stake, of a kind which lesser critics have often
repeated. Perhaps George III. _had_ nothing to do with literature; but
his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of
a pure English _regime_, have done something to produce, numerous
appearances of the Romantic revival--Percy's _Reliques_, Hurd's
_Essays_, Macpherson's _Ossian_, _The Castle of Otranto_, and others.
The deaths of Pope and Swift have no such synchronism. They mark,
indeed, the disappearance of the strongest men of the old school, but
not the appearance of even the weakest and most infantine of the new.
Still this, though interesting in itself, is a trifle, and the whole
paper, short as it is, is a sort of _Nunc Dimittis_ in a new sense, a
hymn of praise for dismissal, not from but to work--to the singer's
proper function, from which he has been long divorced.

"Falkland," which follows, is less purely literary, but yet closely
connected with literature. One thinks with some ruth of its original
text, which was a discourse on Falkland by that modern Lucius Gary,
the late Lord Carnarvon--the most curious and pathetic instance of a
man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact
prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of
temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been
indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did
in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to
it in the _Letters_; but I can remember how strongly it was felt
at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness
and Light, of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper, was most
natural, and its sources most obvious. It would be cruel, and is quite
unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance
at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct
weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by
that--it may be lovable, it may be even estimable--incapacity to
think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the
conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us
not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little
repulsive to any of us. He could not have had a better subject; nor
can Falkland ever hope for a _vates_ better consecrated, by
taste, temper, and ability, to sing his praises.

Then we are back again in pure literature, with the tw