Not for the first time help came to us Trojans Graia ab urbe.  Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many years fashionable in England to hold.  But between 1830 and 1860 the French had a very strong critical school indeed—­a school whose scholars and masters showed the daemonic, or at least prophetic, inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Merimee, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve.  Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice.  But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of scholarship and appreciation.  Even the most Romantic of them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before ordering him off to execution.

In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union.  The want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged against him, comes in reality to no more than this—­that he is too busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for dithyrambs.  And the preference of second-to first-class subjects, which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter.  Homer, AEschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their own way with all fit readers sooner or later:  it is not so with Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with Thomas Love Peacock.

But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other.  It is enough to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve’s own lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, sometimes rather disastrously to extend.