But the literary contents of Mixed Essays are very interesting, and the Johnson paper (really a preface to the six selected lives, which he edited for Messrs Macmillan in 1878) is a most excellent piece of work.  His selection of the Lives is perhaps not quite unerring.  For he ought surely to have given the “Cowley,” with its (from his own point of view) invaluable point de repere in the estimate of the “metaphysicals.”  And he might have missed the “Swift,” which, though extremely interesting as a personal study from its mixture of prejudice and constraint, its willingness to wound, and yet—­not its fear but—­its honest compunction at striking, is, for the purpose of the volume, misplaced.  But he had a right to give what he chose:  and his preface has points of the very highest value.  The opening passage about the point de repere itself, the fixed halting-place to which we can always resort for fresh starts, fresh calculations, is one of the great critical loci of the world, and especially involves the main contribution of the nineteenth century to criticism if not to literature altogether.  We may exalt, without very much doubt or dread, the positive achievements of the century of Tennyson and Browning, of Carlyle and Thackeray, of Heine and Hugo.  But we have seen such strange revolutions in this respect that it may not do to be too confident.  The glory of which no man can deprive our poor dying siecle is that not one, of all the others since history began, has taken such pains to understand those before it, has, in other words, so discovered and so utilised the value of points de repere.  It may be that this value is, except in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to—­that he may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this.  But in the formulation of the idea (for he did much more than merely borrow it from the French) Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting

  “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”

And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in creation, he has his reward—­a reward that no man can take away, even if any one were disposed to try.

As a whole, Mixed Essays itself, which followed Last Essays on Church and Religion at an interval of two years, is an almost immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in the graces.  “Mixed” is perhaps not a strictly accurate title, for the volume consists of two halves, the contents of each of which are homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each other.  But even in the non-literary essays we are out of “The Wilderness” in its worst sense.  Most of the essays had, as has just been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while “Equality” was also delivered as a lecture during the years 1877 and 1878.  The exception was the paper called