been ever since he can remember, obvious and common-place enough.  But when this and some other peccadillos (on which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the composition-books aforesaid) were absent or even moderately present, sometimes even in spite of their intrusion, Mr Arnold’s style was of a curiously fascinating character.  I have often thought that, in the good sense of that unlucky word “genteel,” this style deserves it far more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of Temple; while in its different and nineteenth-century way, it is as much a model of the “middle” style, neither very plain nor very ornate, but “elegant,” as Addison’s own.  Yet it is observable that all the three writers just mentioned keep their place, except with deliberate students of the subject, rather by courtesy or prescription than by actual conviction and relish on the part of readers:  and it is possible that something of the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold’s case also, when his claims come to be considered by other generations from the merely formal point of view.  Nor can those claims be said to be very securely based in respect of matter.  It is impossible to believe that posterity will trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism on which he wasted so much precious time and energy; they will have been arranged by the Prince’s governor on the shelves, with Hobbes’s mathematics and Southey’s political essays.  “But the criticism,” it will be said, “that ought to endure.”  No doubt from some points of view it ought, but will it?  So long, or as soon, as English literature is intelligently taught in universities, it is sure of its place in any decently arranged course of Higher Rhetoric; so long, or as soon, as critics consider themselves bound to study the history and documents of their business, it will be read by them.  But what hold does this give it?  Certainly not a stronger hold than that of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, which, though some of us may know it by heart, can scarcely be said to be a commonly read classic.

The fact is—­and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself—­that criticism has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence.  Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently to some of them) as useless as old moons.  Nor can one help regretting that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr Arnold’s prose.  There is no doubt at all that the existence of such an edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him not, Mr Arnold