It is not therefore the actual fate of Empedocles which fails to interest us, but we are unable to feel that Mr. Arnold’s account of him is the true account.  In the absence of authentic material, the artist who hopes to interest us in his fate must at least make the story probable as he tells it; consistent in itself, with causes clearly drawn out proportioned to the effects resulting from them.  And this it cannot be said that Mr. Arnold has done.  Powerful as is much of the language which he places in the mouth of Empedocles, he has failed to represent him as in a condition in which suicide is the natural result.  His trials, his disgusts, as far as he exhibits them, are not more than man may naturally be supposed able to bear, while of the impulses of a more definite character there is no trace at all.  But a more grave deficiency still is, that among all the motives introduced, there is not one to make the climb of AEtna necessary or intelligible.  Empedocles on AEtna might have been Empedocles in his room at Catana, and a dagger or a cup of hemlock would have answered all purposes equally well with a plunge in the burning crater.  If the tradition of Empedocles is a real story of a thing which really happened, we may feel sure that some peculiar feeling connected with the mountain itself, some mystical theory or local tradition, led such a man as he was to such a means of self-immolation.

We turn from Empedocles, which perhaps it is scarcely fair to have criticised, to the first poem in the latest edition, “Sohrab and Rustum,” (Poems.  By Matthew Arnold.  A New Edition, London:  1853.) a poem which alone would have settled the position which Mr. Arnold has a right to claim as a poet, and which is remarkable for its success in every point in which Empedocles appears deficient.  The story comes down out of remote Persian antiquity; it is as old, perhaps it is older, than the tale of Troy; and, like all old stories which have survived the changes of so long a time, is in itself of singular interest.  Rustum, the Hercules of the East, fell in with and loved a beautiful Tartar woman.  He left her, and she saw him no more; but in time a child was born, who grew up with the princes of his mother’s tribe, and became in early youth distinguished in all manly graces and noblenesses.  Learning that he was the son of the great Rustum, his object is to find his father, and induce him, by some gallant action, to acknowledge and receive him.  War breaks out between the Tartars and the Persians.  The two armies come down upon the Oxus, and Sohrab having heard that Rustum had remained behind in the mountains, and was not present, challenges the Persian chief.  Rustum, unknown to Sohrab, had in the meantime joined the army, and against a warrior of Sohrab’s reputation, no one could be trusted to maintain the Persian cause except the old hero.  So by a sad perversity of fate, and led to it by their very greatness, the father and the son meet in battle, and only recognize