the style of Mr Kinglake; and I do not know that I feel more
especially bound to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord
Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these things as he was
right, the central drift would still be inestimable--the drift of
censure and contrast applied to English eccentricity, the argument
that this eccentricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to
be very bad.

Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at
his best. Even in the Guérin pieces, annoyance at the waste of
first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the
grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of "distinction" at
the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French
Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this
distinction to Maurice; and that Eugénie, though undoubtedly a "fair
soul," was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of
other women, need not matter very much after all. And with the rest
there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. One may doubt
whether Heine's charm is not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the
very contempt of "subject," the very quips and cranks and caprices
that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and
the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth
to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the
world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the
representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century
proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is
not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach
enthusiasm--not merely _engouement_ on the one side or serene
approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for
his "modern spirit" (why, _O Macarée_, as his friend Maurice de