verse.  His command of it is indeed uncertain.  But all over his work, from The Strayed Reveller to Westminster Abbey, it may happen at any minute, and it does happen at many minutes.  This is what makes a poet:  not the most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the grand style and the great masters.  And this is what Mr Arnold has.

That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges both during his life and at the time of his death.  As we have seen, both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry Ward’s statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever.  He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian “drabness” by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other, were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose proper.  Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best be answered by the individual taste of the competent.  I should say myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold ever did; nothing of the latter’s can approach that magnificent passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound that memorises it.  And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed.  But he did not quite keep his friend’s high level of distinction and tenue.  It was almost impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod—­I do not mean in the sense of the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did, contented himself with correct but ordinary writing.  If his defect was mannerism, his quality was certain manner.

The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and the most doubtful of his mannerisms was, of course, the famous iteration, which was probably at first natural, but which, as we see from the Letters, he afterwards deliberately fostered and accentuated, in order, as he thought, the better to get his new ideas into the heads of what the type-writer sometimes calls the “Br_u_tish” public.  That it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument, and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will be even more teased by it than we are, because to him the ideas it enforces will be, and will have