utions and ways generally,
was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of
light.

His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even
the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the
folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased
with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not
owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well
as polite. The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill.
"Numbers" dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must
ever be uppermost--or as nethermost not less important--in a republic;
and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of
that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always
affected. "Literature and Science," the middle discourse, attacked a
question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was
concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was
singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is
likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year,
perhaps many a century. "Emerson," the last, descended from
generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once
specially American and specially literary. It would have been hard
indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects
as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better
examples of each class than those actually taken.

It is not clear that quite such high praise can be given to the
execution, and the reason is plain: it was in the execution, not in
the composition and scheme, that the hard practical difficulties of
the task came in. Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as
he was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restraint, Mr Arnold
was both too much of an Englishman and too much of a genius not to be
ill to ride with the curb. And, save perhaps in "Literature and
Science" (which was not at first written for an American audience at
all), the pressure of the curb--I had almost said of the twitch--is
too often evident, or at least suggested. This especially applies to
the first, the longest, the most ambitious, and, as its author would
say, most "nobly serious" of the three. There are quite admirable
things in "Numbers"; and the descant on the worship of the great
goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly