The collector's joys are not of that kind. Mr. Arnold was not, I believe, a collector of anything. He certainly was not of books. I once told him I had been reading a pamphlet, written by him in 1859, on the Italian Question. He inquired how I came across it. I said I had picked it up in a shop. 'Oh, yes,' said he, 'some old curiosity shop, I suppose.' Nor was he joking. He seemed quite to suppose that old books, and old clothes, and old chairs were huddled together for sale in the same resort of the curious. He did not care about such things. The prices given for the early editions of his own poems seemed to tease him. His literary taste was broadly democratic. He had no mind for fished-up authors, nor did he ever indulge in swaggering rhapsodies over second-rate poets. The best was good enough for him. 'The best poetry' was what he wanted, 'a clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it.' So he wrote in his general introduction to Mr. Ward's _Selections from the English Poets_. The best of everything for everybody. This was his gospel and his prayer. Approaching Mr. Arnold's writings more nearly, it seems inevitable to divide them into three classes. His poems, his theological excursions, and his criticism, using the last word in a wide sense as including a criticism of life and of politics as well as of books and style. Of Mr. Arnold's poetry it is hard for anyone who has felt it to the full during the most impressionable period of life to speak without emotion overcoming reason. 'Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, Hopes and fears, belief and unbelieving.'