which he extolled was literature in its widest sense--ancient and
modern, English and Continental, Occidental and Oriental--whatever
contained "the best which had been thought and said in the world." And,
when we come to the sub-divisions of literature, we note that he was
pre-eminently a classicist. This he was partly by temperament, partly by
training, partly by his matured and deliberate judgment. It can scarcely
be doubted that he had an innate love of perfect form, an innate
"sentiment against hideousness and rawness," and so he was a classicist
by temperament. Then his training was essentially classical. He used to
protest, with amusing earnestness, against the notion that his father
had been a bad scholar. "People talk the greatest nonsense about my
father's scholarship. The Wykehamists of his day were excellent
scholars. Dr. Gabell made them so. My father's Latin verses were not
good; but that was because he was not poetical--not because he was a bad
scholar. But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his
Greek prose, you couldn't tell it from Thucydides." In this kind of
scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect
his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous
study. His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps
wider in Greek than in Latin, though the soundness of his Latin
scholarship is proved by the fact that he was _proxime_ for the Hertford
Scholarship at Oxford. He had read Plato in the Sixth Form at Rugby, and
Oxford taught him Aristotle. From first to last his "unapproachable
favourites" were Homer and Sophocles, and Hesiod was "a Greek friend to
whom he turned with excellent effect." But though he was thus
essentially a classicist, a mere classicist he was not. No one had a
wider, a more familiar, a more discriminating knowledge of English
literature; no one--and this is worthy of remark--had the text of the
Bible more perfectly at his fingers' ends. He had read all that was best
in French, German, and Italian;[16] and in French at any rate he was an