riage, that word "delicacy," which so powerfully affected the Paris correspondent, is the key to a great deal of what Arnold felt and wrote. In the sphere of conduct he set up, as we have seen, two supreme objects for veneration and attainment: Chastity and Charity. He practised them, he taught them, and he used them as decisive tests of what was good and what was bad in national life. But plainly there are large tracts of existence which lie outside the purview of these two virtues. There is the domain of honesty, integrity, and fair dealing; there is a loyalty to truth, the pursuit of conscience at all costs and hazards; there is all that is contained in the idea of beauty, propriety, and taste. None of these are touched by charity or chastity. For example, a man may have an unblemished life and a truly affectionate heart; and yet he may be incorrigible in money-matters, or be ready to sacrifice principle to convenience, or, like our great Middle Class generally, may be serenely content with hideousness and bad

manners.

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 "will respect in itself the sense of delicacy not less than the sense of honesty.

said,

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 εύφνής is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the ȧovns 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 inaccesible 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 in a grandee,"