things in critical prelections.  Nor, though one may think that Mr Arnold’s general estimate of Byron is not even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere.  Much as there must have been in Byron’s loose art, his voluble inadequacy—­nay, even in his choice of subject—­that was repellent to Mr Arnold:  much more as there must have been in his unchastened conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality, tenue of every kind,—­yet there were real links between them.  Mr Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or trustworthy ally, against the Philistine.  He saw in him a link with general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely insular.  Byron’s undoubtedly “sincere and strong” dislike of the extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful to Mr Arnold.  Indeed, in his own earlier poems there are not wanting Byronic touches and echoes, not so easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see and hear “confusedly.”  Lastly, he had, by that sort of reaction which often exhibits itself in men of the study, an obvious admiration for Force—­the admiration which makes him in his letters praise France up to 1870 and Germany after that date—­and he thought he saw Force in Byron.  So that the Essay is written with a stimulating mingle-mangle of attraction and reluctance, of advocacy and admission.  It is very far indeed from being one of his best critically.  You may, on his own principles, “catch him out” in it a score of times.  But it is a good piece of special pleading, an excellent piece of writing, and one of the very best and most consummate literary causeries in English.

In strict chronological order, a third example of these most interesting and stimulating Prefaces should have been mentioned between the “Wordsworth” and the “Byron”—­the latter of which, indeed, contains a reference to it.  This is the famous Introduction to Mr T.H.  Ward’s English Poets, which, in that work and in the second series of Essays in Criticism, where it subsequently appeared, has perhaps had more readers than any other of its author’s critical papers.  It contains, moreover, that still more famous definition of poetry as “a criticism of life” which has been so often attacked and has sometimes been defended.  I own to having been, both at the time and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants.  Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics “mistake an epigram for a philosophical definition.”  In the first place, the epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place, an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but appropriate, while a philosophical definition is exactly what was wanted.