“Sculpte, lime, cisele,”

as the great commandment of the creative artist, has been a friend and leader in the life of the spirit:  to Mr Arnold he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper.  To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guerin, with his second-hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of the spirit; others scarcely find him so.  “This is this to thee and that to me.”

The third (strictly the middle) piece fortunately requires no allowances, and suffers from no drawbacks.  “Literature and Science” is an apology for a liberal education, and for a rationally ordered hierarchy of human study, which it would be almost impossible to improve, and respecting which it is difficult to think that it can ever grow obsolete.  Not only was Mr Arnold here on his own ground, but he was fighting for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and shield that he had proved.  And the result is like that, of the fortunate fights of romance:  he thrusts his antagonists straight over the crupper, he sends them rolling on the ground, and clutching its sand with their fingers.  Even Mr Huxley, stoutest and best of all the Paynim knights, never succeeded in wiping off this defeat; and it is tolerably certain that no one else will.  The language of the piece is unusually lacking in ornateness or fanciful digression; but the logic is the strongest that Mr Arnold ever brought to bear.

The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from the pathetic and adventitious interest which attaches to them as last, would be in any case among the best of their author’s, and their value is (at least, as it seems to me) in an ascending scale.  To care very much for that on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself.  Nothing is satisfactory that one can only read in translations.  But Mr Arnold, in whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always, is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems to have conceived a new engouement for this new and quaintly flavoured Russian literature.  Had he lived longer, he probably would have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle Ibsenism.  And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear him on those Memoirs of a Mongol Minx (as they have been profanely called), which are assigned to the great Marie Bashkirtseff; or on those others of the learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a friend on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry one of them, no matter which, and lead both about.  But the mixture of freshness, of passion, and of regard for conduct in Count Tolstoi could not but appeal to him; and he has given us a very charming causerie on Anna Karenina, notable—­like O’Rourke’s noble feast—­to

  “Those who were there
  And those who were not,”—­