The fact is that we are a serious people.  The Middle Class, which he singled out for attack, is quite pre-eminently serious.  Philosophers and critics—­the Spectator and the Edinburgh—­had made seriousness a religion.  Editors, leader-writers, reviewers, the Press generally, were steeped to their lips in seriousness.  They could not understand, and were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful, unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity in other people.  “Our social Polyphemes,” as Lord Beaconsfield said, “have only one eye”; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold’s genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself described it—­

    Radiant, adorn’d outside; a hidden ground
    Of thought and of austerity within.

In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette of July 21, 1866, he first introduced his friend Arminius,[26] Baron Von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, the cultivated and enquiring Prussian who had come to England to study our Politics, Education, Local Government, and social life.  A series of similar letters followed at irregular intervals during the years 1866, 1867, 1869, and 1870.  And Arminius’ drastic method of questioning and arguing became the idoneous vehicle for Arnold’s criticisms on such topics as our Foreign Policy, Compulsory Education, the Press, and the Deceased Wife’s Sister.  The letters were eventually collected in that little-read but most fascinating book, Friendship’s Garland, which was published in 1871.[27] But before Friendship’s Garland came out, Arnold, who had tested his powers in social criticism by these fugitive pieces, addressed himself to a more serious and solid effort in the same field.  The essays which eventually formed the book called Culture and Anarchy began to appear in the Cornhill Magazine for July, 1867, and were continued in 1868.  The book was published in 1869.  We saw at the outset that he himself said of his Discourses in America that they, of all his prose-writings, were the writings by which he would most wish to be remembered.  Many of his disciples would say that Essays in Criticism was his most important work in prose.  Some people would give the crown to Literature and Dogma.  “It has been more in demand,” the author told us in 1883, “than any other of my prose-writings.”  Respect is due to what a great master thought of his own work, and to what his best-qualified disciples think of it.  But after all we uphold the right of private judgment, and the present writer is strongly of opinion that Culture and Anarchy is Arnold’s most important work in prose.  It was, to borrow a phrase used by Mr. Gladstone in another connexion, not a book, but an event.  We must consider it in its proper setting of time and circumstance.