lay these gifts, but that the
mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been
thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even
in the observations of lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course,
and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such
Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. Not one
in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the
information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before
him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author;
not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is
part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the
better understanding of the particular book. Of course, if an
Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and
reading--if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth--it had better
not be there. But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad
thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification
of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the
Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be
neglected by those who don't; while in the rarer and better cases it
will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value
as a _point de repere_ which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be
good relatively and good in itself,--a contribution at once to the
literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.

Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his
"intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given.
In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon
likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that
from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits
of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive
Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry
for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had
any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the
ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous
divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who
have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the
point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent.
Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the
p