ing the evolution of his thought and style, than _A French
Eton_ (1864). Although he was advancing in middle-life when it was
written, and had evidently, as the phrase goes, "made up his bundle of
prejudices," he had not written, or at least published, very much
prose; his mannerisms had not hardened. And above all, he was but just
catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of
Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of
some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own
disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his
subject, which was not always the case later; and though his
assumptions--the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the
superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure
of the Anglican Church, and so forth--are already as questionable as
they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain
[Greek: epieikeia], which was perhaps not always so obvious when he
came to preach that quality itself later. About the gist of the book
it is not necessary to say very much. He practically admits the
obvious and unanswerable objection that his _French Eton_,
whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at Soreze, is very
French, but not at all Eton. He does not really attempt to meet the
more dangerous though less epigrammatic demurrer, "Do you _want_
schools to turn out products of this sort?" It was only indirectly his
fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of his arguments,
that a process of making ducks and drakes of English grammar-school
endowments began, and was (chiefly in the "seventies") carried on,
with results, the mischievousness of which apparently has been known
and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly kept to
themselves.

All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to
be venerable. But the book as a book, and also as a document in the
case, has, and always will have, interest. "The cries and catchwords"
which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most
besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have
made a lodgment. The revolt--in itself quite justifiable, and even
admirable--from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class
thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste
and ethics and philosophy,--from everything, in short, of which
Macaulay was the equally accepted a