some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that
the period when _Essays in Criticism_, combined with his Oxford
Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the
first years of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, when that brilliant
periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the
_Saturday Review_, and others, was renewing for the sixties the
sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the _Saturday_
itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance
gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866,
during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the
astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the
Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in
the style of _persiflage_, which Kinglake had introduced, or
reintroduced, twenty years earlier in _Eothen_, and which the
_Saturday_ had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a
few hints from Carlyle in _Sartor_ and the _Latterday
Pamphlets_. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a
troupe of imaginary correspondents and _comparses_--Arminius von
Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the _Daily Telegraph_, the
Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased
wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated
personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by
their proper names--he instructed England on its own weakness, folly,
and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the
importance of _Geist_ and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought
himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised,
bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this
well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other
people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent
British mind was more puzzled, yet more _Prusso-mimic_, than