But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield--yield by a long way--to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish charge, "You can break, but you cannot make," was confessedly impossible--a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule of the uttermost art. In him the corruption of the poet had not been the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another; but the author of the _Preface_ of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of _Westminster Abbey_ was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.