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The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




PREFACE

This book of selections aims to furnish examples of Arnold's prose in
all the fields in which it characteristically employed itself except
that of religion. It has seemed better to omit all such material than to
attempt inclusion of a few extracts which could hardly give any adequate
notion of Arnold's work in this department. Something, however, of his
method in religious criticism can be discerned by a perusal of the
chapter on _Hebraism and Hellenism_, selected from _Culture and
Anarchy_. Most of Arnold's leading ideas are represented in this volume,
but the decision to use entire essays so far as feasible has naturally
precluded the possibility of gathering all the important utterances
together. The basis of division and grouping of the selections is made
sufficiently obvious by the headings. In the division of literary
criticism the endeavor has been to illustrate Arnold's cosmopolitanism
by essays of first-rate importance dealing with the four literatures
with which he was well acquainted. In the notes, conciseness with a
reasonable degree of thoroughness has been the principle followed.