But, as has so constantly to be said in reference to Mr Arnold, these things do not matter.  He must have his catchwords:  and so “criticism of life” and “high seriousness” are introduced at their and his peril.  He must have his maintenance of the great classics, and so he exposes what I fear may be called no very extensive or accurate acquaintance with Old French.  He must impress on us that conduct is three-fourths of life, and so he makes what even those who stop short of latreia in regard to Burns may well think mistakes about that poet likewise.  But all the spirit, all the tendency, of the Introduction is what it ought to be, and the plea for the “real” estimate is as wholly right in principle as it is partly wrong in application.

It is well borne out by the two interesting articles on Gray and Keats which Mr Arnold contributed to the same work.  In the former, and here perhaps only, do we find him putting his shoulder to the work of critical advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart.  With Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on points more or fewer at grave difference; though he affected to regard Goethe as a magnus Apollo of criticism and creation both, I think in his heart of hearts there must have been some misgivings; and it is impossible that he should not have known his fancy for people like the Guerins to be mere engouement.  Gray’s case was different.  The resemblances between subject and critic were extraordinary.  Mr Arnold is really an industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth.  Again, the literary quality of the bard of the Elegy was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most.  From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned masters.  And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs.  Gray, though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the vulgar rather than the critics, and he had the singular fate of being dispraised both by Johnson and by Wordsworth.  But in this paper of Mr Arnold’s the wheel came full circle.  Everything that can possibly be said for Gray—­more than some of us would by any means indorse—­is here said for him:  here he has provided an everlasting critical harbour, into which he may retreat whensoever the popular or the critical breeze turns adverse.

And the Keats, less disputable in its general estimate, is equally good in itself, and specially interesting as a capital example of Mr Arnold’s polemic—­the capital example, indeed, if we except the not wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley’s Life.  He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable rhetorical