to have known, and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing the mere and sheer pass-man—­the man whose knowledge was represented by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats—­was, if not actually in a minority,—­in some colleges at least he was that—­at any rate in a pretty bare majority.  With his love of interference and control, he might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university permitted every one to stick to the minimum.  But as a matter of fact he suggests that it provided no alternative, no maximum or majus at all.

By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the professorship, Mr Arnold’s position was, for good and for evil, mostly fixed.  When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no means a very young man and already the author of much remarkable work, yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a small official circle in London.  He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation.  By far the most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated.  He had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer.  He had become something of a figure in society.  But, above all, he had proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered kind of literary criticism.  And this had already threatened incursions into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of letters.  Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold’s presentation of himself as, if not exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought, public morality, religion itself.  These pretensions, if urged in a less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not universally tolerated as it was:  but the gifts and graces of the critic made them—­so far—­inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some even of these.

And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far wider and more remarkable innovations.  This was the time, at home, of the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian.  This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold’s own ideas as to the respective greatness