is not allowed the same chance.  As it is, not a little of his work has never been reprinted at all; some of the rest is difficult of access, and what there is exists in numerous volumes of different forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome.  And if his prose work seems to me inferior to his poetical in absolute and perennial value, its value is still very great.  Not so much English prose has that character of grace, of elegance, which has been vindicated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such consummate examples of it.  Academic urbanity is not so universal a feature of our race—­the constant endeavour at least to “live by the law of the peras,” to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration, is scarcely so endemic.  Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole, yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations and the individuals that forget or neglect him.

Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which such neglect must bring.  Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry; but he will yield delight more surely.  His manner, except in his rare “thorn-crackling” moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a hardly to be exaggerated charm.

But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold’s strongest title to eminence consists.  There have certainly been greater poets in English:  I think there have been greater critics.  But as poet and critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment placed beside him:  the fate of the false Florimel must await all others who dare that adventure.  And if he must yield—­yield by a long way—­to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he has his revenges.  Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever.  Here was a man who could not only criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and preaching fit together.  Here was a critic against whom the foolish charge, “You can break, but you cannot make,” was confessedly impossible—­a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule of the uttermost art.  In him the corruption of the poet had not been the