the crown to _Literature and Dogma_. "It has been more in demand," the
author told us in 1883, "than any other of my prose-writings." Respect
is due to what a great master thought of his own work, and to what his
best-qualified disciples think of it. But after all we uphold the right
of private judgment, and the present writer is strongly of opinion that
_Culture and Anarchy_ is Arnold's most important work in prose. It was,
to borrow a phrase used by Mr. Gladstone in another connexion, not a
book, but an event. We must consider it in its proper setting of time
and circumstance.

The beginning of 1869 was a great moment in our political and social
history. Ever since the enthusiasm which surrounded the Reform Act of
1832 had faded away in disappointment and disillusion, the ardent
friends of freedom and progress had been crying out for a further
extension of the franchise. The next Reform Bill was to give the workmen
a vote; and a Parliament elected by workmen was to bring the Millennium.
The Act of 1867 gave the desired vote, and the workmen used it for the
first time at the General Election of 1868. At the beginning of 1869 the
new Parliament was just assembling, and it was possible to take stock of
it, to analyze its component parts, to form some estimate of its
capacity, some forecast of its intentions. It was a Liberal Parliament.
There was no mistake about that. Bishop Wilberforce wrote just after the
Election: "In a few weeks Gladstone will be in office, at the head of a
majority of something like a hundred, elected on the distinct issue of
'Gladstone and the Irish Church.'"

Certainly the Election had been fought and won on Irish
Disestablishment, but disestablishment was only part of a larger scheme.
Rather late in the day, the Liberal Party, urged thereto by a statesman
who had never set foot in Ireland, had taken into its head to "govern