are, no doubt, beautiful reflections beautifully expressed, but the temper they show is the very opposite of the Greek. To say this is not in the least to disparage Arnold. "A man is more like the age in which he lives," says the Chinese aphorism, "than he is like his own father and mother," and Arnold's polemical writings alone are sufficient to show that the waters of life he drank were from fountains distilled, seven times distilled, at the topmost slope of 19th-century civilization. Mr George Meredith's "Old Chartist" exhibits far more of the temper of acceptance than does any poem by Matthew Arnold. His most famous critical dictum is that poetry is a "criticism of life." What he seems to have meant is that poetry is the crowning fruit of a criticism of life; that just as the poet's metrical effects are and must be the result of a thousand semiconscious generalizations upon the laws of cause and effect in metric art, so the beautiful things he says about life and the beautiful pictures he paints of life are the result of his generalizations upon life as he passes through it, and consequently that the value of his poetry consists in the beauty and the truth of his generalizations. But this is saying no more than is said in the line-- "Rien n'est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable"-- or in the still more famous lines-- "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." To suppose that Arnold confounded the poet with the writer of _pensees_ would be absurd. Yet having decided that poetry consists of generalizations on human life, in reading poetry he kept on the watch for those generalizations, and at last seemed to think that the less and not the more they are hidden behind the dramatic action, and the more unmistakably they are intruded as generalizations, the better. For instance, in one of his essays he quotes those lines from the "Chanson de Roland" of Turoldus, where Roland, mortally wounded, lays himself down under a pine-tree with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy, and begins to "call many things to remembrance; all the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne, his liege lord, who nourished him"-- "De plusurs choses a remembrer li prist, De tames teres cume li bers cunquist, De dulce France, des humes de sun ligu, De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l'nurrit."