All these reports form substantial contributions to the history and literature of education in the Victorian age. They have been quoted often, and have exercised marked influence on subsequent changes and controversies. One great purpose underlies them all. It is to bring home to the English people a conviction that education ought to be a national concern, that it should not be left entirely to local, or private, or irresponsible initiative, that the watchful jealousy so long shown by Liberals, and especially by Nonconformists, in regard to state action was a grave practical mistake, and that in an enlightened democracy, animated by a progressive spirit and noble and generous ideals, it was the part of wisdom to invoke the collective power of the state to give effect to those ideals. To this theme he constantly recurred in his essays, articles and official reports. "_Porro unum est necessarium_. One thing is needful; organize your secondary education." In 1883 a pension of L250 was conferred on Arnold in recognition of his literary merits. In the same year he went to the United States on a lecturing tour, and again in 1886, his subjects being "Emerson" and the "Principles and Value of Numbers." The success of these lectures, though they were admirable in matter and form, was marred by the lecturer's lack of experience in delivery. It is sufficient, further, to say that _Culture and Anarchy: an Essay in Political and Social Criticism_, appeared in 1869; _St Paul and Protestantism, with an Introduction on Puritanism and the Church of England_ (1870); _Friendship's Garland: being the Conversations, Letters and Opinions of the late Arminius Baron van Thunder-ten-Tronckh_ (1871); _Literature and Dogma: an Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible_ (1873); _God and the Bible: a Review of Objections to Literature and Dogma_ (1875); _Last Essays on Church and Religion_ (1877); _Mixed Essays_ (1879); _Irish Essays and Others_ (1882); _Discourses in America_ (1885). Such essays as the first of these, embodying as they did Arnold's views of theological and polemical subjects, attracted much attention at the time of their publication, owing to the state of the intellectual atmosphere at the moment; but it is doubtful, perhaps, whether they will be greatly considered in the near future. Many severe things have been said, and will be said, concerning the inadequacy of poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth when confronting subjects of a theological or philosophical kind. Wordsworth's High Church Pantheism and Coleridge's disquisitions on the Logos seem farther removed from the speculations of to-day than do the dreams of Lucretius. But these two great writers lived before the days of modern science. Arnold, living only a few years later, came at a transition period when the winds of tyrannous knowledge had blown off the protecting roof that had covered the centuries before, but when time