Still it has always been held that this chair is not merely a chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in the shape of Merope.  This was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto—­a document to show what the only Professor of Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice, of at least dramatic poetry.  It was, as was to be expected from the author’s official position and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been.  He even tells us that “it sells well”; but the reviewers were not pleased.  The Athenaeum review is “a choice specimen of style,” and the Spectator “of argumentation”; the Saturday Review is only “deadly prosy,” but none were exactly favourable till G.H.  Lewes in The Leader was “very gratifying.”  Private criticism was a little kinder.  The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given “a flaming testimonial for Rugby”) read it “with astonishment at its goodness,” a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged.  Kingsley (whom the editor of the Letters good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the British public as “author of The Saints’ Tragedy and other poems”) was “very handsome.”  Froude, though he begs the poet to “discontinue the line,” was not uncomplimentary in other ways.  His own conclusion, from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he “saw the book was not going to take as he wished,” and that “she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans.”  Let us see what “she” is actually like.

It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei’s attempt in Italian, Voltaire’s in French, and this of Mr Arnold’s in English, show it to have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the Classical drama:  and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind.  For the fact is that the donnee is very much more of the Romantic than of the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the Romantic than to the Classical practitioner.  With minor variations, the story as generally dramatised is this.  Merope, the widowed queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the country.  When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the State.  AEpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved by the inevitable anagnorisis.  The party of Cresphontes is then secretly roused.  AEpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in honour of the news of his rival’s death, snatches the sacrificial axe and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.