nd so for a time he seems to have
grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his
truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him
away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be
said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in
vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most
popular, volume.

It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book
that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be
found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment.
For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact
with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we
have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got
upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in
Dissent--or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His
Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average
middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I
have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average
Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold
attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only
of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the
extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I
cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of
Dissent, but I can believe it.

Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and
was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between
1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond
of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent
religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average
manager of a "British" school as the average representative of the
British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet
this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade between 1867 and
1877.

The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last
of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and
insinuating one. _Culture its Enemies_, which was the origin and
first part, so to say, of _Culture and Anarchy_, carried the
campaign begun in the _Essays in Criticism_ forward; but only in
the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of
the