kle, Murdstone, Quinion--Quinion,
Murdstone, Creakle--is inartistic and irritating. But from the
philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No
Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take,
Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic
exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual
reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest
companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in
particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly
that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a _comparse_ or
"super" that to base any generalisation on him is absurd. The dislike
of the British public to be "talked book to" may be healthy or
unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book,
small blame to it! The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful,
neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr Arnold (to his credit
be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881. But his own
panaceas--a sort of Cadi-court for "bag-and-baggaging" bad landlords,
and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism--were, at least, no
better, and went, if it were possible, even more in the teeth of
history.

It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological licence for the
sake of logical coherence) to say a few words on the other political
and quasi-political pieces reprinted with _Irish Essays_--the address
to Ipswich working men, _Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes_, the Eton speech
on _Eutrapelia_, and the ambitious _Future of Liberalism_[2] The first
is a curious but not very important appeal to the lower class to
educate the middle, with episodic praises of "equality," "academies,"
and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of
"municipalisation," which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has
come about since. The second contains some admirable remarks on
classical education, some still more admirable protests against
reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the
famous discourse on _Eutrapelia_, with its doctrine that "conduct is
three-fourths of life," its denunciation of "moral inadequacy," and
its really great indications of societies dying of the triumph of
Liberalism and Conservatism respectively. A discourse quite admirable
in intention, though if "heckling" had been in order on that occasion,
a sharp youth might have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by as