and “Presbyter Anglicanus” that he is born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the Saturday Review that he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines.  He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but hapless forgotten shadows like “Mr Clay,” “Mr Diffanger,” “Inspector Tanner,” “Professor Pepper” to the contempt of the world.  And then, when we are beginning to find all this laughter rather “thorn-crackling” and a little forced, the thing ends with the famous and magnificent epiphonema (as they would have said in the old days) to Oxford, which must for ever conciliate all sons of hers and all gracious outsiders to its author, just as it turns generation after generation of her enemies sick with an agonised grin.

So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, at the whim which made Mr Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting person like Eugenie de Guerin and a mere nobody like her brother.  They are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has taught us), “all depends on the subject,” and the subjects here are so exceedingly unimportant!  Besides, as he himself almost openly confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand French poetry at all.  When we come to “Keats and Guerin,” there is nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron’s

  “Such names coupled!”

and pass with averted face.  Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew Arnold’s, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!

But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such criticism as this.  To some criticism—­even to a good deal—­it is beyond doubt exposed.  The first and most famous paper—­the general manifesto, as the earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its author’s literary creed—­on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same objections as those that have been made to the introduction.  Here is the celebrated passage about “Wragg is in custody,” the text of which, though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment against a nation.  Here is the astounding—­the, if serious, almost preternatural—­statement that “not very much of current English literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the world.  Not very much I fear:  certainly less than of the current literature of France and Germany.”  And this was 1865, when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not going to have any!  It was 1865, when all the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty years’ standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years