But if he, as the phrase is, “put himself out” little as to letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions which have been just referred to.  In later years (it is Mr Humphry Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or unwillingly, he never allowed either to usurp the place of the vocation which he had accepted.  Not everybody, perhaps, is so scrupulous.  It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men boast of getting through their work somehow or other, that they may devote themselves to parerga which they like, and which they are pleased to consider more dignified, more important, nearer the chief end of man.  And from the extremely common assumption that other people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, one may at least not uncharitably suppose that a much larger number would so act if they dared, or had the opportunity.  This was not Mr Arnold’s conception of the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which gains him his hire.  Not only does he seem to have performed his actual inspecting duties with that exact punctiliousness which in such cases is much better than zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his art on the requirements, and not the strict requirements only, of his craft.  The unfitness of poets for business has been often enough proved to be a mere fond thing vainly invented; but it was never better disproved than in this particular instance.

Of the manner in which he had discharged these duties, some idea may be formed from the volume of Reports which was edited, the year after his death, by Sir Francis Sandford.  It would really be difficult to imagine a better display of that “sweet reasonableness,” the frequency of which phrase on a man’s lips does not invariably imply the presence of the corresponding thing in his conduct.  It would be impossible for the most plodding inspector, who never dared commit a sonnet or an essay, to deal with his subject in a way showing better acquaintance with it, more interest in it, or more business-like abstinence from fads, and flights, and flings.  Faint and far-off suggestions of the biographer of Arminius may, indeed, by a very sensitive reader, be discovered in the slightly eccentric suggestion that the Latin of the Vulgate (of which Mr Arnold himself was justly fond) should be taught in primary schools, and in the rather perverse coupling of “Scott and Mrs Hemans.”  But these are absolutely the only approaches to naughtiness in the whole volume.  It is a real misfortune that the nature of the subject should make readers of the book unlikely to be ever numerous; for it supplies a side of its author’s character nowhere else (except in glimpses) provided by his extant work.  It may even be doubted, by those who have read it, whether “cutting blocks with a razor”