Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell; we have turned to prose and
(as we can best manage it) sense.

But _A French Eton_ is perhaps most interesting for its style. In
this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the
_Preface_ of 1853 and the later and better known works. More of a
_concio ad vulgus_ than the former, it shows a pretty obvious
endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the
academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not yet display those
"mincing graces" which were sometimes attributed (according to a very
friendly and most competent critic, "harshly, but justly") to the
later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly
imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary--"habitude" "repartition," for
"habit," "distribution"--makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the
conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and
substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here.
But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there
is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though
some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence--Baines,
Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold's well-known substitutes for Cleon and
Cinesias--there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in
_Friendship's Garland_. "Bottles" and his company are not yet
with us; the dose of _persiflage_ is rigorously kept down; the
author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the
principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that

"What I tell you three times is true,"

and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty.