criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper
happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the
Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and
the scalping-knife refurbished.

In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally
blended. In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he
aimed first at Lucidity--at that clear light, uncoloured by
prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are.
In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might
run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and
persist in it. He spoke with proper contempt of the "tenth-rate critics,
for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not
to be risked"; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance. Homer
and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he
never wrote a disparaging word. Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object
of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his
"over-curiousness of expression"; and, where he writes--

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapped in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Arnold dared to say that the writing was "detestable."

Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship;
yet Arnold denounced the "confident shallowness which makes him so
admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so
intolerable to all searchers for truth"; and frankly avowed that to his
mind "a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in the _Lays of
Ancient Rome_ was a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about