The fact is--and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself--that criticism has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently to some of them) as useless as old moons. Nor can one help regretting that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr Arnold's prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence of such an edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. As it is, not a little of his work has never been reprinted at all; some of the rest is difficult of access, and what there is exists in numerous volumes of different forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome. And if his prose work seems to me inferior to his poetical in absolute and perennial value, its value is still very great. Not so much English prose has that character of grace, of elegance, which has been vindicated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such consummate examples of it. Academic urbanity is not so universal a feature of our race--the constant endeavour at least to "live by the law of the _peras_," to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration, is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole, yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations and the individuals that forget or neglect him. Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry; but he will yield delight more surely. His manner, except in his rare "thorn-crackling" moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a hardly to be exaggerated charm.