subject—­about Goethe himself.  Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse, spoken with praise—­for him altogether extraordinary, if not positively extravagant—­of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and asks rather wistfully for “the just judgment of forty years,” the calm revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom.  But M. Scherer’s estimate is in parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of “I agree with this,” “I do not agree with that.”  But the paper retains the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to be.

In “George Sand,” which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account.  His estimate of this prolific amuseuse will probably in the long-run seem excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is it at all difficult to account for the excess.  Mr Arnold belonged exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of personal sorrows.  Even the works of her “storm-and-stress” period were not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have had, at least for some natures among the “discouraged generation of 1850” (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth.  A man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they actually were.  And Mr Arnold’s obituary here has a great deal of charm.  The personal and biographical part is done with admirable taste, not a grain too much or too little of that moi so haissable in excess, so piquant as a mere seasoning, being introduced:  and the panegyric is skilful in the extreme.  To be sure, Mr Hamerton reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight because the French peasant no longer takes off his hat.  Alas! there is no need to go to the country of La Terre to discover this sign of moral elevation.  But the delusion itself is only another proof of Mr Arnold’s constancy to his early ideas.  And looking back on the whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barring the first Essays in Criticism itself, he had written no better book.