[Illustration: Thomas Arnold, D.D.

Head Master of Rugby, and father of Matthew Arnold

_From the Painting in Oriel College_

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

Of course, this criticism, so hostile to the current cant of the moment,
was endlessly misinterpreted and misunderstood. He thus explained his
doctrine in a Preface to a Second Edition of his Poems: "It has been
said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the
period of Greek and Roman antiquity; but it is not so. I only counsel
him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what
time they belong." A few years later he wrote to a friend (in a letter
hitherto unpublished): "The modern world is the widest and richest
material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing
power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion),
commensurate with his material, his _mundus representandus_. This
adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him,
seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to
distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric
and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though
the world represented by it was far less full and significant."

There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which
can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called
_Irish Essays, and Others_. But they are worth noting, because in them,
at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary