accent, of quantity and of sense meet. It might not be well for a poem to contain an entire sequence of such perfect lines as "I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy," or "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," for then the metricist's art would declare itself too loudly and weaken the imaginative strength of the picture. But such lines should no doubt form the basis of the poem, and weaker lines--lines in which there is no such combination of the three kinds of emphasis--should be sparingly used, and never used for makeshift purposes. Now, neither by instinct nor by critical study was Arnold ever able to apprehend this law of prosody. If he does write a line of the first order, metrically speaking, he seems to do so by accident. Such weak lines as these are constantly occurring-- "The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man." Much has been said about what is called the "Greek temper" of Matthew Arnold's muse. A good deal depends upon what it meant by the Hellenic spirit. But if the Greek temper expresses itself, as is generally supposed, in the sweet acceptance and melodious utterance of the beauty of the world as it is, accepting that beauty without inquiring as to what it means and as to whither it goes, it is difficult to see where in Arnold's poetry this temper declares itself. Surely it is not in _Empedocles on Etna_, and surely it is not in _Merope_. If there is a poem of his in which one would expect to find the joyous acceptance of life apart from questionings about the civilization in which the poet finds himself environed (its hopes, its fears, its aspirations and its failures)--such questionings, in short, as were for ever Vexing Arnold's soul--it would be in "The Scholar Gypsy," a poem in which the poet tries to throw himself into the mood of a "Romany Rye." The great attraction of the gypsies to Englishmen of a certain temperament is that they alone seem to feel the joyous acceptance of life which is supposed to be specially Greek. Hence it would have been but reasonable to look, if anywhere, for the expression of Arnold's Greek temper in a poem which sets out to describe the feelings of the student who, according to Glanville's story, left Oxford to wander over England with the Romanies. But instead of this we got the old fretting about the unsatisfactoriness of modern civilization. Glanville's Oxford student, whose story is glanced at now and again in the poem, flits about in the scenery like a cloud-shadow on the grass; but the way in which Arnold contrives to avoid giving us the faintest idea either dramatic or pictorial of the student about whom he talks so much, and the gypsies with whom the student lived, is one of the most singular feats in poetry. The reflections which come to a young Oxonian lying on the grass and longing to escape life's fitful fever without shuffling off this mortal coil,