In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the “ideal Shelley,” “the delightful Shelley,” “the friend of the unfriended poor,” the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery of the medium of sounds, and the “natural magic in his rhythm.”  But then he adds this salutary caution:  “Let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley’s have no effect upon a man’s poetry.  The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either.”  In poetry, as in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel.”

And just as, in Arnold’s view, moral defects in an author were apt to mar the perfection of his work, so an author’s moral virtues might ennoble and enlarge his authorship.  Hear him on his friend Arthur Clough:  “He possessed, in an eminent degree, these two invaluable literary qualities:  a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it.  He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first.  He greatly developed the first through means of the second.  In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for the object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal.  His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness.  In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled.  He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised.  Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his.  His poem, The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, has some admirable Homeric qualities—­out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity.  Some of the expressions in that poem ... come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring.  But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life.”

We have seen more than once that, according to Arnold, poetry was a criticism of life; but he always maintained that this was true of poetry only because poetry is part of literature, and all literature was a criticism of life.  One may demur to the statement as greatly too unguarded in its terms, but certainly he was true to his own doctrine, and in practice, from first to last, he used literature as a medium for criticising the life and conduct of his fellow-men.  In the last year of his life he produced with approbation “a favourite saying of Ptolemy the astronomer, which Bacon quotes in its Latin version thus:—­Quum fini appropinquas, bonum cum augmento operare”—­“As you draw near to your latter end, redouble your efforts