ordering him off to execution.

In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of
the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The
want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged
against him, comes in reality to no more than this--that he is too
busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things
in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for
dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects,
which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact
that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more
needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter.
Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their
own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with
Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with
Thomas Love Peacock.

But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all
important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough
to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less
appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had
long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of
effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own
lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in
his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he
was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion,
sometimes rather disastrously to extend.

Still it has always been held that this chair is not _merely_ a
chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in