to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr Arnold begins to reckon Moliere in, I confess I am lost.  When and where did Moliere write poetry?  But these things do not matter; they are the things on which reviewers exercise their “will it be believed?” and on which critics agree to differ.  We may include with them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known more) and the exaltation of “life” and “conduct” and all the rest of it.  These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight; we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against them, pass them as admitted.

But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the Wordsworthians.  They might perhaps retort with a tu quoque.  When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth’s poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a certain Preface with its “all depends on the subject,” and chuckle a little, a very little.  But Mr Arnold is right here.  No philosophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the consequence is that The Excursion and The Prelude are, as wholes, not good poems at all.  They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry.  But how one longs, how, as one sees from this essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!

The Byron paper contains more disputable statements—­indeed the passage about Shelley, if it were quite serious, which may be doubted, would almost disqualify Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry.  But it is hardly less interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable.  In the first place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able to admire both Byron and Wordsworth.  Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple.  He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer’s rough treatment of his subject.  In no essay, I think, does he quote so much from others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a somebody (for instance Professor Nichol) to correct and gloss and digress upon while complimenting him.  Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this Zion—­which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind.  Yet this very uneasiness gives to the Essay a glancing variety, a sort of animation and excitement, which are not common