hird party,
however,--himself,--the effect was a little disastrous. The reception
which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him not so much
to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism as to embark on a
wide and far-ranging enterprise of general censure, which narrowed
itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to establish undogmatic on the ruins
of dogmatic Christianity. It would be very improper to discuss such an
undertaking on the merits here; or to criticise narrowly the series of
singular treatises which absorbed (with exceptions, no doubt, such as
the quaint sally of _Friendship's Garland_ on the occasion of the
Franco-German War) Mr. Arnold's energies for some fifteen or sixteen
years. The titles--_Culture and Anarchy_, _God and the Bible_, _St. Paul
and Protestantism_, _Literature and Dogma_, etc.--are well known. Of the
contents it is enough to say that, apart from the popular audacity of
their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters
confidently attacking thorny questions without any apparatus of special
knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy
of their author. There are many brilliant passages in these books as
writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic;
but the real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they
undergo the very curse, of speaking without qualification and without
true culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself so freely pronounced.

Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways; and in his
last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing better of the kind
(individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been written than his
introductions to selected lives from Johnson's _Poets_, to Byron, to
Shelley (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to Wordsworth
(incomparably the best). He aided others; and a collection of his purely
or mainly literary work is still eagerly expected. Even this would be
extremely unequal and open to exception here and there. But it would
contain some of the very best things to be found in any English critic.
And this after all, if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest
things that can be said of a critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly
the influence of Mr. Arnold did not make for good entirely. He
discouraged--without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning
quite the contrary--seriousness, thoroughness, scholarship in critici