Clearness is indeed his own most conspicuous note, and to clearness he added singular grace, great skill in phrase-making, great aptitude for beautiful description, perfect naturalness, absolute ease.  The very faults which the lovers of a more pompous rhetoric profess to detect in his writing are the easy-going fashions of a man who wrote as he talked.  The members of a college which produced Cardinal Newman, Dean Church, and Matthew Arnold are not without some justification when they boast of “the Oriel style.”

But style, though a great delight and a great power, is not everything, and we must not found our claim for him as a prose-writer on style alone.  His style was the worthy and the suitable vehicle of much of the very best criticism which English literature contains.  We take the whole mass of his critical writing, from the Lectures on Homer and the Essays in Criticism down to the Preface to Wordsworth and the Discourse on Milton; and we ask, Is there anything better?

When he wrote as a critic of books, his taste, his temper, his judgment were pretty nearly infallible.  He combined a loyal and reasonable submission to literary authority with a free and even daring use of private judgment.  His admiration for the acknowledged masters of human utterance—­Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe—­was genuine and enthusiastic, and incomparably better informed than that of some more conventional critics.  Yet this cordial submission to recognized authority, this honest loyalty to established reputation, did not blind him to defects, did not seduce him into indiscriminate praise, did not deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excessive blankness of much of Wordsworth’s blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Ruskin’s etymology.  And, as in great matters, so in small.  Whatever literary production was brought under his notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent.  He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick eye for minor merits of facility and method, a severe intolerance of turgidity and inflation—­of what he called “desperate endeavours to render a platitude endurable by making it pompous,” and a lively horror of affectation and unreality.  These, in literature as in life, were in his eyes the unpardonable sins.

On the whole it may be said that, as a critic of books, he had in his lifetime the reputation, the vogue, which he deserved.  But his criticism in other fields has hardly been appreciated at its proper value.  Certainly his politics were rather fantastic.  They were influenced by his father’s fiery but limited Liberalism, by the abstract speculation which flourishes perennially at Oxford, and by the cultivated Whiggery which he imbibed as Lord Lansdowne’s Private Secretary; and the result often seemed wayward and whimsical.  Of this he was himself in some degree aware.  At any rate he knew perfectly that