of the twitch—­is too often evident, or at least suggested.  This especially applies to the first, the longest, the most ambitious, and, as its author would say, most “nobly serious” of the three.  There are quite admirable things in “Numbers”; and the descant on the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly serious from the point of view of morality, but is one of Mr Arnold’s best claims to the title of a political philosopher, and even of a political prophet.  But it is less easy to say that this passage appears to be either specially in place or well composed with its companions.  Perhaps the same is true of the earlier part, and its extensive dealings with Isaiah and Plato.  As regards the prophet, it is pretty certain that of Mr Arnold’s hearers, the larger number did not care to have Isaiah spoken about in that particular manner, while some at least of the rest did not care to have him spoken about at all.  Of the philosopher, it is equally safe to say that the great majority knew very little, and that of the small minority, some must have had obstinate questionings connected with the appearance of Plato as an authority on the moral health of nations, and with the application of Mr Arnold’s own very true and very noble doctrine about Aselgeia.  In fact, although the lecture is the most thoughtful, the most serious in part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr Arnold’s political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism.

The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are much better as wholes.  The opening of the “Emerson,” with its fond reminiscence of Oxford, is in a vein which Mr Arnold did not often work, but which always yielded him gold.  In the words about Newman, one seems to recognise very much more than meets the ear—­an explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude.  He is less happy on Carlyle—­he never was very happy on Carlyle, and for obvious reasons—­but here he jars less than usual.  As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found that Carlyle “wears” a great deal better than Emerson.  It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical about Emerson himself.  On Emerson’s poetry he is even, as on his own principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical.  Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has “once in a hundred years,” as Mr O’Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic meteors.  And while, with all reverence, one is bound to say that his denying the title of “great writer” to Carlyle is merely absurd—­is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art—­he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson.  But after justifying his policy of not “cracking up” by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would “live in the spirit.”  With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one.  To some Gautier, with his doctrine of