more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever.  From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion.  Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough.  In mere style it yields to nothing of its author’s, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms.  No English writer—­indeed one may say no writer at all—­has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding.  Dryden would have written with an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman—­which may also be said Of Courier.  Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of indignation—­honest and healthy, but possibly just plusquam-artistic—­at the unspeakable persons who think that by blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley.  And almost any one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic.  Every one of these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English essay on subjects connected with literature.  In its own special division of causerie the thing is not only without a superior, it is almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy.  Ill indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an example of his actual accomplishment.

We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative of biographical events.  December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to his sister, evidence that he was increasingly “spread” (as the French say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons—­Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin.  One is glad to hear of the last-named that the writer “is getting to like him “—­the passages on the author of Modern Painters in the earlier letters are certainly not enthusiastic—­and that “he gains much by his fancy being forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats.”  This beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life.  We hear that Mr J.R.  Green “likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he looks into them,” again a not uncommon experience—­and that Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from