But _A French Eton_ is perhaps most interesting for its style. In this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the _Preface_ of 1853 and the later and better known works. More of a _concio ad vulgus_ than the former, it shows a pretty obvious endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not yet display those "mincing graces" which were sometimes attributed (according to a very friendly and most competent critic, "harshly, but justly") to the later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary--"habitude" "repartition," for "habit," "distribution"--makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here. But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence--Baines, Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold's well-known substitutes for Cleon and Cinesias--there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in _Friendship's Garland_. "Bottles" and his company are not yet with us; the dose of _persiflage_ is rigorously kept down; the author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that "What I tell you three times is true," and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty. The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of his earlier manner--when he simply followed that admirable older Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last--is gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some--indeed a good deal--of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first object is to convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the description and characterisation are quite excellent.