undistinguished professors, but Warton and Keble, in their different
ways, must have adorned even a Chair of Poetry even in the University
of Oxford. Above all, the entire (or almost entire) freedom of action
left to the Professor should have, and in the case of Keble at least
had already had, the most stimulating effect on minds capable of
stimulation. For the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is neither, like
some Professors, bound to the chariot-wheels of examinations and
courses of set teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his
best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, and hardly any
meaning, for all but a small circle of experts. His field is
illimitable; his expatiation in it is practically untrammelled. It is
open to all; full of flowers and fruits that all can enjoy; and it
only depends on his own choice and his own literary and intellectual
powers whether his prelections shall take actual rank as literature
with the very best of that other literature, with the whole of which,
by custom, as an extension from poetry, he is at liberty to deal. In
the first century of the chair the custom of delivering these
Prelections in Latin had been a slight hamper--indeed to this day it
prevents the admirable work of Keble from being known as it should be
known. But this was now removed, and Mr Arnold, whose reputation (it
could hardly be called fame as yet) was already great with the knowing
ones, had not merely Oxford but the English reading world as audience.

And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the importance of
which he himself, in this very position, was not the least
contributor. Although the greatest writers of the second period of the
century--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray--had, in all cases but
the last, a long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully
fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which they
belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was