the individual taste of the competent. I should say
myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold
ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent
passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound
that memorises it. And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at
times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle
period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. But he did not quite keep
his friend's high level of distinction and _tenue_. It was almost
impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod--I do not mean in the sense of
the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in
one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did,
contented himself with correct but ordinary writing. If his defect was
mannerism, his quality was certain manner.

The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and the most doubtful
of his mannerisms was, of course, the famous iteration, which was
probably at first natural, but which, as we see from the
_Letters_, he afterwards deliberately fostered and accentuated,
in order, as he thought, the better to get his new ideas into the
heads of what the type-writer sometimes calls the "Br_u_tish"
public. That it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument,
and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will be even more
teased by it than we are, because to him the ideas it enforces will
be, and will have been ever since he can remember, obvious and
common-place enough. But when this and some other peccadillos (on
which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the
composition-books aforesaid) were absent or even moderately present,
sometimes even in spite of their intrusion, Mr Arnold's style was of a
curiously fascinating character. I have often thought that, in the
good sense of that unlucky word "genteel," this style deserves it far
more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of Temple; while in its
different and nineteenth-century way, it is as much a model of the
"middle" style, neither very plain nor very ornate, but "elegant," as
Addison's own. Yet it is observable that all the three writers just
mentioned keep their place, except with deliberate students of the
subject, rather by courtesy or prescription than by actual conviction
and relish on the part of readers: and it is possible that something
of the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold's case also, when his claims
come to be