The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had, or, except merely as “fighting a prize,” could have had, much to say for Merope.  The author pleads that he only meant “to give people a specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination.”  In the first place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the Prometheus, and the close of the Eumenides, and the whole of the Agamemnon in one’s mind) saying that this is rather hard on the Greeks.  And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about the object, when luckily specimens of the actual “world” so “created,” not mere pastiches and plaster models of them, are still to be had, and of the very best!  But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another.  Probably in his heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his failure.  At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra—­“Fragment of an Antigone,” “Fragment of a Dejaneira,” grouped at her feet.  In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with Empedocles on Etna, a rather unlucky contrast.  For Empedocles, if very much less deliberately Greek than Merope, is very much better poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical.  Mr Arnold had forgotten his master’s words about the oikeia hedone.  The pleasure of Greek art is one thing—­the pleasure of English poetry another.

His inaugural lecture, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” was printed many years afterwards in Macmillan’s Magazine for February 1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his volumes of essays.  But the ten years of his professorship are, according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the two famous little books—­On Translating Homer, which, with its supplementary “Last Words,” appeared in 1861-62, and On the Study of Celtic Literature, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in 1867.  It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication—­which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book—­and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was