or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer guess-work of the Biblical critics.  But it is possible to sympathise with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to be united in the Oxford schools.  Together they made a discipline, inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of Literae Humaniores, the best intellectual training in the world.  When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once thin and vague.

But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis; for, but a page or two afterwards, this disregard of history leads Mr Arnold into a very odd blunder.  His French friend, M. Fontanes, had thought of writing about Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him.  “Godwin,” he says, “est interessant, mais il n’est pas une source; des courants actuels qui nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui.”  Godwin is the high priest of Anarchism; he is our first Socialist philosopher, he advocated no marriage, woman’s rights, the abolition of religion.  And dans nos courants actuels rien ne vient de lui! This was early in 1876, and later in the same year we have from him the singular judgment that George Sand, just dead, was “the greatest spirit in our European world from the time that Goethe departed.”  The chronicle may be appropriately closed for the time by mentioning that in the spring of 1877 Mr Arnold was approached with a view to his standing once more for the Poetry Chair, and declined.  The invitation, however, was a sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, and in effect, though doubtless not in intention, he had already obeyed it.  “A French Critic on Milton,” published in January 1877, is the first literary article of any importance that his bibliography records for the whole decade which we have surveyed in this chapter.

Note.—­It is particularly unlucky that the Prose Passages, which the author selected from his works and published in 1879, did not appear later.  It is almost sufficient to say that less than one-fourth of their contents is devoted to literature, all the rest to the “Dead Sea fruit.”  I have therefore said nothing about the book in the text.  It is, however, a useful though incomplete and one-sided chrestomathy of Mr Arnold’s style from the formal point of view, illustrating both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious ordonnance of his paragraphs in building up thought and statement.

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