It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary
and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those
sometimes questionable æsthetic _obiter dicta_, of which, from
first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the
mysterious "grand style," and tells us that Milton can never be
affected, we murmur, "_De gustibus!_" and add mentally, "Though
Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after
_Comus_ at least, never anything else!" When he tells us again
that at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living
intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and
Germany," we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only
one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre
of a dozen Englishmen--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray,
Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany,
further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two,
great writers of the second class: and we say, "Either your 'living
intellectual instrument' is a juggle of words, or you really are
neglecting fact." Many--very many--similar retorts are possible; and
the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr
Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English
hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he
turns out from his own stables for our inspection.

But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this,
which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the
book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal
influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same
quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical
generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree
to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and