standing on one's head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and
"full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar." But there is a keen
eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and
penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the
liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which
constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is
pungent. Sydney Smith spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as "abating and
dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule." The
words not inaptly describe Arnold's method of handling personal and
literary pretentiousness.

His praise as a phrase-maker is in all the Churches of literature. It
was his skill in this respect which elicited the liveliest compliments
from a transcendent performer in the same field. In 1881 he wrote to his
sister: "On Friday night I had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield. He
ended by declaring that I was the only living Englishman who had become
a classic in his own lifetime. The fact is that what I have done in
establishing a number of current phrases, such as _Philistinism,
Sweetness and Light_, and all that is just the thing to strike him." In
1884 he wrote from America about his phrase, _The Remnant_--"That term
is going the round of the United States, and I understand what Dizzy
meant when he said that I had performed 'a great achievement in
launching phrases.'" But his wise epigrams and compendious sentences
about books and life, admirable in themselves, will hardly recall the
true man to the recollection of his friends so effectually as his sketch
of the English Academy, disturbed by a "flight of Corinthian leading
articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A. Sala;" his comparison of Miss
Cobbe's new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel
between Phidias' statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles'
truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system