which Arnold's name was hereafter to be mainly associated. The intellectual defects which the essay denounced were characteristically English defects. So on discovering himself to be at issue with the bulk of his countrymen in every region of opinion, Arnold subsequently undertook the unpopular office of detector-general of the intellectual failings of his own nation. The cast of his mind was rather critical than constructive, and the gradual drying up of his native spring of poetry, at no time copious left mm no choice between criticism and silence.
In 1853 the exhaustion of his poetic faculty did not seem imminent, and some time was to elapse before Arnold assumed his distinctly critical attitude towards the temper of his times. In 1855 he published 'Poems … Second Series' (London, 8vo), mostly reprints; but the most important, 'Balder Dead,' a miniature blank-verse epic in the manner of 'Sohrab and Rustum,' was new, and almost as great, a masterpiece of noble pathos and dignified narrative.
In May 1857 Arnold was elected to the professorship of poetry at Oxford, which he held for ten years. He inaugurated his tenure of office by publishing in 1858 a tragedy, 'Merope,' avowedly intended as a poetical manifesto, and therefore condemned in advance as a work of reflection rather than inspiration. It is stately but frigid: the subject evidently had not taken possession of him as 'Sohrab' and 'Balder' had done. It is also weighted by the unrhymed choral lyrics, whose mechanism contrasts painfully with the spontaneity of the harp-player's songs in 'Empedocles on Etna.' It is to Arnold's honour that, try as he would, he could not write lyrical poetry without a lyrical impulse, such as came to him when in November 1857 he wrote 'Rugby Chapel' on his father's death, or when in 1859 he celebrated his deceased brother and sister-in-law in 'A Southern Night,' one of the most beautiful of his poems [see Arnold, William Delafield], or when he wrote 'Thyrsis' in the death of his friend Clough in 1861.
'Thyrsis' and 'A Southern Night' were first issued in Arnold's 'New Poems' of 1867. Many other pieces that figure in that volume evince declining power not so much by inferiority of execution as by the increasing tendency to mere reflection: one of the pieces, 'Saint Brandan' was published separately (London, 1867, 4to). His 'Poems' were fully collected in two volumes in 1869, when 'Rugby Chapel' was first included, and again in 1877. By that date his chief work as a poet had been long since done. The true elegiac note was, however, struck once more in 'Westminster Abbey,' a poem on the death of Dean Stanley in 1881 (in 'Nineteenth Century,' January 1882), magnificent in its opening and its close, and nowhere unworthy of the author or the occasion. (All Arnold's 'poetry reappeared in three volumes in 1885, and in a single volume 'Popular edition' in 1890. 'Selected Poems' were issued as a volume of the 'Golden Treasury Series' in 1878.)
Meanwhile Arnold's appointment at Oxford had prompted two of his most valuable efforts in literary criticism. In 1861 he published 'On Translating Homer: Three Lectures given at Oxford' (London, 8vo), one of the essays which mark epochs. There followed in 1862 a second volume, 'On Translating Homer: last Words.' The four lectures were first collected in 1896. It is true that Arnold's principles were more satisfactory than his practice; his own attempts at translation were not very successful; and the lectures were disfigured by inexcusable flippancies at the expense of persons entitled to the highest respect [see Wright, Ichabod Charles]. But never had the characteristics of Homer himself been set forth with such authority, or the rules of translation so unanswerably deduced from them, or popular misconceptions so effectually extinguished. It is indeed a classic of criticism. Almost equal praise is due to the lectures 'On the Study of Celtic Literature' delivered in 1867, even though his knowledge of this subject was by no means equal to his knowledge of Homer, and the theme is less susceptible of closeness of treatment and cogency of demonstration. Its chief merit, apart from the fascinating style, is to have set forth the essential characteristics of Celtic poetry, and to have comprehended those qualities of English poetry which chiefly distinguish it from that of other modern nations under the possibly inexact but certainly convenient denomination of 'Celtic magic'
In 1859 Arnold issued an able pamphlet, 'England and the Italian Question,' but, with all his poetical and critical activity, he was far from neglecting his official duties. His correspondence is full of proofs of his zeal as an inspector of schools, which are further illustrated by the valuable collection of his official reports published by Sir Francis Sandford after his death. He delighted in foreign travel for the purpose of inspecting foreign schools and universities, and his observations were published in several books of great though ephemeral value: 'Popular
