qualification was insufficient, and I daresay there were other objections.  Mr Arnold had a sort of “send-off” in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the Study of Celtic Literature in prose and the New Poems in verse, with Schools and Universities on the Continent to follow next year.  Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.

On the Study of Celtic Literature is the first book of his to which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather serious objections.  That it has merits not affected by these objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish to say that it is—­or was—­even the superior of the Homer in comparative and indirect importance.  In that Mr Arnold had but, at the best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new realms.  Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older acquisitions.

So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better.  It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we cannot write all that nonsense off his account.  In particular, he set an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact.  It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a “revoke”—­the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you must not play with a man—­is speaking of authors and books which he has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you ignorant of his ignorance. This Mr Arnold never committed, and could never have committed.  But short of it, and while escaping its penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even less of the originals than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here guilty.

Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say:  he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited.  But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand.  A very few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, he seems to have consulted:  he never, I think, names Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets; and in the main his citations are derived either from Ossian ("this do seem going far,” as an American poetess observes),