So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work--patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best fitted for conveying it. We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called _The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems_. He had done the same with _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_ in 1852. The best contents of these two volumes were combined in _Poems_, 1853, and to this book he gave a Preface, which was his first essay in Literary Criticism. In this essay he enounces a certain doctrine of poetry, and, true to his lifelong practice, he enounces it mainly by criticism of what other people had said. A favourite cry of the time was that Poetry, to be vital and interesting, must "leave the exhausted past, and draw its subjects from matters of present import." It was the favourite theory of Middle Class Liberalism. The _Spectator_ uttered it with characteristic gravity; Kingsley taught it obliquely in _Alton Locke_. Arnold assailed it as "completely false," as "having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact." In assailing it, he justified his constant recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he asserted that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century "left the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the _Iliad_, by the _Oresteia_, or by the episode of Dido." He glorified the Greeks as the "unapproached masters of the _grand style_." He even ventured to doubt whether the influence of Shakespeare, "the greatest, perhaps, of all poetical names," had been wholly advantageous to the writers of poetry. He weighed Keats in the balance against Sophocles and found him wanting. [Illustration: Thomas Arnold, D.D. Head Master of Rugby, and father of Matthew Arnold _From the Painting in Oriel College_ _Photo H.W. Taunt_]