This consists of only three discourses—the Rede Lecture adapted to American audiences and the specially American lectures on Numbers and Emerson. With the aid of wide margins and a liberal amount of 'fat,' as the printers call it, the text is doled out in pages of but nineteen lines each, and thus the three articles are successfully expanded into a booklet of over two hundred pages. Small as it is, the volume differs favourably from some of the recent republications of Mr. Arnold's utterances in that it contains only specimens of his best work, and we may perhaps add that in it he dismounts from his over-ridden hobby—State schools for the middle classes. Each of the three essays attracted attention when first delivered—readers will remember the ludicrous blunders made by the American reporters with the goddess Lubricity in Numbers—and they were as eagerly read when republished in magazines. Now collected in a volume, they will be as popular as any in the series in which they are published, and have a good chance of being revived in the far distant day when their copyright shall have run out—the most practical test that occurs to us to determine whether a book really belongs to English literature.
Much comment on essays so much commented on at the time of their appearance
