btain employment which might be, if not both more
profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he
tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of
the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think
that his extremely strong--in fact partisan--opinions, both on
education and on the Church of England, were a most serious
disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an
honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that
sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he
got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term
of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr
Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but
it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I
daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of
"send-off" in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at
which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of
his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the
_Study of Celtic Literature_ in prose and the _New Poems_ in verse,
with _Schools and Universities on the Continent_ to follow next year.
Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.

_On the Study of Celtic Literature_ is the first book of his to
which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather
serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these
objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish
to say that it is--or was--even the superior of the _Homer_ in
comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the
best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and
familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new
realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this
expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now
perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older
acquisitions.

So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better.
It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense
which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we
cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set
an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely
followed, of speaking without sufficien