The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of
his earlier manner--when he simply followed that admirable older
Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last--is
gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some--indeed a good
deal--of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its
absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant
absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic
jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have
been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best.
There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and
conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in
Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first object is to
convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want
to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the
description and characterisation are quite excellent.

Between _A French Eton_ and the second collection of Oxford
Lectures came, in 1865, the famous _Essays in Criticism_, the
first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and
illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed manifesto
and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the
epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English. It
consisted, in the first edition, of a _Preface_ (afterwards
somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be
made ten by the addition of _A Persian Passion-Play_). The two
first of these were general, on _The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time_ and _The Literary Influence of Academies_, while
the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guérins, Heine,
_Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment_, Joubert, Spinoza, and
Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a