mumble to us his story how the battle of Waterloo
was won in the playing-fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been
prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to
inadequate mental training--to want of application, knowledge,
intelligence, lucidity. The Eton playing-fields have their great charm,
notwithstanding; but with what felicity of unconscious satire does that
stroke of 'the Master of the Beagles' hit off our whole system of
provision of public secondary schools; a provision for the fortunate and
privileged few, but for the many, for the nation, ridiculously
impossible!" This is his last word on the Public Schools, as that title
is conventionally understood. He had a much fuller and more searching
criticism for the schools in which the great Middle Class is educated.

It may perhaps be fairly questioned whether great humourists much enjoy
the humour of other people. If we apply this question to Arnold's case
and seek to answer it by his published works, we shall probably answer
in the negative. From first to last, he takes little heed of humorous
writers or humorous books. Even in those great authors who are masters
of all moods, it is the grave, rather than the humorous mood, which he
chooses for commendation. He was a devout Shakespearian, but it is
difficult to recall an allusion to Shakespeare's humour, except in the
rather oblique form of Dogberry as the type of German officialdom. Swift
he quoted with admirable effect, but it was Swift the reviler, not Swift
the jester. He says that he made a "wooden Oxford audience laugh aloud
with two pages of Heine's wit"; but the lecture, as we read it, shows
more of mordant sarcasm than of the material for laughter. Scott he knew
by heart, and Carlyle he honestly revered; but he admired the one for
his romance and the other for his philosophy. Thackeray, sad to
remember, he "did not think a great writer," and so Thackeray's humour
disappears, with his pathos and his satire, into the limbo of
common-place. The imaginary spokesman of the _Daily Telegraph_ in
_Friendship's Garland_ reckons as "the great masters of human thought
and human literature, Plato, Shakespeare, Confucius, and Charles
Dickens"; and there, to judge from the great bulk of his writing,
Arnold's acquaintance with Dickens begins and ends.

But it was one of his amiable traits that, whenever he read a book which
pleased him, he immediately began to share his pleasure with his
fri