mind it the least; they like it, and this is much in its favour." A habit thus early formed grew upon him, until for the appropriate Biblical passage the reader came to look as naturally as for the inevitable fling at the Philistines. It figures alike in theological discourse and political tractate, in critical essay and school report, and not unseldom he relied upon an attractive text to cover the deficiencies of an argument which otherwise might have failed to impress. Yet all was done with an utter absence of affectation; the absolute sincerity of the man and his freedom from the slightest suspicion of cant gave naturalness and distinction to a practice which in others might have been intolerable.

Which is Arnold's best prose work? Since he himself seems to have had periodical favourites it cannot be expected that even his closest readers will agree. To his sister he wrote on October 8, 1884, that some chapters in God and the Bible he found on then revising them to be “the best prose I have ever succeeded in writing." That, however, was a criticism of style rather than of subject-matter. Again, of Literature and Dogma he says, in the latest Preface to that work, that it is "of all my books in prose the one most important (if I may say so) and most capable of being useful." For just as Goethe liked to think in old age that his Theory of Colours would perpetuate his name when his poems had been forgotten, so Arnold at times seemed to value his contributions to theology, upon

which he could not claim to speak with special authority, more highly than his theories of education and culture, upon which his word carried the sanction of law. Finally we have it on the authority of Mr. George Russell that the year before his death (namely, in 1887) he declared that Discourses in America" was the book by which, of all his prose writings, he should most wish to be remembered." And yet there must be many admirers of Arnold to whom Culture and Anarchy will appear to be the book which his country and his countrymen most needed from his pen, and who will unreservedly endorse Kingsley's cryptic judgment upon it as "an exceeding wise and true book, and likely as such to be little listened to this autumn, but to sink into the ground and die and bear fruit next spring-when the spring comes."

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lating, upon none has he spoken to his countrymen more aptly and more seasonably-one wishes it might with equal truth be added, more persuasivelythan upon culture. "English civilisation," he writes in one place," the humanising, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society-that is what interests me." Certainly that is what interested him pre-eminently. It is possible that the distinction cannot be claimed for him that he enounces truths hitherto unregarded, but next to the creation of new ideals no higher service can be done for mankind than to bring old ideals to light. This was his great and worthy achievement. Culture has had its apostles, its saints, even its martyrs, in every era-men who have themselves resolutely lived the life of the spirit and have affirmed unwearyingly its claims and its high dignity. Nor has there ever been a period

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in our own history, since the torch of progress was lighted at the Renaissance, when culture has ceased to be regarded as a supreme national concern. Successive ages may have applied themselves to the pursuit of knowledge with varying degrees of ardour and absorption, but where the movement of civilisation has been

7 temporarily impeded or threatened the hindrances have, as a rule, been external rather than developments of the national life itself.

What, then, gave Arnold's advocacy of culture its peculiar timeliness and value? Chiefly the occurrence and the influence of two antecedent events, one political and the other social, which have contributed very largely to the making and moulding of modern England. The first was the change in the balance of political power brought about by franchise legislation early in the 'thirties, and the other was the concurrent final triumph of industrialism. The Reform Act of 1832 may be said to have discovered the middle class, as a supplementary statute of the 'eighties brought into full light the working class. Before that Act was passed the middle class was neither worse nor better, neither less intelligent nor more, than after it, yet it played but a secondary and feeble part on the visible stage of the national life. Commercially it was of some account; socially it was still negligible; politically its chief interest for the ruling class hitherto had been its serviceability in perpetuating, in a day when voters were everywhere few and most men had their price,

the aristocratic basis of government. But while the middle class was thus comparatively impotent in public affairs, it was, thanks to its instinct for trade and industry, winning for itself an economic position of growing influence. The factory system, which in the absence of regulative laws was being built up upon the physical wreck and the moral degradation of the manual workers, evolved an essentially modern type of life and character, a type in which elemental energy and rude force of will were combined with an engrossing material ambition which set no bounds to its endeavour. Side by side with the new industrialists grew also in numbers and in strength the old trading and merchant class, stimulated by expanding markets at home and the discovery of fresh fields to conquer abroad, and from the natural alliance of these two social elements, drawn together by common interests and ideals, proceeded a new and homogeneous middleclass consciousness which was destined to influence powerfully the national life and thought in many directions.

But while the mercantile middle class was accumulating wealth with a rapidity unknown before, and while it was thus acquiring a unique political standing, in education it still kept deplorably behind. More and more power was passing from the aristocratic class to the class below, yet the new wealth lacked the Iold refinement, the new repository of political and social influence lacked the balance, the dignity, the