isadvantage to him--that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very
serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere
railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and
apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme--at his gospel--there
is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many
impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite
doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided
middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if
they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling
the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the
rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with
the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil
War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home
from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover
any way of safety in _Friendship's Garland_.

Nor, to take with the _Garland_ for convenience sake _Irish
Essays_, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the
political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even
long after "the Wilderness" had been mostly left behind. There is
indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had
silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays
in "three-decker" reviews--of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech
at the greatest public school in the world--discouraged the
playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish
young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness--not in the
Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense--is more glaring than
ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of _An
Unregarded Irish Grievance_ is occupied by a long-drawn-out
comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone
and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first
place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in _Friendship's Garland_
about "Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion
from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what
principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere
illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out
and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.

And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in
substance. Minor contradicti