Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at his best.  Even in the Guerin pieces, annoyance at the waste of first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of “distinction” at the end.  That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this distinction to Maurice; and that Eugenie, though undoubtedly a “fair soul,” was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of other women, need not matter very much after all.  And with the rest there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones.  One may doubt whether Heine’s charm is not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the very contempt of “subject,” the very quips and cranks and caprices that Mr Arnold so sternly bans.  But who shall deny the excellence and the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century proper?  Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach enthusiasm—­not merely engouement on the one side or serene approval on the other.  No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for his “modern spirit” (why, O Macaree, as his friend Maurice de Guerin might have said, should a modern spirit be better than an ancient one, or what is either before the Eternal?) instead of for what has been, conceitedly it may be, called the “tear-dew and star-fire and rainbow-gold” of his phrase and verse.  He felt this magic at any rate.  No matter that he applies the wrong comparison instead of the right one, and depreciates French in order to exalt German, instead of thanking Apollo for these two good different things.  The root of the matter is the right root, a discriminating enthusiasm:  and the flower of the matter is one of the most charming critical essays in English.  It is good, no doubt, to have made up one’s mind about Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost envies those who were led to that enchanted garden by so delightful an interpreter.

Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet, I believe, of some very excellent judges, on “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” with its notable translation of Theocritus and its contrast with St Francis.  One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the other; indeed, he never was well read in mediaeval literature.  But his thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with incomparable skill and charm.  Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens mediaeval life more than rather unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch!