When we come to consider him as a prose-writer, cautions and
qualifications are much less necessary. Whatever may be thought of the
substance of his writings, it surely must be admitted that he was a
great master of style. And his style was altogether his own. In the last
year of his life he said to the present writer: "People think I can
teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say
it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

Clearness is indeed his own most conspicuous note, and to clearness he
added singular grace, great skill in phrase-making, great aptitude for
beautiful description, perfect naturalness, absolute ease. The very
faults which the lovers of a more pompous rhetoric profess to detect in
his writing are the easy-going fashions of a man who wrote as he talked.
The members of a college which produced Cardinal Newman, Dean Church,
and Matthew Arnold are not without some justification when they boast of
"the Oriel style."

But style, though a great delight and a great power, is not everything,
and we must not found our claim for him as a prose-writer on style
alone. His style was the worthy and the suitable vehicle of much of the
very best criticism which English literature contains. We take the whole
mass of his critical writing, from the _Lectures on Homer_ and the
_Essays in Criticism_ down to the Preface to Wordsworth and the
Discourse on Milton; and we ask, Is there anything better?

When he wrote as a critic of books, his taste, his temper, his judgment
were pretty nearly infallible. He combined a loyal and reasonable
submission to literary authority with a free and even daring use of
private judgment. His admiration for the acknowledged masters of human
utterance--Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe--was genuine