Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his "intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given. In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent. Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful _Resignation_, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to include in the appendix to his _English Poets_; and the curious, characteristic, and not much short of admirable _Dream_, which in the earlier issues formed part of _Switzerland_, and should never have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying, reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have given _all_ the poems. As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they gain enormously by "this man's estimate of them," and do not lose by "this man's" selection. I have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a few of the oases from the deserts of the _Excursion_, the _Prelude_, and the then not published _Recluse_. Wordsworth's real titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of literature will; but nobody need.