changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant
the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought--and there
was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking--that
intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were
coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have
grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his
truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him
away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be
said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in
vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most
popular, volume.

It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book
that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be
found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment.
For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact
with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we
have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got
upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in
Dissent--or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His
Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average
middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I
have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average
Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold
attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only
of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the
extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I
cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of
Dissent, but I can believe it.