The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are much better as wholes. The opening of the "Emerson," with its fond reminiscence of Oxford, is in a vein which Mr Arnold did not often work, but which always yielded him gold. In the words about Newman, one seems to recognise very much more than meets the ear--an explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude. He is less happy on Carlyle--he never was very happy on Carlyle, and for obvious reasons--but here he jars less than usual. As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found that Carlyle "wears" a great deal better than Emerson. It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical about Emerson himself. On Emerson's poetry he is even, as on his own principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has "once in a hundred years," as Mr O'Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is bound to say that his denying the title of "great writer" to Carlyle is merely absurd--is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art--he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not "cracking up" by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would "live in the spirit." With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one. To some Gautier, with his doctrine of "Sculpte, lime, cisele," as the great commandment of the creative artist, has been a friend and leader in the life of the spirit: to Mr Arnold he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper. To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guerin, with his second-hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of the spirit; others scarcely find him so. "This is this to thee and that to me."