not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the
very contempt of "subject," the very quips and cranks and caprices
that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and
the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth
to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the
world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the
representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century
proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is
not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach
enthusiasm--not merely _engouement_ on the one side or serene
approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for
his "modern spirit" (why, _O Macaree_, as his friend Maurice de
Guerin might have said, should a modern spirit be better than an
ancient one, or what is either before the Eternal?) instead of for
what has been, conceitedly it may be, called the "tear-dew and
star-fire and rainbow-gold" of his phrase and verse. He felt this
magic at any rate. No matter that he applies the wrong comparison
instead of the right one, and depreciates French in order to exalt
German, instead of thanking Apollo for these two good different
things. The root of the matter is the right root, a discriminating
enthusiasm: and the flower of the matter is one of the most charming
critical essays in English. It is good, no doubt, to have made up
one's mind about Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost envies
those who were led to that enchanted garden by so delightful an
interpreter.

Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must
always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet,
I believe, of some very excellent judges, on "Pagan and Mediaeval
Religious Sentiment," with its notable translation of Theocritus and
its contrast with St Francis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was
not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the
other; indeed, he never was well read in mediaeval literature. But his
thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of
military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge
of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with
incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather
doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens mediaeval life
more than rather unfairly, but with such a lig