the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be a very pleasing thing.  And, as I have said, Mr Arnold’s review is much more than a puff.  Once, indeed, there is even a hypercriticism, due to that slight want of familiarity with literary history proper which has been noticed more than once.  Mr Arnold finds fault with Mr Brooke for adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, “from the Restoration to George III.”  He objects to this that “George III. has nothing to do with literature,” and suggests “to the Death of Pope and Swift.”  This is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics have often repeated.  Perhaps George III. had nothing to do with literature; but his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of a pure English regime, have done something to produce, numerous appearances of the Romantic revival—­Percy’s Reliques, Hurd’s Essays, Macpherson’s Ossian, The Castle of Otranto, and others.  The deaths of Pope and Swift have no such synchronism.  They mark, indeed, the disappearance of the strongest men of the old school, but not the appearance of even the weakest and most infantine of the new.  Still this, though interesting in itself, is a trifle, and the whole paper, short as it is, is a sort of Nunc Dimittis in a new sense, a hymn of praise for dismissal, not from but to work—­to the singer’s proper function, from which he has been long divorced.

“Falkland,” which follows, is less purely literary, but yet closely connected with literature.  One thinks with some ruth of its original text, which was a discourse on Falkland by that modern Lucius Gary, the late Lord Carnarvon—­the most curious and pathetic instance of a man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of temperament, during the seventeenth.  It would, of course, have been indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters; but I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time.  His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness and Light, of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper, was most natural, and its sources most obvious.  It would be cruel, and is quite unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by that—­it may be lovable, it may be even estimable—­incapacity to think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic.  On the contrary, let us not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little repulsive to any of us.  He could not have had a better subject; nor can Falkland ever hope for a vates better consecrated, by taste, temper, and ability, to sing his praises.