ardly any
meaning, for all but a small circle of experts. His field is
illimitable; his expatiation in it is practically untrammelled. It is
open to all; full of flowers and fruits that all can enjoy; and it
only depends on his own choice and his own literary and intellectual
powers whether his prelections shall take actual rank as literature
with the very best of that other literature, with the whole of which,
by custom, as an extension from poetry, he is at liberty to deal. In
the first century of the chair the custom of delivering these
Prelections in Latin had been a slight hamper--indeed to this day it
prevents the admirable work of Keble from being known as it should be
known. But this was now removed, and Mr Arnold, whose reputation (it
could hardly be called fame as yet) was already great with the knowing
ones, had not merely Oxford but the English reading world as audience.

And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the importance of
which he himself, in this very position, was not the least
contributor. Although the greatest writers of the second period of the
century--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray--had, in all cases but
the last, a long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully
fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which they
belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was
beginning to give place to another. Within a few years--in most cases
within a few months--of Mr Arnold's installation, _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_ heralded fresh
forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; _The Origin of
Species_ and _Essays and Reviews_ announced changed attitudes
of thought; the death of Macaulay removed the last writer who, modern
as he was in some ways, and popular, united popularity with a
distinctly eighteenth-century tone and tradition; the death of Leigh
Hunt removed the last save Landor (always and in all things an
outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first third of the
century; _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ started a new kind of
novel.

The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to
lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most
important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the
most thorough reformation of staff, _morale_,[3] and tactics. The
English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is
curiously and to this day