bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.

[2] _Glen Desseray and other Poems_. By John Campbell Shairp,
London, 1888. P. 218.

[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is
neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only
indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following
sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,--the slow and reluctant
acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal
to give Browning, even after _Bells and Pomegranates_, a fair
hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin
among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of
erratic genius like _Lavengro_; the ignoring of work of such
combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_. For a sort of
quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford
(himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's
_Life_ of the latter, i. 387.

[4] This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.

[5] "What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which,
though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those
in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
in poetry is painful also."

[6] "The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do."--_Sydney Smith
to Jeffrey_.

CHAPTER II.

LIFE FROM 1851-62--SECOND SERIES OF _POEMS_--_MEROPE_--_ON TRANSLATING
HOMER_.

We must now return a little and give some account of Mr Arnold's
actual life, from a period somewhat before that reached at the end of
the last chapter. The account need not be long, for the life, as has
been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is
necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an
account of his work, which, for nine of the eleven years we shall
cover, was, though interesting, of much less interest than that of
those immediately before and those immediately succeeding.

One understands at least part of the reason for the gradual drying up
of his poetic vein from a