It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable aesthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific.  When he talks about the mysterious “grand style,” and tells us that Milton can never be affected, we murmur, “De gustibus!” and add mentally, “Though Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after Comus at least, never anything else!” When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) “English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany,” we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen—­Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two, great writers of the second class:  and we say, “Either your ’living intellectual instrument’ is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact.”  Many—­very many—­similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold’s championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own stables for our inspection.

But it matters not.  For all this, and very much more than all this, which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since.  It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold’s work.  He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness:  only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed.  But he was the earliest of such voices, the clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what followed was directly due to him.

The non-literary events of his life during this period were sufficiently varied if not very momentous.  We have mentioned the domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858, perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford.  In the late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on elementary education.  “Foreign life,” he says, with that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, “is still to me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree.”  And he was duly “presented” at home, in order that he might be presentable abroad.  But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.