at a man had done anything
different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid
Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct
is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity
to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise,
would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I
had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at this moment I should have
arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems--the man
who, far later, wrote the magnificent _Westminster Abbey_ on such a
subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in
prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's
or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the
_Heine_ and the _Joubert_ earlier, of the _Wordsworth_ and the _Byron_
later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life
upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year
of these,--there are more than enough subjects in the various
literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such
extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his
range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I
should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at
Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But _Dis
aliter visum_: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself
as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did
not interfere.

We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious
idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means
merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have
thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His
tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the
cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette
which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute
mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the
"leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great
changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant
the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought--and there
was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking--that
intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were
coming or come upon the world. A