reculade, with the intent to leap upon the maudlin defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them.  The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship’s Garland period, is simply enormous.  And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand style—­praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation.  The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is purely critical, purely literary.  And yet higher praise has never been given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press, nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus.  Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of Mr Arnold’s critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power to have been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like sound old wine, certain to improve for years to come.

In the seven years that were left to him after the publication of the Byron, Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the service of his only true mistress Literature.  But he never fell again so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867 and 1877.  His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics, not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier dates.  They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr Gladstone’s tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only period of real Liberal domination.  But although he dealt with the phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as “The Nadir of Liberalism,” the “Zenith of Conservatism,” and so forth, it was chiefly, as was natural at the time, in relation to Ireland that he exercised his political pen, and enough has been said about these Irish articles by anticipation above. Discourses in America, the result of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and the articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley’s Life, which represent his very last stage of life, require more particular attention.

The Discourses in America, two of them specially written, and the other, originally a Cambridge “Rede” discourse, recast for the Western Hemisphere, must always rank with the most curious and interesting of Mr Arnold’s works:  but the very circumstances of their composition and delivery made it improbable, if not impossible, that they should form one of his best.  These circumstances were of a kind which reproduces itself frequently in the careers of all