study of
the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly and convincingly
championed; and the piece ends with its other famous sentence about
"the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry" and their "eternal enemy,
Caprice."

As Mr Arnold's critical position will be considered as a whole later,
it would be waste of time to say very much more of this first
manifesto of his. It need only be observed that he might have been
already, as he often was later, besought to give some little notion of
what "the _grand style_" was; that, true and sound as is much of
the Preface, it is not a little exposed to the damaging retort, "Yes:
this is _your_ doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; but so
does ours seem fair to us." Moreover, the "all-depends-on-the-subject"
doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in
what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while
in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required
height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic
pleasure, that which is always present in favour of that which is
sometimes absent?

We know from the _Letters_--and we should have been able to
divine without them--that _Sohrab and Rustum_, the first in
order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the
poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written
in direct exemplification of the theories of the _Preface_. The
theme is old, and though not "classical" in place, is thoroughly so in
its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son,
who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son,
of the final triumph of the father, of the _anagnorisis_, with
the resignation of the vanquished and the victor's despair. The medium
is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic stamp, very
carefully written, and rising at the end into a really magnificent
strain, with the famous picture of "the majestic river" Oxus floating
on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars

"Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."

Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask whether this, like
the _Mycerinus_ close, that of _Empedocles_, and others,
especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not
more of a purple tail-patch, a "tag," a "curtain," than of a
legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold,
following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if no