But the third, what delays him
From his unattained crown?"

But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste modern love for
passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?" To
which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather
uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest
anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there."

The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had,
or, except merely as "fighting a prize," could have had, much to say
for _Merope_. The author pleads that he only meant "to give people a
specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination." In the first
place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the
_Prometheus_, and the close of the _Eumenides_, and the whole of the
_Agamemnon_ in one's mind) saying that this is rather hard on the
Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about
the object, when luckily specimens of the actual "world" so "created,"
not mere _pastiches_ and plaster models of them, are still to be had,
and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all
men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not
so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his
heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that
according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his
failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again,
and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with,
as we see in other galleries, merely some _disjecta membra_--"Fragment
of an _Antigone_," "Fragment of a _Dejaneira_," grouped at her feet.
In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with
_Empedocles on Etna_, a rather unlucky contrast. For _Empedocles_, if