self wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is." How often one wishes that Mr. More would steal an hour from the study of Neo-Platonism to meditate on that paradoxical utterance! How often one wishes that Mr. More's ignorance were far, far greater than it is. With many of Arnold's fundamental intentions in criticism he is profoundly sympathetic; but he has never, as it appears to me, felt in a compelling way the Englishman's passion for diffusing his ideas, for making them "prevail," for carrying them from one end of society to the other. He has never taken adequately to heart Arnold's true and memorable description of the "great men of culture." They are those, Arnold declares, "who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light."
When I ask myself why "P. E. M." has not taken these words more obviously home, why he writes so exclusively for the "clique of the cultivated and learned," I come invariably to one conclusion, namely, that his interest in the uncultivated and unlearned is horribly chilly, is not much livelier, in fact, than his master Plato's concern for the Helots, who are silently to bear on their shoulders the bur-
