too solid flesh of English society."

[Illustration: Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College, Oxford

Showing Matthew Arnold's Rooms

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

So much for his first deliberate attempt in the way of social criticism.
It was levelled, we observe, at the thoughts and doings of the great
Middle Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially
the target for his scorn. To that class, as he was fond of declaring,
half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged. "I always thought
my marriage," he used to say, "such a perfect marriage of the Middle
Classes--a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to
the _Essays in Criticism_, he spoke of "the English Middle Class, of
which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling
towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards
his brethren of Israel: "My heart's desire and prayer for them is that
they may be saved." In _Culture and Anarchy_ he was constrained to admit
that "through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever
the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for
the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own
class"; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much
nearer to the ideas and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.

He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and
dignified habit, of the Aristocracy. He deplored its limitations and its
obduracy, its "little culture and no ideas." He made fun of it when its
external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous--"Everybody