Matthew Arnold resemble each other in nothing else, they have both taught earnestly and persistently, through long and useful lives, the supreme necessity of law, the supreme merit of obedience. Mr. Arnold preached it with logical coldness, after his fashion, and Mr. Ruskin with illogical impetuosity, after his; but the lesson remains practically the same. "All freedom is error," writes the author of Queen of the Air, who is at least blessed with the courage of his convictions. "Every line you lay down is either right or wrong: it may be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong; the aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons, and is what they commonly call 'free' execution. … I have hardly patience to hold my pen and go on writing, as I remember the infinite follies of modern thought in this matter, centred in the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he is likely to make of it."
But he does go on writing, nevertheless, long after this slender stock of patience is exhausted, and in his capacity of critic he lays down Draconian laws which his disciples seem
