his politics were lightly esteemed by politicians, and, half jokingly, half seriously, he used to account for the fact by that jealousy of an outsider’s interference, which is natural to all professional men.  Yet he had the keenest interest, not only in the deeper problems of politics, but also in the routine and mechanism of the business.  He enjoyed a good debate, liked political society, and was interested in the personalities, the trivialities, the individual and domestic ins-and-outs, which make so large a part of political conversation.

But, after all, Politics, in the technical sense, did not afford a suitable field for his peculiar gifts.  It was when he came to the criticism of national life that the hand of the master was felt.  In all questions affecting national character and tendency, the development of civilization, public manners, morals, habits, idiosyncrasies, the influence of institutions, of education, of literature, his insight was penetrating, his point of view perfectly original, and his judgment, if not always sound, invariably suggestive.  These qualities, among others, gave to such books as Essays in Criticism, Friendship’s Garland, and Culture and Anarchy, an interest and a value quite independent of their literary merit.  And they are displayed in their most serious and deliberate form, dissociated from all mere fun and vivacity, in his Discourses in America.  This, he told the present writer, was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most desired to be remembered.  It was a curious and memorable choice.

Another point of great importance in his prosewriting is this; if he had never written prose the world would never have known him as a humorist.  And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily estimated.  How pure, how delicate, yet how natural and spontaneous his humour was, his friends and associates knew well; and—­what is by no means always the case—­the humour of his writing was of exactly the same tone and quality as the humour of his conversation.  It lost nothing in the process of transplantation.  As he himself was fond of saying, he was not a popular writer, and he was never less popular than in his humorous vein.  In his fun there is no grinning through a horse-collar, no standing on one’s head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and “full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar.”  But there is a keen eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is pungent.  Sydney Smith spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as “abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule.”  The words not inaptly describe Arnold’s method of handling personal and literary pretentiousness.