Now in all these departments of human life, less important indeed than the two chiefest, but surely not unimportant, Arnold applied the criterion of delicacy.  “A finely-touched nature,” he said, “will respect in itself the sense of delicacy not less than the sense of honesty....  The worship of sharp bargains is fatal to delicacy; nor is that missing grace restored by accompanying the sharp bargain with an exhibition of fine sentiments.”  Then, again, as regards loyalty to conviction, he knew full well that, in Newman’s phrase, he might “have saved himself many a scrape, if he had been wise enough to hold his tongue.”  “The thought of you,” he wrote to Mr. Morley, “and of one or two other friends, was often present to me in America, and, no doubt, contributed to make me hold fast to ‘the faith once delivered to the Saints.’” The slightest deviation from the line of clear conviction—­the least turning to left or right in order to cocker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter a class, showed a want of delicacy—­a preference of present popularity to permanent self-respect—­which he could never have indulged in himself, and with difficulty tolerated in others.  He had nothing but contempt for “philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn.”  And then, again, in the whole of that great sphere which belongs to Beauty, Propriety, and Taste, his sense of delicacy was always at work, and not seldom in pain.  “Ah,” he exclaimed, quoting from Rivarol, “no one considers how much pain any man of taste has to suffer, before ever he inflicts any.”  To inflict pain was not, indeed, in his way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot.  From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life.  “The [Greek:  euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek:  aphnes] on the other hand is our Philistine.”  “I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can give light.”  “Oxford by her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty.”  In his constant quest for these glorious things—­beauty, colour, sweetness, and light,—­his sense of delicacy had much to undergo; for, in the class with which he was by the work of his life brought in contact, they were unknown and unimagined; and the only class where “elegance and refinement, beauty and grace” were found, was inaccessible to Light.  In both classes he found free scope for his doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for “living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of ’Marine Retreat’”; another, preaching that “a piano in a Quaker’s drawing-room is a step for him to more humane life;” and again “liking and respecting polite tastes