mission of reforming his country, not merely in matters literary,
where he was excellently qualified for the apostolate, but in the much
more dubiously warranted function of political, "sociological," and
above all, ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical gospeller. With all
these things we must now deal.

No one of Mr Arnold's books is more important, or more useful in
studying the evolution of his thought and style, than _A French
Eton_ (1864). Although he was advancing in middle-life when it was
written, and had evidently, as the phrase goes, "made up his bundle of
prejudices," he had not written, or at least published, very much
prose; his mannerisms had not hardened. And above all, he was but just
catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of
Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of
some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own
disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his
subject, which was not always the case later; and though his
assumptions--the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the
superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure
of the Anglican Church, and so forth--are already as questionable as
they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain
[Greek: epieikeia], which was perhaps not always so obvious when he
came to preach that quality itself later. About the gist of the book
it is not necessary to say very much. He practically admits the
obvious and unanswerable objection that his _French Eton_,
whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at Sorèze, is very
French, but not at all Eton. He does not really attempt to meet the
more dangerous though less epigrammatic demurrer, "Do you _want_
schools to turn out products of this sort?" It was only indirectly his
fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of his arguments,