, Matthew Arnold was appointed by Lord Lansdowne to an Inspectorship of Schools, which he retained for five-and-thirty years. His friend, Mr. Ralph Lingen, afterwards Lord Lingen, who had been his tutor at Oxford, was influential in procuring him this post, though it came to him naturally enough, being in the gift of his official chief. Mr. Lingen was Secretary to the Education Department, then in its infancy, and he wished to attract young men of promise from the Universities. He never made a better choice than Matthew Arnold. It is no disparagement of the many able men who have been Inspectors of Schools to say that not one of them excelled Mr. Arnold in fitness for the post. He was very fond of children, he knew by instinct how to deal with them, and at the other end of the scale he had a real scientific knowledge of what education in its highest sense ought to be. With lofty ideas of that kind, however, he had for some years little enough to do. Compulsory education was still the dream of advanced theorists. The parliamentary grants were only five years old, and a school which chose, like Archdeacon Denison's, to dispense with a grant, could dispense with inspection too. But the