Of him it might be truly said, as of his favourite poet, that he "saw life steadily and saw it whole." And of life he declared that Conduct was three-fourths. For all the infinite varieties and contradictions of mere opinion he had the largest tolerance, knowing that no opinion, as such, is culpable. For people thinking so diversely as Wordsworth, Bunsen, Clough, and Palgrave; Church and Temple, Lake and Stanley; Lord Coleridge, William Forster, and John Morley, he had equally warm regard, and, in some ways, sympathy. It was only when the sphere of conduct was approached that his judgment became severe and his sympathy dried up. In Politics--levity, time-serving, mob-pleasing, the spirit which prefers partisanship to patriotism, were the faults which he could not pardon. His imperfect sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, a deplorable but undeniable fact, was due not so much to dissent from Gladstone's theory of the public good as to disapproval of his character. "Respect is the very last feeling he excites in me; he has too little solidity and composure of character or mind for that. He is brilliantly clever, of course, and he is honest enough, but he is passionate, and in no way great, I think." In Religion--obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a "free handling, _in a becoming spirit_, of religious matters," and did not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true that he once made a signal lapse from his own canon of religious criticism, but he withdrew it with genuine regret that "an illustration likely to be torn from its context, to be improperly used, and to give pain, should ever have been adopted." In Literature, again, though his judgment was critical, his charity was unbounded. He could find something to praise even in the most immature and unpretending efforts; and he knew how to distinguish what we call "good of its sort," good in the second order of achievement, from what is simply bad. In literature, as in opinion, it was only when moral faults were mingled with intellectual defects that he became censorious. He detested literary humbug--a pretence of knowledge without the reality, a show of philosophy masking poverty of thought; the vanity of quaintness, the "ring of false metal," the glorification of commonplace.