by providing that in one insignificant case out of a hundred thousand, land shall not follow the feudal law of descent; without a single vital idea or sentiment or feeling for beauty or appropriateness; well persuaded that if more trade is done in England than anywhere else, if personal independence is without a check, and newspaper publicity unbounded, that is, by the nature of things, to be great; misled every morning by the magnificent Times or the ‘rowdy’ Telegraph; desperately prone to preaching to other nations, proud of being able to say what it likes, whilst wholly indifferent to the fact that it has nothing whatever to say.

Such, in brief, is the substance of this most agreeable volume.  Its message was lightly treated by the grave and reverend seigniors of the State.  The magnificent Times, the rowdy Telegraph, continued to preach their gospels as before; but for all that Mr. Arnold found an audience fit, though few, and, of course, he found it among the people he abused.  The barbarians, as he called the aristocracy, were not likely to pay heed to a professor of poetry.  Our working classes were not readers of the Pall Mall Gazette or purchasers of four-and-sixpenny tracts bound in white cloth.  No; it was the middle class, to whom Mr. Arnold himself belonged, who took him to honest hearts, stuck his photograph upon their writing-tables, and sounded his praises so loudly that his fame even reached the United States of America, where he was promptly invited to lecture, an invitation he accepted.  But for the middle classes Mr. Arnold would have had but a poor time of it.  They did not mind being insulted; they overlooked exaggeration; they pardoned ignorance—­in a word, they proved teachable.  Yet, though meek in spirit, they have not yet inherited the earth; indeed, there are those who assert that their chances are gone, their sceptre for ever buried.  It is all over with the middle-class.  Tuck up its muddled head!  Tie up its chin!

A rabble of bad writers may now be noticed pushing their vulgar way along, who, though born and bred in the middle classes, and disfigured by many of the very faults Mr. Arnold deplored, yet make it a test of their membership, an ‘open sesame’ to their dull orgies, that all decent, sober-minded folk, who love virtue, and, on the whole, prefer delicate humour to sickly lubricity, should be labelled ’middle class.’

Politically, it cannot but be noticed that, for good or for ill, the old middle-class audience no longer exists in its integrity.  The crowds that flocked to hear Cobden and Bright, that abhorred slavery, that cheered Kossuth, that hated the income-tax, are now watered down by a huge population who do not know, and do not want to know, what the income-tax is, but who do want to know what the Government is going to do for them in the matter of shorter hours, better wages, and constant employment.  Will the rabble, we wonder, prove as teachable as the middle class?