s of modern English essayists the least dogmatic. With fixed
principles of art and very decided views of his own he combines a
tolerance and a flexibility of mind which are very un-English. He is the
least insular of his countrymen. It cannot be said of him, as he himself
has said of Carlyle, that, with all his genius, he "has for the
functions of the critic a little too much of the self-will and
eccentricities of a genuine son of Great Britain." And yet, un-British
as he is in these respects, Arnold, in one thing, is more national far
than Carlyle,--in the manner, namely, in which he chooses to express his
thought. Though deeply conversant with German literature, (as he is with
French,) he has not suffered himself to be bitten with the Teutomania
which infects so unpleasantly the diction of his self-willed
countryman,--making his sentences seem like translations from Jean Paul,
rather than utterances conceived in an English mind. He unites
cosmopolitan liberality with English self-possession.

As a stylist, he is singularly inartificial. Would that our American
writers might take a lesson from Arnold's prose, and correct their
ambitious rhetoric, affected quaintness, and other varieties of fine
writing, by this pure, simple, honest English. The peculiarity of his
style, we should say, is its freedom from peculiarity. It is the style
of a cultivated, thoughtful man, without the pedantry and mannerism
which thoughtful and cultivated men so often contract. Easy, almost
careless in its movement, but far from careless in its choice of words,
it is neither bookish nor vulgarly colloquial, but maintains a just mean
between elaborateness and rudeness. In our young days Macaulay was
considered the model writer, and Ruskin has been thought to occupy that
place in these latter years; but Macaulay is tumid, and even Ruskin
stilted and stiff, in comparison with Matthew Arnold.

For the matter, here are fourteen essays, including the three lectures,
"On translating Homer," and the "Last Words," not ponderously and
oppressively learned, and not abstrusely and obtrusively philosophical,
but as full of wisdom and intellectual stimulus and graceful humor as
any we know, and more tolerant and liberal than most,--together with a
preface as entertaining as any of the essays. So healthy and nourishing
a book, in the way of literary essays, has not for a long while appeared
among us. We are far from assenting to all of Professor Arnold's
po