a rule, absurd, there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all reasonable men.  But his political friends had done away with nearly all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his lot.  His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools.  Having now a livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge of the Queen’s Bench.  Their first child, Thomas, was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools, which occupied—­to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite so in the third—­most of his life that was not given to literature.  Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has been spent upon his “drudgery” and its scanty rewards.  It is enough to say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.

But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since Alaric at Rome, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his life was yet to run.  And he had issued one prose exercise in criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.

These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem (Cromwell) of 1843:  they consist of The Strayed Reveller and other Poems, by “A.,” 1849; Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, [still] by “A.,” 1852; and Poems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853—­the third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with Empedocles and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions, including Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy.  The contents of all three must be carefully considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on Cromwell.

This [Greek:  agonisma], like the other, Mr Arnold never included in any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891.  It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to.  Couched in the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is “good rhymes,” as the elder Mr Pope used to say to