sions de voyage_, for
the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling
correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold
was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the
vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his
prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters,
as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of
thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance,
in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong
desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:

'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and
professing to believe what they do not, the running blindly
together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if
they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of
the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such
scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.

It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the
rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years
has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest
and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of
insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not
many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd
of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always
beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.'
He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the
English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and
intelligence decidedly superior'--an opinion which contradicts his
previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a
lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he
may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the
French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed
ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by
his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the
gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed
to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among
Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he
writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great
elements of cohesi