d in 1865 these,
or some of them, were collected and published under the title of _Essays
in Criticism_. These _Essays_--nine in number, besides a characteristic
preface--dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with
literary subjects,--"The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence
of Academies," "The Guerins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and
Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus
Aurelius,"--but they extended the purport of the title of the first of
them in the widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but
he extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely
than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as
dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It
might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming
attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising intentions,
as "Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking with ironical
faithfulness, the British Philistine--a German term which he, though not
the first to import it, made first popular--in literature, in
newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. Foreign, and
specially French, ways were sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely,
held up as examples for our improvement; and the want of "ideas," the
want of "light," the want of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of
sorrow and satire. All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its
mannerism became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be
assigned to any single original, but which is a sort of compound or
eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at
times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to
Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these
elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes exactly,
sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably arrested
attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the principle
formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the words--

What I tell you three times is true.

But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging
scatter of sometimes rather haphazard arrows, there was a solid literary
value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier in this
chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat gone off in
England during the