from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what
principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere
illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out
and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.

And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in
substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the
book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator
between Mr Arnold's description of English Government at p. 4 and his
rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107. This might
happen to anybody, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this censor
of the "unideaed" has evidently himself no "ideas," no first
principles, in politics at all. That, play what tricks you will, all
possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule
of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of
these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical
and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly
called scientific,--this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at
all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too
soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a
criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong's
wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as
regards the Matthæan gospel. "Nothing," said the Chevalier, when he
had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, "is so
important to the welfare of the household as _Good Sherry_." And
so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by
the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools,
by the saturation of England with "ideas," by all our old friends.

The rest matches. Mr Arnold pooh-poohs the notion that Ireland, except