acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness." But "the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.” Little can be added to this, and certainly nothing can be subtracted from it. Next to it, the most interesting part of the essay is the free and candid estimate of Burns. This is the more welcome because, while he was writing the paper, in November 1880, he told his sister (Letters, vol. ii. p. 184) that Burns was "a beast with splendid gleams." What would Mr. Arnold have thought of the Philistine who described Catullus as a beast with splendid gleams? And yet Catullus, who was far grosser than Burns, is the poet whom, as the late Professor Sellar showed, Burns most resembles. In his beautiful address on Milton, delivered at St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, a few weeks before his death, Mr. Arnold said, with truth, force, and insight (page 66), "In our race are thousands of readers, presently there will be millions, who know not a word of Greek and Latin, and will never learn those languages. If this host of readers are ever to gain any sense of the power and charm of the great poets of antiquity, their way to gain it is not through translations of the ancients, but through the original poetry of Milton, who has the like power and charm, because he has the like great style." Only a born man of letters could have written that, But when Mr. Arnold quotes from Gray's friend, Dr. Warton, the words, "He never spoke out," and says that "in these four words is contained the whole history of Gray, both as a man and as

What Dr. Warton

a poet," he becomes fantastic. means, is that Gray was not communicative about the state of his own health. He was a copious letterwriter, and his letters are among the best in the language. If the amount of his poetry is comparatively small, it had a range wide enough to include the "Progress of Poesy," the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and the political satires. To Keats, Mr. Arnold became juster as he grew older, and in this his final estimate he couples him, not with Maurice de Guérin, but with Shakespeare. This reminds one of Lord Young's comment on the remark that Barnes, the Dorset poet, might be put on the same shelf with Burns. "It would have to be a long shelf," said the witty Judge. But it is true that "no one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness" (page 119). The essay on Wordsworth is so good, that to praise it is better than to criticise it, and to read it is better than either. But such a statement as that "the Excursion and the Prelude, his poems of greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth's best work" (page 135) requires a justification which Mr. Arnold does not give it. It would be difficult to find in any of Wordsworth's shorter pieces better verses than the lines on the Simplon Pass, or the passage beginning "Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold." While, however, I cannot help thinking that Mr. Arnold exaggerates the prosiness of Wordsworth's prosaic passages, and dwells too much upon that familiar theme, he more than compensates for any trifling blemishes by such a noble sentence as this: "His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance,

in the poem of Resolution and Independence; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur." Mr. Arnold is readier to do Byron justice than most Wordsworthians are. It was Tennyson that Wordsworth prevented him from appreciating, not Byron. Byron's poetry seems, so far as one can judge, to be out of date now. It is his letters rather than his poems which people read. But his "sincerity and strength," to use the phrase which Mr. Arnold quotes from Mr. Swinburne, must always be acknowledged.

The remaining essays in this volume deal with Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, with the earlier writings of Count Tolstoi, and with the Diary of Amiel. Mr. Arnold was profoundly disgusted with the details of Shelley's private life, with "Godwin's house of sordid horror," with Byron's "brutal selfishness," and so on. "What a set! what a world!" he exclaims naturally enough. To compare them with the Oriel Common Room shows perhaps a lack in the sense of proportion. They are more like the strange company who accompanied Candide on his rambles. But after Professor Dowden's strange apologetics, Mr. Arnold's rational morals and inbred sense of refinement are salutary and refreshing. To say of Shelley as a poet that he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," is impressive, and I suppose it means something. But it does not account for the "Skylark," or "When the Lamp is shattered," or the mighty "Ode to the West Wind." Mr. Arnold's analysis of Anna Karenina is appreciative enough, and he would have thoroughly enjoyed Resurrection if he had lived to read it. But his

recommendation that Count Tolstoi should leave religion and stick to literature, comes strangely from the author of Literature and Dogma. No living writer has inculcated the teaching of Christ with more eloquence than Count Tolstoi. Of Amiel, it is no doubt true that he shines more in literary criticism than in mystic speculation. He could hardly shine less. But what had Matthew Arnold to do with Amiel ?

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

So early as October 1882, Mr. Arnold, in an amusing letter to Mr. Morley, spoke of resignation. "I announced yesterday at the office my intention of retiring at Easter or Whitsuntide. Gladstone will never promote the author of Literature and Dogma if he can help it, and meanwhile my life is drawing to an end, and I have no wish to execute the Dance of Death in an elementary school" (Letters, ii. 207). He did not, however, actually resign till the 30th of April 1886, when he had been an Inspector for thirty-five years. Mr. Gladstone did not promote the author of Literature and Dogma. But he offered him a pension of two hundred and fifty pounds, "as a public recognition of service to the poetry and literature of England." After some quite unnecessary hesitation, Mr. Arnold accepted the offer. Few men, to say nothing of poetry and literature, ever served the public more faithfully for a remuneration which at no time equalled the salary of a police magistrate or a County Court judge. If he did not work so hard as some of his colleagues at the routine and drudgery of inspection, his reports are the most luminous, the most interesting, and the most suggestive that have ever been issued from the Education Department. A collection of these Reports