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best that is known and thought in the world. He claims a high 

 place for Letters or Literature, that is, the side which engages our 

 feelings and imagination, as against the pretensions of Theology 

 which is in favour of dogma, and of Science which is the side that 

 engages owe faculty of exact knowledge. Mr. Arnold thinks the 

 theologians of the day are wrong because they present religious 

 things in a scientific instead of a literary way. If there is any- 

 thing with which metaphysics have nothing to do, and where a 

 plain man ought to find himself at home, it is religion. The 

 object of religion is conduct ; and conduct is the simplest thing 

 in the world. That is to say, it is the simplest thing so far as 

 understanding it is concerned: asregards doing, it is the hardest 

 thing in the world. Theologians with their dogmas and abstruse 

 speculations have little influence upon conduct, and fail to aid 

 and spread righteousness. Like most thinkers and philosophers, 

 Mr. Arnold's writings are variations on a few leading ideas. For 

 over forty years he has held up a high idea to his felloAV- country- 

 men ; and as he said at Ipswich, in an address to a working-men's 

 college in 1880, '' we are always the better, all of us, for having 

 aimed high, for having striven to see and to know things as they 

 really are, for having set ourselves to walk in the Ught of that 

 knowledge, to help forward great designs, and to do good. ' Con- 

 sider whereunto ye are born ! Ye were not made to live like 

 brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.' " 



To pass from Matthew Arnold, the prose writer, and, to 

 some extent, the controversialist, to Matthew Arnold, the poet, 

 is a great change. If the prose and poetry were published with- 

 out the author's name, a reader might be fairly excused if he 

 attributed them to two different authors. The prose lives in an 

 atmosphere of eager vitaUty and strenuousness ; the poems have 

 an air of reflective repose, of melancholy, and of undisturbable 

 calm. It is diificult to fix Mr. Arnold's relative or actual position 

 as a poet. An accomplished writer in the Athenmtm, reviewing 

 the latest issue of his collected Poems, said, " One reads them 

 for the fiftieth time, and for the fiftieth time one feels inchned 

 to esteem their author for the chief of living poets." None but a 

 very devoted Arnoldian would tie himself down to such a decision. 

 For certain great qualities of art and inspiration, however, Mr. 

 Arnold stands alone amongst living poets. But his range is 

 limited, and he sounds few of the notes in the gamut of human 

 life. More perhaps than any other English poet he is the poet 

 of precision. He has affinities with Gray, who paints with the 

 same lucid touch, but with less richness of impression, and less 

 originality. Gray is full of beauty, but his pictures are rather 

 conventional. Mr. Arnold sees vividly, and rarely paints a lovely 

 scene without some phrase which adds to one's knowledge of its 

 charm. Take, for example, the fine stanzas in Thyrsis on the 



