e and
Germany," we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only
one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre
of a dozen Englishmen--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray,
Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany,
further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two,
great writers of the second class: and we say, "Either your 'living
intellectual instrument' is a juggle of words, or you really are
neglecting fact." Many--very many--similar retorts are possible; and
the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr
Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English
hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he
turns out from his own stables for our inspection.

But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this,
which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the
book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal
influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same
quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical
generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree
to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and
directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the
wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be
eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the
clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what
followed was directly due to him.

The non-literary events of his life during this period were
sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the
domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858,
perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the
late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next
spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a
roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to
report on elementary education. "Foreign life," he says, with that
perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, "is still to
me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree." And he was
duly "presented" at home, in order that he might be presentable
abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them
recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that
death of his brother Will