All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to be venerable.  But the book as a book, and also as a document in the case, has, and always will have, interest.  “The cries and catchwords” which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have made a lodgment.  The revolt—­in itself quite justifiable, and even admirable—­from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste and ethics and philosophy,—­from everything, in short, of which Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and exponent, is conspicuous.  It is from foreign and almost hostile sources that we must expect help.  The State is to resume, or to initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike, then assigned to individual action or private combination.  We have not yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets and furnished with their descriptions; but the three classes are already sharply separated in Mr Arnold’s mind, and we can see that only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts circumcision and culture fully, is there to be any salvation.  The anti-clerical and anti-theological animus is already strong; the attitude dantis jura Catonis is arranged; the jura themselves, if not actually graven and tabulated, can be seen coming with very little difficulty.  Above all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside; the Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell; we have turned to prose and (as we can best manage it) sense.

But A French Eton is perhaps most interesting for its style.  In this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the Preface of 1853 and the later and better known works.  More of a concio ad vulgus than the former, it shows a pretty obvious endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the academic tone of the earlier work.  And it does not yet display those “mincing graces” which were sometimes attributed (according to a very friendly and most competent critic, “harshly, but justly”) to the later.  The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly imminent.  Slightly exotic vocabulary—­“habitude” “repartition,” for “habit,” “distribution”—­makes its appearance.  That abhorrence of the conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and substantives, with never an “and” to string them together, is here.  But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess:  there is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence—­Baines, Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold’s well-known substitutes for Cleon and Cinesias—­there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in Friendship’s Garland.  “Bottles” and his company are not yet with us; the dose of persiflage is rigorously kept down; the author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that