lar, he took their minds to the Continent
and made them feel that they were becoming cosmopolitan by knowing
Joubert; or at home, he rallied them in opposition to the dullness of
the period, to "barbarism" or other objectionable traits in the social
classes: and he volleyed contempt upon the common multitudinous foe in
general, and from time to time cheered them with some delectable
examples of single combat. It cannot be concealed that there was much
malicious pleasure in it all. He was not indisposed to high-bred
cruelty. Like Lamb, he "loved a fool," but it was in a mortar; and
pleasant it was to see the spectacle when he really took a man in hand
for the chastisement of irony. It is thus that "the _seraphim
illuminati_ sneer." And in all his controversial writing there was a
brilliancy and unsparingness that will appeal to the deepest instincts
of a fighting race, willy-nilly; and as one had only to read the words
to feel himself among the children of light, so that our withers were
unwrung, there was high enjoyment.

This liveliness of intellectual conflict, together with the sense of
ideas, was a boon to youth especially; and the academic air in which the
thought and style always moved, with scholarly self-possession and
assurance, with the dogmatism of "enlightenment" in all ages and among
all sects, with serenity and security unassailable, from within at
least--this academic "clearness and purity without shadow or stain" had
an overpowering charm to the college-bred and cultivated, who found the
rare combination of information, taste, and aggressiveness in one of
their own ilk. Above all, there was the play of intelligence on every
page; there was an application of ideas to life in many regions of the
world's interests; there was contact with a mind keen, clear, and firm,
armed for controversy or persuasion equally, and filled with eager
belief in itself, its ways, and its will.

To meet such personality in a book was a bracing experience; and for
many these essays were an awakening of the mind itself. We may go to
others for the greater part of what criticism can give,--for definite
and fundamental principles, for adequate characterization, for the
intuition and the revelation, the penetrant flash of thought and phrase:
but Arnold generates and supports a temper of mind in which the work of
these writers best thrives even in its own sphere; and through him this
temper becomes less individual than social, encom