By emotionalism, however, he does not allow himself to be betrayed, and he does not indulge in rhythmical prose or rhapsody, though occasionally his writing has a truly poetical quality resulting from the quiet but deep feeling which rises in connection with a subject on which the mind has long brooded with affection, as in the tribute to Oxford at the beginning of the _Essay on Emerson_. Sometimes, on the other hand, a certain pedagogic stiffness appears, as if the writer feared that the dullness of comprehension of his readers would not allow them to grasp even the simplest conceptions without a patient insistence on the literal fact. One can by no means pass over Arnold's humor in a discussion of his style, yet humor is certainly a secondary matter with him, in spite of the frequency of its appearance. It is not much found in his more intimate and personal writing, his poetry and his familiar letters. In such a book as _Friendship's Garland_, where it is most in evidence, it is plainly a literary weapon deliberately assumed. In fact, Arnold is almost too conscious of the value of humor in the gentle warfare in which he had enlisted. Its most frequent form is that of playful satire; it is the product of keen wit and sane mind, and it is always directed toward some serious purpose, rarely, if ever, existing as an end in itself. V [Sidenote: Literary Criticism] The first volume of _Essays in Criticism_ was published in 1865. That a book of essays on literary subjects, apparently so diverse in character, so lacking in outer unity, and so little subject to system of any sort, should take so definite a place in the history of criticism and make so single an impression upon the reader proves its possession of a dominant and important idea, impelled by a new and weighty power of personality. What Arnold called his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceeding" tends to disguise the seriousness and unity of purpose which lie behind nearly all of these essays, but an uninterrupted perusal of the two volumes of _Essays in Criticism_ and the volume of _Mixed Essays_ discloses what that purpose is. The essays may roughly be divided into two classes, those which deal with single writers and those discussing subjects of more general nature. The purpose of both is what Arnold himself has called "the humanization of man in society." In the former he selects some person exemplifying a trait, in the latter he selects some general idea, which he deems of importance for our further humanization, and in easy, unsystematic fashion unfolds and illustrates it for us. But in spite of this unlabored method he takes care somewhere in the essay to seize upon a phrase that shall bring home to us the essence of his theme and to make it salient enough so as not to escape us. How much space shall be devoted to exposition, and how much to illustration, depends largely on the familiarity of his subject to his readers.