But this was not all.  It was quite evident—­and it was no shame and no disadvantage to him—­that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and apostle.  Yet when we try to get at his programme—­at his gospel—­there is no vestige of anything tangible about either.  Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold’s favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the state-provided middle-class schools of France.  While, for the rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover any way of safety in Friendship’s Garland.

Nor, to take with the Garland for convenience sake Irish Essays, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even long after “the Wilderness” had been mostly left behind.  There is indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays in “three-decker” reviews—­of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech at the greatest public school in the world—­discouraged the playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish young evening newspaper.  But the unpracticalness—­not in the Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense—­is more glaring than ever, and there are other faults with it.  Great part of An Unregarded Irish Grievance is occupied by a long-drawn-out comparison of England’s behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield.  In the first place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in Friendship’s Garland about “Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion from the life of Mr Pickwick.”  In the second, one asks on what principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.

And so in other places.  Yet the worst faults are not in form but in substance.  Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator between Mr Arnold’s description of English Government at p. 4 and his rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107.  This might happen to anybody, and is not fatal.  What is fatal is that this censor of the “unideaed” has evidently himself no “ideas,” no first principles, in politics at all.  That, play what tricks you will, all