most remarkable
function--such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated
before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not
been repeated since. _Essays in Criticism_, let us repeat, is a
book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and
place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn
unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither.

Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same
_lustrum_, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography
proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this
period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all
the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very
first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical
interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in
August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog
attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly
low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very
little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December
danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that
"it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see
Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or
third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"--that time so
fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is
followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is
difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving;
perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.

The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, where like other
people he found "the crowd very good-humoured," are noted; and the
beginning of _Thyrsis_ where and while the fritillaries blow. But
from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than
a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14,
1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of
which was offered for his lecture--later the well-known essay. His
object, he says, "is not so much to give a literary history of Heine's
work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special
tendency and significance of what he did." He will, therefore, not
even read these things of Heine's that he has not read, but will take
the _Romancero_ alone for his text, with a few quotations from
e