’In his tour to Switzerland Mr. Fox gave me two days of free and private society.  He seemed to feel and even to envy the happiness of my situation, while I admired the powers of a superior man as they are blended in his character with the softness and simplicity of a child. Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempted from the taint of malevolence, vanity, and falsehood.’

OUR GREAT MIDDLE CLASS

The republication of Mr. Arnold’s Friendship’s Garland after an interval of twenty-seven years may well set us all a-thinking.  Here it is, in startling facsimile—­the white covers, destined too soon to become black, the gilt device, the familiar motto.  As we gazed upon it, we found ourselves exclaiming, so vividly did it recall the past: 

          ‘It is we, it is we, who have changed.’

Friendship’s Garland was a very good joke seven-and-twenty years ago, and though some of its once luminous paint has been rubbed off, and a few of its jests have ceased to effervesce, it is a good joke still.  Mr. Bottle’s mind, qua mind; the rowdy Philistine Adolescens Leo, Esq.; Dr. Russell, of the Times, mounting his war-horse; the tale of how Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall got their degrees at Oxford; and many another ironic thrust which made the reader laugh ‘while the hair was yet brown on his head,’ may well make him laugh still, ’though his scalp is almost hairless, and his figure’s grown convex.’  Since 1871 we have learnt the answer to the sombre lesson, ‘What is it to grow old?’ But, thank God! we can laugh even yet.

The humour and high spirits of Friendship’s Garland were, however, but the gilding of a pill, the artificial sweetening of a nauseous draught.  In reality, and joking apart, the book is an indictment at the bar of Geist of the English people as represented by its middle class and by its full-voiced organ, the daily press.  Mr. Arnold invented Arminius to be the mouthpiece of this indictment, the traducer of our ‘imperial race,’ because such blasphemies could not artistically have been attributed to one of the number.  He made Arminius a Prussian because in those far-off days Prussia stood for Von Humboldt and education and culture, and all the things Sir Thomas Bazley and Mr. Miall were supposed to be without.  Around the central figure of Arminius the essentially playful fancy of Mr. Arnold grouped other figures, including his own.  What an old equity draughtsman would call ‘the charging parts’ of the book consist in the allegations that the Government of England had been taken out of the hands of an aristocracy grown barren of ideas and stupid beyond words, and entrusted to a middle class without noble traditions, wretchedly educated, full of Ungeist, with a passion for clap-trap, only wanting to be left alone to push trade and make money; so ignorant as to believe that feudalism can be abated without any heroic Stein,