The immense work which is for literature to accomplish. This work, lying between the work of Religion and the work of Science, was, in his view, nothing less than the culture of Humanity.  Religion had its sphere, and Science had its sphere, but culture was to be effected neither by Religion nor by Science, but by Literature.  The literature which he extolled was literature in its widest sense—­ancient and modern, English and Continental, Occidental and Oriental—­whatever contained “the best which had been thought and said in the world.”  And, when we come to the sub-divisions of literature, we note that he was pre-eminently a classicist.  This he was partly by temperament, partly by training, partly by his matured and deliberate judgment.  It can scarcely be doubted that he had an innate love of perfect form, an innate “sentiment against hideousness and rawness,” and so he was a classicist by temperament.  Then his training was essentially classical.  He used to protest, with amusing earnestness, against the notion that his father had been a bad scholar.  “People talk the greatest nonsense about my father’s scholarship.  The Wykehamists of his day were excellent scholars.  Dr. Gabell made them so.  My father’s Latin verses were not good; but that was because he was not poetical—­not because he was a bad scholar.  But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his Greek prose, you couldn’t tell it from Thucydides.”  In this kind of scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous study.  His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps wider in Greek than in Latin, though the soundness of his Latin scholarship is proved by the fact that he was proxime for the Hertford Scholarship at Oxford.  He had read Plato in the Sixth Form at Rugby, and Oxford taught him Aristotle.  From first to last his “unapproachable favourites” were Homer and Sophocles, and Hesiod was “a Greek friend to whom he turned with excellent effect.”  But though he was thus essentially a classicist, a mere classicist he was not.  No one had a wider, a more familiar, a more discriminating knowledge of English literature; no one—­and this is worthy of remark—­had the text of the Bible more perfectly at his fingers’ ends.  He had read all that was best in French, German, and Italian;[16] and in French at any rate he was an exact and judicious critic, as is sufficiently shown by his essay on The French Play in London.[17] Hebrew he mastered sufficiently to “follow and weigh the reasons offered by others” for a retranslation of the Old Testament; and into Celtic literature he made at any rate one memorable incursion.[18]