refuge of his own undogmatic Nephelococcygia, with the ineffable scandals of Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and febrile passion which characterises the French press.  Only, what is left?  Where are the improvements due to this great influence?  They are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable dignity of the French peasant and the polished refinement of the French middle-class.  Frankly, one may prefer Hodge and Bottles.

“Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism” has less actuality, and, moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in reference to the Irish Essays.  But “Porro Unum est Necessarium” possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance of the dream of Mr Arnold’s life, the interference of the State in English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important.  It consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact that, in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone’s levee en masse against the Tory Government of 1874-80, the Liberal programme contained nothing about this darling object.  And the superiority of France is trotted out again; but it would be cruel to insist any more.  Yet at last Mr Arnold becomes practical, and contends for pretty much the substance of present Secondary Education Reform schemes—­limited inspection, qualification of masters, leaving certificates, &c.  “It do not over-stimulate,” to quote an author to whom Mr Arnold was shortly to devote much attention; but we leave the political or semi-political batch in considerably greater charity with the author than his prose volumes for years past had rendered possible.

No reserves, no allowances of the least importance are necessary in dealing with the rest of the volume.  I do not think it fanciful to discern a sort of involuntary or rather unconscious “Ouf!” of relief in the first, the “Guide to English Literature,” on the subject, as has been said, of Mr Stopford Brooke’s always excellent and then novel Primer.  A tribute to duty is, indeed, paid at starting:  we are told sternly that we must not laugh (as it is to be feared too many of us did and do) at the famous boast of the French Minister, as to all the boys in France learning the same lesson at the same hour.  For this was the result of State interference:  and all the works of State interference are blessing and blessed.  But, this due rite paid, Mr Arnold gives himself up to enjoyment, laudation, and a few good-natured and, for the most part, extremely judicious proposals for making the good better still.  Even if this last characteristic were not present, it would be unjust to call the article a puff.  Besides, are puffs so wholly bad?  A man may be not very fond of sweets, and yet think a good puff now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot from