[2] Glen Desseray and other Poems.  By John Campbell Shairp, London, 1888.  P. 218.

[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully.  Let us only indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,—­the slow and reluctant acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal to give Browning, even after Bells and Pomegranates, a fair hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of erratic genius like Lavengro; the ignoring of work of such combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam.  For a sort of quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford (himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp’s Life of the latter, i. 387.

[4] This “undertone,” as Mr Shairp calls it.

[5] “What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived?  They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.  In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous.  When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also.”

[6] “The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do.”—­Sydney Smith to Jeffrey.

CHAPTER II.

LIFE FROM 1851-62—­SECOND SERIES OF POEMS—­MEROPE—­ON TRANSLATING HOMER.

We must now return a little and give some account of Mr Arnold’s actual life, from a period somewhat before that reached at the end of the last chapter.  The account need not be long, for the life, as has been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an account of his work, which, for nine of the eleven years we shall cover, was, though interesting, of much less interest than that of those immediately before and those immediately succeeding.

One understands at least part of the reason for the gradual drying up of his poetic vein from a sentence of his in a letter of 1858, when he and his wife at last took a house in Chester Square:  “It will be something to unpack one’s portmanteau for the first time since I was married, nearly seven years ago.”  “Something,” indeed; and one’s only wonder is how he, and still more Mrs Arnold (especially as they now had three children), could have endured the other thing so long.  There is no direct information in the Letters as to