more of mordant sarcasm than of the material for laughter.  Scott he knew by heart, and Carlyle he honestly revered; but he admired the one for his romance and the other for his philosophy.  Thackeray, sad to remember, he “did not think a great writer,” and so Thackeray’s humour disappears, with his pathos and his satire, into the limbo of common-place.  The imaginary spokesman of the Daily Telegraph in Friendship’s Garland reckons as “the great masters of human thought and human literature, Plato, Shakespeare, Confucius, and Charles Dickens”; and there, to judge from the great bulk of his writing, Arnold’s acquaintance with Dickens begins and ends.

But it was one of his amiable traits that, whenever he read a book which pleased him, he immediately began to share his pleasure with his friends.  In the year 1880, he writes to his colleague, Mr. Fitch, “I have this year been reading David Copperfield for the first time.[13] Mr. Creakle’s School at Blackheath is the type of our English Middle Class Schools, and our Middle Class is satisfied that so it should be.”

It would seem that he made this rather belated acquaintance with Dickens’ masterpiece, through reading it aloud to one of his children who was laid up with a swelled face.  But, however introduced to his notice, the book made a deep impression on him.  In the following June he contributed to the Nineteenth Century an article on Ireland styled “The Incompatibles.”  In that article he suggests that the Irish dislike of England arises in part from the fact that “the Irish do not much come across our aristocracy, exhibiting that factor of civilization, the power of manners, which has undoubtedly a strong attraction for them.  What they do come across, and what gives them the idea they have of our civilization and its promise, is our Middle Class.”

The mention, so frequent in his writings, of “our Middle Class,” seems to demand a definition; and, admitting that in this country the Middle Class has no naturally defined limits, and that it is difficult to say who properly belong to it and who do not, he adopts an educational test.  The Middle Class means the people who are brought up at a particular kind of school, and to illustrate that kind of school he has recourse to his newly-discovered treasure.  “Much as I have published, I do not think it has ever yet happened to me to comment in print upon any production of Charles Dickens.  What a pleasure to have the opportunity of praising a work so sound, a work so rich in merit, as David Copperfield!...  Of the contemporary rubbish which is shot so plentifully all round us, we can, indeed, hardly read too little.  But to contemporary work so good as David Copperfield we are in danger of perhaps not paying respect enough, of reading it (for who could help reading it?) too hastily, and then putting it aside for something else and forgetting it.  What treasures of gaiety, invention, life, are in that book! what alertness