viduals, in both nonconformists and aristocracy. Clearly such a conclusion can be none of our own seeking.

Then again, to remedy our inequality, there must be a change in the law of bequest, as there has been in France; and the faults and inconveniences of the present French law of bequest are obvious. It tends to over-divide property; it is unequal in operation, and can be eluded by people limiting their families; it makes the children, however ill they may behave, independent of the parent. To be sure, Mr. Mill1 and others have shown that a law of bequest fixing the maximum, whether of land or money, which any one individual may take by bequest or inheritance, but in other respects leaving the testator quite free, has none of the inconveniences of the French law, and is in every way preferable. But evidently these are not questions of practical politics. Just imagine Lord Hartington 2 going down to Glasgow, and meeting his Scotch Liberals there, and saying to them: "You are ill at ease, and you are calling for change, and very justly. But the cause of your being ill at ease is not what you suppose. The cause of your being ill at ease is the profound imperfectness of your social civilization. Your social civilization is, indeed, such as I forbear to characterize. But the remedy is not disestablishment. The remedy is social equality. Let me direct your attention to a reform in the law of bequest and entail." One can hardly speak of such a thing without laughing. No, the matter is at present one for the thoughts of those who think. It is a thing to be turned over in the minds of those who, on the one hand, have the spirit of scientific inquirers, bent on seeing things as they really are; and, on the other hand, the spirit of friends of the humane life, lovers of perfection. To

your thoughts I commit it. And perhaps, the more you think of it, the more you will be persuaded that Menander 1 showed his wisdom quite as much when he said Choose equality, as when he assured us that Evil communications corrupt good manners.

NOTES

POETRY AND THE CLASSICS

PAGE

1

1. Poetry and the Classics.

2

4

Published as Preface to Poems: 1853 (dated Fox How, Ambleside, October 1, 1853). It was reprinted in Irish Essays, 1882.

2. the poem. Empedocles on Etna.

3. the Sophists. "A name given by the Greeks about the middle of the fifth century B.C. to certain teachers of a superior grade who, distinguishing themselves from philosophers on the one hand and from artists and craftsmen on the other, claimed to prepare their pupils, not for any particular study or profession, but for civic life." Encyclopædia Britannica. 1. Poetics, 4.

2. Theognis, ll. 54-56.

I. "The poet," it is said. In the Spectator of April 2, 1853. The words quoted were not used with reference to poems of mine. [Arnold.]

5 1. Dido. See the Iliad, the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choëphora, and Eumenides) of Eschylus, and the Æneid.

2. Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, the Excursion. Long narrative poems by Goethe, Byron, Lamartine, and Wordsworth.

6 1. Edipus. See the Edipus Tyrannus and Edipus Coloneus of Sophocles.

7 1. grand style. Arnold, while admitting that the term grand style, which he repeatedly uses, is incapable of exact verbal definition, describes it most adequately in the essay On Translating Homer: "I think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject. ." See On the Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer, ed. 1895, pp. 264–69.

8

9

2. Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmæon. The story of Orestes was dramatized by Eschylus, by Sophocles, and by Euripides. Merope was the subject of a lost tragedy by Euripides and of several modern plays, including one by Matthew Arnold himself. The story of Alcmeon was the subject of several tragedies which have not been preserved.

1. Polybius. A Greek historian (c. 204-122 B.C.).

1. Menander. See Contribution of the Celts, Selections, Note 3, p. 177.

12 1. rien à dire. He says all that he wishes to, but unfortunately he has nothing to say.

13 I.

Boccaccio's Decameron, 4th day, 5th novel.

PAGE

2. Henry Hallam (1777-1859). English historian. See his Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, chap. 23, §§ 51, 52. 14 1. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), historian, orator, and statesman of France.

16

1. Pittacus, of Mytilene in Lesbos (c. 650-569 B.C.), was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. His favorite sayings were: It is hard to be excellent " χαλεπὸν ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι), and" Know when to act.'

17 1. Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) was a German statesman and historian. His Roman History (1827-32) is an epoch-making work. For his opinion of his age see his Life and Letters, London, 1852, 1, 396.

18

1. Eneid, XII, 894–95.

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME

20 1. Reprinted from The National Review, November, 1864, in the Essays in Criticism, Macmillan & Co., 1865. 2. In On Translating Homer, ed. 1903, pp. 216-17.

3. An essay called Wordsworth: The Man and the Poet, published in The North British Review for August, 1864, vol. 41. John Campbell Shairp (1819-85), Scottish critic and man of letters, was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1877 to 1884. The best of his lectures from this chair were published in 1881 as Aspects of Poetry.

4. I cannot help thinking that a practice, common in England during the last century, and still followed in France, of printing a notice of this kind, -a notice by a competent critic, to serve as an introduction to an eminent author's works, might be revived among us with advantage. To introduce all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, Mr. Shairp's notice might, it seems to me, excellently serve; it is written from the point of view of an admirer, nay, of a disciple, and that is right; but then the disciple must be also, as in this case he is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too often happens, some relation or friend with no qualification for his task except affection for his author. [Arnold.]

5. See Memoirs of William Wordsworth, ed. 1851, II, 151, letter to Bernard Barton.

1. Irene. An unsuccessful play of Dr. Johnson's.

1. Preface. Prefixed to the second edition (1800) of the Lyrical Ballads.

1. The old woman. At the first attempt to read the newly prescribed liturgy in St. Giles's Church, Edinburgh, on July 23, 1637, a riot took place, in which the "fauldstools," or folding stools, of the congregation were hurled as missiles. An untrustworthy tradition attributes the flinging of the first stool to a certain Jenny or Janet Geddes. 1. Pensées de J. Joubert, ed. 1850, 1, 355, titre 15, 2.