He condemned Carlyle in England and Gambetta in France, each for 'carrying coals to Newcastle;' Carlyle, because he preached earnestness to a nation that already had enough of it, but was not equally endowed with other good qualities; Gambetta, just because he evaporated in words and failed to teach that very earnestness to a nation that would have been all the better for more. The same principle explains Arnold's insistence on the study of the ancients. 'They can help to cure us of what is ... the great vice of our intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion, in morals: namely, that it is _fantastic_, and wants sanity.' It was for this reason that he dwelt on things distasteful to his countrymen, or to whomsoever he was addressing. He was eager to carry the coals of Newcastle where they were needed, the earnestness and practical sense of England to France, the lucidity of France and her love of ideas to England. This, combined no doubt with personal taste, accounts for his devotion to French literature. No one saw French weaknesses more clearly,--'France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.' But irrespective of the relative merits of French and German writings, he thought the Germans a bad model for the English to follow, and the French a good one, because they, a race of Latin culture, differ from us more than another branch of the Teutonic stock can do. So too, in his eyes, the highest value of the classics is just that they present us with ideals unlike our own. 'We can hardly at the present day understand what Menander meant when he told a man who inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of the piece depended on the brilliant things that arose under his pen as he went along.' The width of the difference measures the value of the lesson to be learnt.