and Lord Granville.”  So it was to the shortcomings of the Middle Class, from which he professed to be sprung and which he so intimately knew, that he first addressed his social criticism.  The essay on “My Countrymen” immediately attracted notice.  It was fresh, it was lively, it put forth a new view, it gaily ran counter to the great mass of current prejudice.  He was frankly pleased by the way in which it was received.  It was noticed and quoted and talked about.  He reported to his mother that it was thought “witty and suggestive,” “timely and true.”  Carlyle “almost wholly approved of it,” and Bright was “full of it.”  He did not expect it to be liked by people who belonged to “the old English time, of which the greatness and success was so immense and indisputable that no one who flourished when it was at its height could ever lose the impression of it,” or realize how far we had fallen in Continental esteem.  His friend Lingen was “indignant” because he thought the essay exalted the Aristocracy at the expense of the Middle Class; and the Whig newspapers were “almost all unfavourable, because it tells disagreeable truths to the class which furnishes the great body of what is called the Liberal interest.”  From the foreign side came a criticism in the Pall Mall Gazette, “professing to be by a Frenchman,” but “I am sure it is by a woman I know something of in Paris, a half Russian, half Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman.”  The first part of this criticism “is not good, and perhaps when the second part appears I shall write a short and light letter by way of reply.”  That “short and light letter” appeared in the Pall Mall of March 20, 1866.  It dealt with the respective but not incompatible claims of Culture and Liberty—­the former so defective in England, the latter so abundant—­and it contained this aspiration for Englishmen of the Middle Class.  “I do not wish them to be the cafe-haunting, dominoes-playing Frenchmen, but some third thing:  neither the Frenchmen nor their present selves.”

He was now fairly launched on the course of social criticism.  As time went on, his essays attracted more and more notice, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, but always interested and not seldom excited.  Some of the comments on the new and daring critic were inconceivably absurd.  Of Mr. Frederic Harrison’s retort,[25] Arnold wrote that it was “scarcely the least vicious, and in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried.”  Mr. Goldwin Smith described him as “a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on good terms with the world.”  To the Times he seemed “a sentimentalist whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense and sturdy morality of his fellow-Englishmen.”  One newspaper called him “a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion”; another, “an elegant Jeremiah”; and Mr. Lionel Tollemache, combining in one harmonious whole the absurdities of all the other commentators, says:  “When asked my opinion of this quaint man of genius, I have described him as a Hebrew prophet in white kid gloves.”