closely connected with both.  Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story, offer us pie-crust.  Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain.  Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct plus poetic appreciation, but minus what we call religion.  Mr Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal as a life-philosopher who was also a poet.  He knew, presumably, the stories told about Sophocles in Athenaeus, and though these might be idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is nothing intrinsically impossible about them.  It would have been rather interesting to hear him fully on this subject.  But he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and “the Aberglaube of the Second Advent” to trouble himself with awkward matters of this kind at the moment.

It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them, or with something like them, afterwards.  The book—­a deliberate provocation—­naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he been still in the fold.  Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really disquieted by its comparative popularity.  For he had quite enough of Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded.  At any rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which showed the tone of Literature and Dogma.  Indeed, of the concluding volumes, God and the Bible and Last Essays on Church and Religion, the first is an elaborate and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and comparatively “anodyne” essays.  It is significant—­as showing how much of the success of Literature and Dogma had been a success of scandal—­that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity. God and the Bible was never reprinted till the popular edition of the series thus far in 1884; and Last Essays was never reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable Bibliography of the works.  Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale appear to be of the first edition.  This cool reception does not discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace.  There are good things in the Last Essays (to which we shall return), but the general effect of them is that of a man who is withdrawing from a foray, not exactly beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is trying to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions.