however, that Renan is chiefly “trying to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, on the French,” while he is trying to inculcate intelligence on the English.  After which he makes a long and enthusiastic reference to the essay, Sur la Poesie des Races Celtiques, the literary results of which we shall soon see.  I do not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates—­for the reference to M. Renan in “Numbers” is not quite explicit—­what he thought of those later and very peculiar developments of “morality in a high sense of the word” which culminated in the Abbesse de Jouarre and other things.  His sense of humour must have painfully suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French lubricity which he himself denounced.  But there was no danger of his imitating M. Renan in this respect.  In others the following was quite unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous.  In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the Frenchman’s sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the wildest excesses of M. Renan’s critical reconstructions of sacred history.  But he copied a great deal too much of his master’s dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan’s (I am told) not particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about Celtic literature.  On the whole, the two were far too much alike to do each other any good.  Exquisite even as M. Renan’s mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force.  Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not want.

As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom usus concinnat amorem in the case of these documents), he made some endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other.  First he tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of the House of Commons.  For the former post it may be permitted to think that his extremely strong—­in fact partisan—­opinions, both on education and on the Church of England, were a most serious disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place.  But he got neither.  He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term of 1867.  I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but it was decided that the honorary