nd it among the people
he abused. The barbarians, as he called the aristocracy, were not
likely to pay heed to a professor of poetry. Our working classes
were not readers of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ or purchasers of
four-and-sixpenny tracts bound in white cloth. No; it was the middle
class, to whom Mr. Arnold himself belonged, who took him to honest
hearts, stuck his photograph upon their writing-tables, and sounded
his praises so loudly that his fame even reached the United States of
America, where he was promptly invited to lecture, an invitation he
accepted. But for the middle classes Mr. Arnold would have had but a
poor time of it. They did not mind being insulted; they overlooked
exaggeration; they pardoned ignorance--in a word, they proved
teachable. Yet, though meek in spirit, they have not yet inherited the
earth; indeed, there are those who assert that their chances are gone,
their sceptre for ever buried. It is all over with the middle-class.
Tuck up its muddled head! Tie up its chin!

A rabble of bad writers may now be noticed pushing their vulgar way
along, who, though born and bred in the middle classes, and disfigured
by many of the very faults Mr. Arnold deplored, yet make it a test of
their membership, an 'open sesame' to their dull orgies, that all
decent, sober-minded folk, who love virtue, and, on the whole, prefer
delicate humour to sickly lubricity, should be labelled 'middle
class.'

Politically, it cannot but be noticed that, for good or for ill, the
old middle-class audience no longer exists in its integrity. The
crowds that flocked to hear Cobden and Bright, that abhorred slavery,
that cheered Kossuth, that hated the income-tax, are now watered down
by a huge population who do not know, and do not want to know, what
the income-tax is, but who do want to know what the Government is
going to do for them in the matter of shorter hours, better wages, and
constant employment. Will the rabble, we wonder, prove as teachable as
the middle class? Will they consent to be told their faults as meekly?
Will they buy the photograph of their physician, or heave half a brick
at him? It remains to be seen. In the meantime it would be a mistake
to assume that the middle class counts for nothing, even at an
election. As to ideas, have we got any new ones since 1871? 'To be
consequent and powerful,' says Arminius, 'men must be bottomed on some
vital idea or sentiment which lends strength and certainty to their
ac