rious--its seriousness, indeed,
is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does
not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as
well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to
it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of
orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to
plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human
nature on the other, where no doubt his "not guilty" would be equally
emphatic.

The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the
next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the
series--its zenith at once and its nadir--_Literature and Dogma_.
A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form;
indeed, the contents of _St Paul and Protestantism_ itself must
have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part
of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of
_Literature and Dogma_. Much of it must have been written amid
the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was
athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i'
the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of
_Friendship's Garland_. _St Paul and Protestantism_ had had
two editions in the same year (_Culture and Anarchy_, a far
better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of
things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and
partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had
caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book,
appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through
three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years
later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also
that it is quite his worst.

That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there--in taste so bad
that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the
book, to which accordingly we need here only allude--can be denied by
nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or
other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and
sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides
the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having
excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to
deal very briefly with this side of the