And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a whole; but he is in the mere "Pettys" of criticism (it is true not many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr Arnold begins to reckon Moliere in, I confess I am lost. When and where did Moliere write poetry? But these things do not matter; they are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will it be believed?" and on which critics agree to differ. We may include with them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known more) and the exaltation of "life" and "conduct" and all the rest of it. These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight; we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against them, pass them as admitted. But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the Wordsworthians. They might perhaps retort with a _tu quoque_. When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth's poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a certain Preface with its "all depends on the subject," and chuckle a little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the consequence is that _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_ are, as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!