r, they can do no
harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of
good.

For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his
manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right. It was true
that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in
a few of her great men of letters--Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison,
Johnson--had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of
the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she
had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on
the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy,
in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and
had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true
that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us
in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method,
_style_ of criticism. And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold,
who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with
a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough
"stock-taking" of our own literature in the light and with the help of
others.

Let _palma_--let the _maxima palma_--of criticism be given
to him in that he first fought for the creed of this literary
orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of
will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies)
the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence
may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of
the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point
out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic
side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and
original fashion a common tendency than definitely lead an otherwise
sluggish multitude to the promised land. But no investigation has
deprived, or is at all likely to deprive, the _Essays in
Criticism_ of their place as an epoch-making book, as the manual of
a new and often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, critical
movement in England.

Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill followed up in
the second, the almost equally famous (perhaps the _more_ famous)
_Influence of Academies_. Of course here also, here as always,
you may make reservations. It is a very strong argument, an argument
stronger than any of Mr Arnold's, that the institutions of a nati