suggestive and stimulating, that it has in it intellectual vitality a deep under-current of thought and life far below all that is visible, and giving to what we term expression its vivifying and effective force. Mr. Stedman speaks of Mr. Arnold as a "poet of the intellect." The appellation is in place relative to his prose. He generally gives us something that has cost him thought, and which is fitted thereby to awaken thought within us. How could a son of Dr. Thomas Arnold have failed to exhibit a masculine vigor of mind? There is in the style a kind of Gothic robustness, through the influence "of which it impresses itself upon the reader, and infuses into his being something of this same Teutonic spirit. Mr. Arnold had been, from his earliest intellectual life, an observer and inquirer, a reader and student and thinker. He had what he himself would call, "a scientific passion" for knowledge and for its communication to others. We have referred to a division of his prose works as educational. It is just to affirm that his style throughout has this educational and educating quality; that didactic character for which he so admired the poetry of Wordsworth. In the words of Montesquieu, it seeks "to render an intelligent being still more intelligent," and, in the truly Baconian spirit, to add somewhat to the sum of human truth. Our author, in commenting on the character of Burke, remarks "that he was so great because he brought thought to bear on politics." It is one of the most helpful services rendered by

Mr. Arnold that he has brought thought to bear on literature and style, lifting them from the low plane on which the French school of his day had placed them, and coördinating them with all the invigorating branches of mental life. "Let men say what they please," he writes, "if what they please to say is worth saying." He would endorse the sentiment of George Eliot in "Theophrastus Such": "Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact." Behind the word, as he holds, is the idea; behind the style is the subject-matter, and nothing is gained by any writer in substituting mere vocabulary for sense. The style is thus instructive and incitive. It often implies more than it fully unfolds, and serves to quicken within the reader a genuine literary impulse. It is the intellectual style as we have discussed it.

No one can read the prose of Mr. Arnold with carefulness and sympathetic attention, without becoming a wiser man, and without having awakened within him a desire to become even wiser still, along the lines of inquiry opened up before him by the author. His style has thus always been attractive to the intelligent classes of every community, to the well-bred and well-read. Among university and college men, Mr. Arnold has always found devoted admirers; not so much because he has written largely on university topics, but because he has written on most topics in the university manner. It is this intellectual element of style

which, after all, is its distinctive element, on the basis of which the prose we are examining may safely be commended to the thoughtful young men of the land. It will be an auspicious omen in our literary history, and of untold advantage to our college men, when such an order of reading as this will quite displace the miscellaneous literature of the hour, and those books be most eagerly sought which are the fullest of mental content.

We are speaking exclusively of our author's style, and not of his individual beliefs, when we thus emphasize the excellence of his prose as a vigorous protest against all that is superficial. Few of us cannot but regret that Mr. Arnold has not confined himself more closely to strictly literary themes, of which he is an accredited master, and has essayed so frequently to play the part of a doctrinal disputant in regions of inquiry where, in thought and style, he has appeared at his worst. Though Principal Fairbairn and others have called attention to the vogue into which Mr. Arnold's theological writings have come, we cannot but rejoice that his "Last Essays on the Church and Religion" were, indeed, the last on such a line of topics, and that his attention was more discreetly directed to essays on criticism and culture. Within his proper sphere, he is unique and able, so as to have become, at the time of his premature death, a conspicuous exponent of modern thought as expressed in modern literature. His "Posthumous Essays" confirm such a view.

In speaking thus of our author's legitimate province as a thinker and writer, we are led to mark what we must regard as the mental narrowness of his outlook. Mr. Stedman has called our attention to the "limitations" of Mr. Arnold's poetic power, his want of "lightness of touch" and of "range of affections." In the study of his prose, we may consistently speak of the limitation of his intellectual range. His reach of mind, at the farthest, was restricted. In his vision of truth, at the longest, he was somewhat near-sighted, and failed to cover that spacious area of inquiry which it is the prerogative of genius to compass. We shall probably encounter, at this point, the decided opposition of many of our readers, or, at least, be told that, if the mental breadth of our author's style is an open question at all, he must have the benefit of the doubt. We hold, however, to the assertion made, and hold it as fully accordant with all that has been said by way of praise as to the clearness, finish, critical perception, and general intellectual suggestiveness of his style. These are all possible features apart from great breadth of mental vision, while the over-clearness and over-culture and dogmatic assertion to which we have referred, are proof in point of this very limitation of faculty.

Mr. Arnold's style is not, in the fullest sense of the words, philosophic, far-reaching, and catholic. Though not superficial, it is not profound; and while contributing, as far it goes, to genuine mental impulse, it has not that "mental stretch" in it

which marks the seer. As already stated, Mr. Arnold was a man of letters, a student of style, a literary critic. He has said, perhaps, more than he meant to say, when he wrote in "Literature and Dogma" "For the good of letters is that they require no extraordinary acuteness, such as is required to handle the theory of causation, and letters, therefore, meet in us a greater want than does logic." True or false, this is the author's view of the mental requisition of letters as a branch of liberal learning, and is the view which his prose illustrates. The central word of his vocabulary is culture, and though he defines it to be "an harmonious expansion of all the powers," it is strikingly apparent that the expansion is but partial. In this respect, at least, the great Master of Rugby is his superior, in that wide-eyed view of thought and life that takes in everything within the visible horizon, and even peers beyond it.

Here, as we believe, lies the main explanation of the fact that Mr. Arnold, in his prose, is an essayist, and nothing more. Whatever the particular form in which his writings are published, their original form was that of the essay or dissertation, as distinct from the book proper, with its exhaustive discussion of the subject in hand. Conceding to the essay all that has historically been claimed for it, or that can legitimately be given it, it is not the book proper, any more than one of Milton's sonnets is to be classified as a lyric with "Comus," or than an heroic ode, such as, "Alexander's Feast," is an