ht and masterly touch!

Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile
sense inferior, is the "Joubert." It has been the fashion with some to
join this essay to the Guerin pieces as an instance of some
incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability
to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree
with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a
_pensee_-writer. He is _rococo_ beside La Bruyere, dilettante beside
La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if
you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and
amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always
or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were
even greater for Mr Arnold's general purpose.

That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected
Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which
most commended themselves to itself--an exquisite _justesse_, an
alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a
consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of
the word. Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a
temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as
strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected
with that--the temperament of equity, of _epieikeia_, of freedom
from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the
things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment
proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to
the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one
of the greatest literary excellences of the _Essays in Criticism_
that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other
and to the whole--that they are not a bundle but an organism; a
university, not a mob.

The subjects of the two last essays, _Spinoza_ and _Marcus
Aurelius_, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem
oddly chosen. For although the conception of literature illustrated in
the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits--nay,
insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold--considerations of
subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is
throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the
interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both
cases, is wholl