The period of Mr Arnold’s second tenure of the Poetry Chair, from 1862 to 1867, was much more fertile in remarkable books than that of his first.  It was during this time that he established himself at once as the leader of English critics by his Essays in Criticism (some of which had first taken form as Oxford Lectures) and that he made his last appearance with a considerable collection of New Poems.  It was during this, or immediately after its expiration, that he issued his second collected book of lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature; and it was then that he put in more popular, though still in not extremely popular, forms the results of his investigations into Continental education.  It was during this time also that his thoughts took the somewhat unfortunate twist towards the mission of reforming his country, not merely in matters literary, where he was excellently qualified for the apostolate, but in the much more dubiously warranted function of political, “sociological,” and above all, ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical gospeller.  With all these things we must now deal.

No one of Mr Arnold’s books is more important, or more useful in studying the evolution of his thought and style, than A French Eton (1864).  Although he was advancing in middle-life when it was written, and had evidently, as the phrase goes, “made up his bundle of prejudices,” he had not written, or at least published, very much prose; his mannerisms had not hardened.  And above all, he was but just catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own disaster.  He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his subject, which was not always the case later; and though his assumptions—­the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure of the Anglican Church, and so forth—­are already as questionable as they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain [Greek:  epieikeia], which was perhaps not always so obvious when he came to preach that quality itself later.  About the gist of the book it is not necessary to say very much.  He practically admits the obvious and unanswerable objection that his French Eton, whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at Soreze, is very French, but not at all Eton.  He does not really attempt to meet the more dangerous though less epigrammatic demurrer, “Do you want schools to turn out products of this sort?” It was only indirectly his fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of his arguments, that a process of making ducks and drakes of English grammar-school endowments began, and was (chiefly in the “seventies”) carried on, with results, the mischievousness of which apparently has been known and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly kept to themselves.