reat mission, and nobly
characterized; but if criticism be so defined, it is criticism of a
large mold.

The scope of the word conspicuously appears also in the phrase, which
became proverbial, declaring that literature is "a criticism of life."
In such an employment of terms, ordinary meanings evaporate: and it
becomes necessary to know the thought of the author rather than the
usage of men. Without granting the dictum, therefore, which would be far
from the purpose, is it not clear that by "critic" and "criticism"
Arnold intended to designate, or at least to convey, something peculiar
to his own conception,--not strictly related to literature at all, it
may be, but more closely tied to society in its general mental activity?
In other words, Arnold was a critic of civilization more than of books,
and aimed at illumination by means of ideas. With this goes his
manner,--that habitual air of telling you something which you did not
know before, and doing it for your good,--which stamps him as a preacher
born. Under the mask of the critic is the long English face of the
gospeler; that type whose persistent physiognomy was never absent from
the conventicle of English thought.

This evangelizing prepossession of Arnold's mind must be recognized in
order to understand alike his attitude of superiority, his stiffly
didactic method, and his success in attracting converts in whom the seed
proved barren. The first impression that his entire work makes is one of
limitation; so strict is this limitation, and it profits him so much,
that it seems the element in which he had his being. On a close survey,
the fewness of his ideas is most surprising, though the fact is somewhat
cloaked by the lucidity of his thought, its logical vigor, and the
manner of its presentation. He takes a text, either some formula of his
own or some adopted phrase that he has made his own, and from that he
starts out only to return to it again and again with ceaseless
iteration. In his illustrations, for example, when he has pilloried some
poor gentleman, otherwise unknown, for the astounded and amused
contemplation of the Anglican monocle, he cannot let him alone. So too
when, with the journalist's nack for nicknames, he divides all England
into three parts, he cannot forget the rhetorical exploit. He never lets
the points he has made fall into oblivion; and hence his work in
general, as a critic, is skeletonized to the memory in watchwords,
formulas, and n