possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly called scientific,—­this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at all.  He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too soon to know very much of him.  But I have always thought that, for a criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong’s wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as regards the Matthaean gospel.  “Nothing,” said the Chevalier, when he had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, “is so important to the welfare of the household as Good Sherry.”  And so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools, by the saturation of England with “ideas,” by all our old friends.

The rest matches.  Mr Arnold pooh-poohs the notion that Ireland, except by force, will never be blended with England; it would be as sensible to say this “of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall.”  He was not, I think, dead—­he was certainly not dead long—­when Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State.  As usual he goes to his books.  He quotes Goethe—­a great man of letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton—­to prove that “the English are pedants.”  He quotes Burke—­the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes—­to tell us what to do with Ireland.  But the main point in at least one of these essays, The Incompatibles, is again connected with David Copperfield.  I have said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion—­Quinion, Murdstone, Creakle—­is inartistic and irritating.  But from the philosophical and political point of view it is far worse.  No Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take, Dickens’s characters as normal types.  They are always fantastic exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest companions in the art of line.  Of the three figures selected in particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a comparse or “super” that to base any generalisation on him is absurd.  The dislike of the British public to be “talked book to” may be healthy or unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book, small blame to it!  The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful, neglect of the practical appears throughout.  Mr Arnold (to his credit be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881.  But his own panaceas—­a sort of Cadi-court for “bag-and-baggaging” bad landlords, and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism—­were, at least, no better, and went, if it were possible, even more in the teeth of history.