His praise as a phrase-maker is in all the Churches of literature.  It was his skill in this respect which elicited the liveliest compliments from a transcendent performer in the same field.  In 1881 he wrote to his sister:  “On Friday night I had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield.  He ended by declaring that I was the only living Englishman who had become a classic in his own lifetime.  The fact is that what I have done in establishing a number of current phrases, such as Philistinism, Sweetness and Light, and all that is just the thing to strike him.”  In 1884 he wrote from America about his phrase, The Remnant—­“That term is going the round of the United States, and I understand what Dizzy meant when he said that I had performed ’a great achievement in launching phrases.’” But his wise epigrams and compendious sentences about books and life, admirable in themselves, will hardly recall the true man to the recollection of his friends so effectually as his sketch of the English Academy, disturbed by a “flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A.  Sala;” his comparison of Miss Cobbe’s new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel between Phidias’ statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles’ truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt’s attempt to “develop a system of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;” the “portly jeweller from Cheapside,” with his “passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life;” the grandiose war-correspondence of the Times, and “old Russell’s guns getting a little honey-combed;” Lord Lumpington’s subjection to “the grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum,” and the “feat of mental gymnastics” by which he obtained his degree; the Rev. Esau Hittall’s “longs and shorts about the Calydonian Boar, which were not bad;” the agitation of the Paris Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph on hearing the word “delicacy”; the “bold, bad men, the haunters of Social Science Congresses,” who declaim “a sweet union of philosophy and poetry” from Wordsworth on the duty of the State towards education; the impecunious author “commercing with the stars” in Grub Street, reading “the Star for wisdom and charity, the Telegraph for taste and style,” and looking for the letter from the Literary Fund, “enclosing half-a-crown, the promise of my dinner at Christmas, and the kind wishes of Lord Stanhope[3] for my better success in authorship.”

One is tempted to prolong this analysis of literary arts and graces; but enough has been said to recall some leading characteristics of Arnold’s genius in verse and prose.  We turn now to our investigation of what he accomplished.  The field which he included in his purview was wide—­almost as wide as our national life.  We will consider, one by one, the various departments of it in which his influence was most distinctly felt; but first of all a word must be said about his Method.

[Footnote 1:  Tennyson.]