person like Eugénie de Guérin and a mere nobody like her brother. They
are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has
taught us), "all depends on the subject," and the subjects here are so
exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself almost openly
confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand
French poetry at all. When we come to "Keats and Guérin," there is
nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron's

"_Such_ names coupled!"

and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew
Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who
happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!

But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such
criticism as this. To some criticism--even to a good deal--it is
beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper--the general
manifesto, as the earlier _Preface_ to the _Poems_ is the
special one, of its author's literary creed--on _The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time_ must indeed underlie much the same
objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is
the celebrated passage about "Wragg is in custody," the text of which,
though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is
really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment
against a nation. Here is the astounding--the, if serious, almost
preternatural--statement that "not very much of current English
literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the
world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current
literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, when the Germans
had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets