that a process of making ducks and drakes of English grammar-school
endowments began, and was (chiefly in the "seventies") carried on,
with results, the mischievousness of which apparently has been known
and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly kept to
themselves.

All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to
be venerable. But the book as a book, and also as a document in the
case, has, and always will have, interest. "The cries and catchwords"
which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most
besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have
made a lodgment. The revolt--in itself quite justifiable, and even
admirable--from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class
thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste
and ethics and philosophy,--from everything, in short, of which
Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and
exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and almost hostile
sources that we must expect help. The State is to resume, or to
initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of
the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike,
then assigned to individual action or private combination. We have not
yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets
and furnished with their descriptions; but the three classes are
already sharply separated in Mr Arnold's mind, and we can see that
only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts circumcision and
culture fully, is there to be any salvation. The anti-clerical and
anti-theological animus is already strong; the attitude _dantis jura
Catonis_ is arranged; the _jura_ themselves, if not actually
graven and tabulated, can be seen coming with very little difficulty.
Above all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside; the