men of any public distinction.  In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some position of “greater freedom and less responsibility,” even when he ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject, doctrine.  Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine, which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more or less graceful and ingenious palinode in the more honourable one which we allow to the Greek equivalent and original.  Mr Arnold could never be lacking in grace or in ingenuity; but he certainly had, in his earlier work, allowed it to be perfectly visible that the world of American politics, American manners, American institutions and ways generally, was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of light.

His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well as polite.  The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill.  “Numbers” dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must ever be uppermost—­or as nethermost not less important—­in a republic; and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always affected.  “Literature and Science,” the middle discourse, attacked a question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year, perhaps many a century.  “Emerson,” the last, descended from generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once specially American and specially literary.  It would have been hard indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better examples of each class than those actually taken.

It is not clear that quite such high praise can be given to the execution, and the reason is plain:  it was in the execution, not in the composition and scheme, that the hard practical difficulties of the task came in.  Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as he was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restraint, Mr Arnold was both too much of an Englishman and too much of a genius not to be ill to ride with the curb.  And, save perhaps in “Literature and Science” (which was not at first written for an American audience at all), the pressure of the curb—­I had almost said