Of Mr Arnold’s efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his “intromittings” with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given.  In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon likely to lose interest or value:  the selection of his own poems, that from Wordsworth, and that from Byron.  To the first the English habits of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry for the application.  Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous divagations than Coleridge.  Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent.  Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful Resignation, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to include in the appendix to his English Poets; and the curious, characteristic, and not much short of admirable Dream, which in the earlier issues formed part of Switzerland, and should never have been excluded from it.  It is probably the best selection by a poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying not a little.  Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying, reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have given all the poems.

As for the “Wordsworth” and the “Byron,” they gain enormously by “this man’s estimate of them,” and do not lose by “this man’s” selection.  I have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has necessarily to be added.  I really do not know what has, unless it be a few of the oases from the deserts of the Excursion, the Prelude, and the then not published Recluse.  Wordsworth’s real titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or fall are there.  The professor, the very thorough-going student, the literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of literature will; but nobody need.

And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious.  I know few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and re-reading than this.  Not that I agree with it by any means as a whole; but he is in the mere “Pettys” of criticism (it is true not many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own agreement with it.  Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English poet, far higher than I can put him.  He is not so great a poet to my thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these competitions