sole contribution to the good of his fellow-creatures, he would still have deserved to be kept in eternal remembrance by them. Had he written no verse, but only the literary, the religious, and the spiritual criticism he has left behind him, he would still have merited immunity from oblivion. But he wrote both verse and prose, beautiful verse, delightful prose, and did so much beside, as a servant of the State, as a friend of education, as a champion of whatever he thought for the benefit of the human race. would scarcely be an exaggeration to say of him: « omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.» It The area of his intellectual activity was immense; so large, indeed, that it is only by an effort of memory we can picture to ourselves its extent. But higher praise still has surely to be bestowed on Matthew Arnold. He was a man of rare gifts. But he was likewise a model son, a model husband, a model citizen. Genius, though not an every-day phenomenon, is, I suppose, as frequent in these days as in others; and, perhaps, there never was before so much cleverness as is now to be observed in almost every walk of life. But character - character that shows itself in filial piety, in conjugal tenderness, in good and conscientious citizenship-is perhaps not too conspicuous, especially in persons exceptionally endowed. One looks in vain for a serious blemish in Matthew Arnold's character. It has been said, surely with truth: "Not all the noblest songs are worth One noble deed." But, in his case, there is no antithesis between teaching and example. He wrote beautiful songs; and his life, as these "Letters" show, was one long noble deed. From a review of Matthew Arnold's "Letters » in the National Review. FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626) N BACON'S "Essays Civil and Moral" an intellect of the highest order expresses itself with an art so subtle that it does not seem to be art at all. Literary form is lost sight of and the thought engrosses attention to the exclusion even of admiration for the greatness of the mind which conceived it. Admiration is excited only in the presence of what seems higher than our own level. It is the peculiarity and the touchstone of all great art, that admiration for it comes only as an afterthought. Its first office is that of sympathy. It expresses what is strongest and truest in us as if it were wholly our right to have it expressed. We feel no sense of obligation to it, but rather of comradeship with it, as if, by some process too simple and natural to be even surprising, we had regained consciousness of a higher life in us than we had suspected, - of a life which belongs to our common lives as much as it does to the highest genius of earth or to the healthiest and most natural souls in whatever state of natural healthiness of soul is to constitute hereafter our heaven. When from this high future that is to be ours, some great soul comes to us as Bacon does, it is always in the simplicity of good neighborliness. He goes in and out among us, speaking our every-day language and ministering to our every-day needs, and we do not feel his superiority until he has gone. Then we look among ourselves and back through the ages of civilization to find his equal, learning thus for the first time to admire him as we had not thought to do before. To read twenty lines into one of the most commonplace of his essays is to come into the presence of one of the most potent forces of the world- an intellect of childlike directness of expression and an almost superhuman strength of conception. No one who has written since his day has done anything that will compare in force, in comprehensiveness, in terse compactness of expression, with any one of a score of his short essays. In these respects they call for reverence, and where they express the lower part of his nature, the cunning of the courtier, the lack of scruple of the weak and timeserving politician, loving virtue in theory, but not brave enough in practice to make a stand for it, then the strength of intellect, which |