“Progress,” with a splendid opening—­

  “The master stood upon the mount and taught—­
  He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes,”—­

conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges.  In the first, Rugby Chapel, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off the lack of lyrical accomplishment.  The other is the still better Heine’s Grave, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines about the “weary Titan,” which are among the best known of their author’s, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy.  And then the book is concluded by two other elegies—­in rhyme this time—­The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more.  They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on “the note,” as I ventured to call it before.  Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them.  The third book—­Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868)—­in which are put the complete results of the second Continental exploration—­is, I suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary education.  By far the larger part of it—­the whole, indeed, except a “General Conclusion” of some forty pages—­is a reasoned account of the actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.  It is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion—­perhaps the foregone conclusion—­obviously colours every page.  But it is an excellent example (as, indeed, is all its author’s non-popular writing) of clear and orderly exposition—­never arranged ad captandum, but also never “dry.”  Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many, to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more mannered graces of some of the rest.

Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or as an argument.  Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the desirableness—­indeed of the necessity—­of State-control of the most thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and places d’armes of that system.  He was thoroughly convinced that English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in nearly the same way from ours.  It may undoubtedly be claimed for him—­by those who see any force in the argument—­that events have followed him.  Education, both secondary and university in England, has to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself