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AN ESSAY IN

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM

AND

SELECTIONS

Property of

Princeton University

Library

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

་་་

WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY

CHARLES F. MCCLUMPHA, M. A., PH. D.

UNIVERSIT

MINNEAPOLIS

THE H. W. WILSON COMPANY

1903

PREFATORY NOTE.

These selections from Arnold's works are made primarily for students of English prose. And in making these selections it has been thought best to print Culture and Anarchy in its entirety. Culture was Arnold's central theme. It has been called his gospel. In every department of human thought and action, critical, literary, religious, political, social, he aimed to convince men of the value of "culture." His treatment of culture, therefore, has become a subject with which the name of Arnold will ever be associated.

The other selections are as follows: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (Essays in Criticism. First Series.), Equality (Mixed Essays, Etc.), Literature and Science (Discourses in America.), and The Grand Style, an extract (On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer.).

A list of the main publications by Arnold, together with a series of essays on Arnold's prose, will be found in the valuable and interesting Introduction written by Mr. Lewis E. Gates and printed in his Selections from Matthew Arnold.

The text followed is that of the Macmillan edition of Arnold's works. C. F. MCCLUMPHA.

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PREFACE.

(1869.)

My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In the essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson quoted. To me and to the members of the Society. for Promoting Christian Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt, familiar. But the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have invented him. At a moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martin's Hall and the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their pulpit-eloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights should not only have, in general, a very low opinion of the preachers of the

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