The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the series--its zenith at once and its nadir--_Literature and Dogma_. A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form; indeed, the contents of _St Paul and Protestantism_ itself must have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of _Literature and Dogma_. Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of _Friendship's Garland_. _St Paul and Protestantism_ had had two editions in the same year (_Culture and Anarchy_, a far better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book, appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also that it is quite his worst. That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there--in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude--can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about _hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus_ (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well known about _risu inepto_, and passes on. Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to bring _Literature and Dogma_ into competition with _A Tale of a Tub_; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with _Le Taureau blanc_. And neither comparison is necessary, because