hat had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon
the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above
Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison;
and he praises 'two articles in _Temple Bar_ (1869), one on Tennyson,
the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book
that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author
the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both
Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its
emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to
lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his
interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations
occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem
of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to
things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with
the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral
creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox
religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are
pretending to supersede them.

'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life
allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
nature.'

No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of
his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary
questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic
leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as
in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat
ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite
epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad
Church _among the clergy_ may be said to have almost perished with
Stanley.'

But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a
fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written
hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro
upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not
the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did i