done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian.
This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised
power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring
about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the
respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of
another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently
impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so
forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them--indeed a
series of blasts from _Chartism_ to the _Latter-day
Pamphlets_--had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very
different tones from Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest
champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa
and household suffrage gave the final summons, if not the final shake.
Mr Arnold had done his best to co-operate; but his object, to do him
justice, was to be rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an
over-thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He set about, in
all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish and begin the
re-edification; unluckily, in but too many cases, with dubious
judgment, and by straying into quarters where he had no vocation. But
he never entirely neglected his real business and his real vocation,
and fortunately he returned to them almost entirely before it was too
late.




CHAPTER IV.

IN THE WILDERNESS.