less happy or
less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the
first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel's talent, his
really remarkable power of literary criticism.

But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It will have been
observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to
the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the
_causerie_ and farther from the abstract critical essay,--that he had
taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed
critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent
it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described
as "intensely irritating." Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are
irritating to certain classes of consumers. He had from the first done
this well, he now did it consummately. That he took occasion, in the
paper on Shelley's life which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ for
January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley's poetry, matters
nothing at all. It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is
made to support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is quite
different. Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr
Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a
certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and
morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and
a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck
more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the
moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an
unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its
composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on
them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had
enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author's, and is
conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and
other mannerisms. No English writer--indeed one may say no writer at
all--has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect
good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with
an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much
lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman--which may also be
said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of
indignation--honest and healthy, but possibly just
_plusquam