in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to--that he may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this. But in the formulation of the idea (for he did much more than merely borrow it from the French) Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in creation, he has his reward--a reward that no man can take away, even if any one were disposed to try. As a whole, _Mixed Essays_ itself, which followed _Last Essays on Church and Religion_ at an interval of two years, is an almost immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in the graces. "Mixed" is perhaps not a strictly accurate title, for the volume consists of two halves, the contents of each of which are homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each other. But even in the non-literary essays we are out of "The Wilderness" in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has just been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while "Equality" was also delivered as a lecture during the years 1877 and 1878. The exception was the paper called "Democracy," which he reprinted from his first work on Foreign Schools in 1861, where it had appeared as an Introduction. The juxtaposition is by no means uninteresting or uninstructive, though perhaps it is not entirely favourable to the idea of Mr Arnold's development as a _zoon politicon_. It has been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and though "the last of life for which the first was made" was now restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was always much joined to idols in matters political. In grasp "Democracy" does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment's thought will show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject. All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would bring. In France there was what looked like a crushing military despotism: in other Continental countries the repression which had followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not relaxed at all. American democracy had not had its second baptism of Civil War. The favourite fancies about the respective _ethos_ of aristocracy, of the middle-class, and of the lower do indeed appear, but for the most part Mr Arnold confines himself to the simple question of State interference, for which in his own subject of education he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have seen extended. It has been more than once remarked already that he may justly be regarded as a politician of more seriousness than he has here been represented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the