Then we are back again in pure literature, with the two notable Quarterly articles, already glanced at, on M. Scherer as “A French Critic on Milton” and “A French Critic on Goethe.”  There was a very strong sympathy, creditable to both, between the two.  M. Scherer went further than Mr Arnold in the negative character of his views on religion; but they agreed as to dogma.  His literary criticism was somewhat harder and drier than Mr Arnold’s; but the two agreed in acuteness, lucidity, and a wide, if not quite a thoroughgoing, use of the comparative method.  Both were absolutely at one in their uncompromising exaltation of “conduct.”  So that Mr Arnold was writing quite con amore when he took up his pen to recommend M. Scherer to the British public, which mostly knew him not at that time.

But he did not begin directly with his main subject.  He had always, as we have seen, had a particular grudge at Macaulay, who indeed represented in many ways the tendencies which Mr Arnold was born to oppose.  Now just at this time certain younger critics, while by no means championing Macaulay generally, had raised pretty loud and repeated protests against Mr Arnold’s exaggerated depreciation of the Lays as “pinchbeck”; and I am rather disposed to think that he took this opportunity for a sort of sally in flank.  He fastens on one of Macaulay’s weakest points, a point the weakness of which was admitted by Macaulay himself—­the “gaudily and ungracefully ornamented” (as its author calls it) Essay on Milton.  And he points out, with truth enough, that its “gaudy and ungraceful ornament” is by no means its only fault—­that it is bad as criticism, that it shows no clear grasp of Milton’s real merits, that it ignores his faults, that it attributes to him qualities which were the very reverse of his real qualities.  He next deals slighter but still telling blows at Addison, defends Johnson, in passing, as only negatively deficient in the necessary qualifications, not positively conventional like Addison, or rhetorical like Macaulay, and then with a turn, itself excellently rhetorical in the good sense, passes to M. Scherer’s own dealings with the subject.  Thenceforward he rather effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and summarises the “French Critic’s” deliverances, laying special stress on the encomiums given to Milton’s style.  The piece is one of his most artfully constructed; and I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious and attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call it, to a new society.

The method is not very different in “A French Critic on Goethe,” though Carlyle, the English “awful example” selected for contrast, is less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part with Lewes, and with divers German critics.  On the whole, this essay, good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to be in two minds about that author’s