“What I tell you three times is true,”

and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty.

The result is that he never wrote better.  A little of the dignity of his earlier manner—­when he simply followed that admirable older Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last—­is gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it.  Some—­indeed a good deal—­of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best.  There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in Bishop Kurd’s acute observation, that if your first object is to convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better.  And the description and characterisation are quite excellent.

Between A French Eton and the second collection of Oxford Lectures came, in 1865, the famous Essays in Criticism, the first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and illustration of the author’s critical attitude, the detailed manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English.  It consisted, in the first edition, of a Preface (afterwards somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be made ten by the addition of A Persian Passion-Play).  The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guerins, Heine, Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius.  I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold’s own belief as to the indifference of the English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was called for till four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth for nearly twenty.

Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the very slightest degree critical, it is one of the most fascinating (if sometimes also one of the most provoking) of books; and the fascination and provocation should surely have been felt even by others.  As always with the author, there is nothing easier than to pick holes in it:  in fact, on his own principles, one is simply bound to pick holes.  He evidently enjoyed himself very much in the Preface: but it may be doubted whether the severe Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his enjoyment.  He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt rather unwise Mr Wright (v. supra):  he tells the Guardian in a periphrasis that it is dull,