strictly to pointing out the correct modes of reasoning from the premises brought to it, which might be true or false for all the logician cared. To argue that green cheese is full of maggots, the moon is made of green cheese, therefore the moon is full of maggots, would be sound reasoning from the point of view of formal logic; the premises and conclusion may all be false, but the mode of deduction is true. Professor de Morgan was not only known in the field of logic or mathematics, but had also a reputation as a writer on general subjects in a whimsical, paradoxical style which had a perpetual freshness about it. His Budget of Paradoxes, republished from the Athenæum, is a work of great ability and humour if at times rather aggravatingly dogmatic in tone. Another weighty writer on the same subject was William Stanley Jevons (1835-82), Professor of Political Economy at University College, London, whose works on the Principles of Science (1874-77) and on Logic (1870) are of acknowledged authority. Dr. William Thomson, late Archbishop of York (1819-90), made a valuable contribution to the literature of the same subject with his Outline of the Laws of Thought. A more famous prelate, Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin (17871863), was also a writer on logic, but not in our period; he lived, however, long into the present reign and contributed to its literature among other

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`books the delightful skit on the new guess-work criticism, called Historic Doubts regarding Napoleon Buonaparte, and on a graver subject an Introduction to Political Economy. The last-named science has had its full share of attention also. We owe some valuable lectures on this subject to Dr. Whewell. A more entire devotee of the science was John Ramsay M'Culloch (1779-1864), originally a journalist in Scotland and for some time editor of the Scotsman, in later years Professor of Political Economy at University College, London, and finally Comptroller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. His most important work was the Principles of Political Economy (1849); among others were a Dictionary of Commerce and Literature of Political Economy. In more recent days few works of more weighty authority on this subject have appeared than the History of Prices of the late James Edwin Thorold Rogers, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, a work of quite unique value in its own department.

A writer of mark, Walter Bagehot (1826-77), is perhaps best known to the world as an economist, though also the author of some remarkable works on history and philosophical philosophy. His English Constitution, Physics and Politics, and Lombard Street are the best-known. His literary and biographical studies were posthumous publications.

CHAPTER IV

THE YOUNGER POETS

THE younger section of the poets who have illustrated this age could not be headed by any name so appropriate as that of Matthew Arnold, younger not so much in time-for he was not more than a dozen years in age after Lord Tennysonbut because not only of much later publication, but of a mind and temper which never got far beyond the academic circle or remembered that the atmosphere of the classics is not that most familiar and dear to all men. It is perhaps this atmosphere more than anything else which has prevented him and others of his brethren from ever penetrating into the heart of the country, and which forms a kind of argument against that careful training which it is now the fashion to claim for every literary workman-the "woodnotes wild," which once men chiefly believed in as the voice of poetry, having lost their acceptance

among those growing theories of development and descent which would make of every poet a welldefined and recognisable product of the influences surrounding him. If this could be said with truth of any group of poets, it might be of Matthew Arnold, Clough, Swinburne, and some later names

-to their advantage no doubt in the way of perfect versification, but to their great disadvantage in respect to nature and life. The intellectual difficulties of a highly-organised age and that "doubt," unkindly and unmusical spirit, which has been converted into a patron saint or demon by the fashion of the times, are not poetical founts of inspiration, and the old Helicon has run somewhat dry for the general reader. Matthew Arnold (1822-88), the son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and occupied for the greater part of his life in the service of his country as H.M.'s Inspector of Schools, is the poet of the Universities, of the intellectual classes who derive their chief life therefrom, either at first hand or in reflection: he has not in him the mixture of common life and feeling which can conciliate that inner niche with the wider one of the general world, or the warm inspiration of passion and emotional nature which goes to the common heart. The old audience to which the old poets appealed, the donne che hanno intelletto d'amore are left out, unless perhaps when they belong to Girton, so are the

children, except those precocious beings who lisp in Greek. The audience which is left him is perhaps the one which he would have preferred, just as Dr. Isaac Watts would no doubt have preferred his audience of the chapels and nurseries; but it is a limited audience, and not that of the greatest poets.

It would be difficult, however, to find a man who made a more prominent appearance on the stage of general literature in his time. His essays, critical and otherwise, kept him very distinctly before the world: and this, and other partly artificial reasons raised his name to such a point of general knowledge and acquaintance, that a selection of his poems was made and published in his lifetime, an honour which falls to few poets. These we may take as his own selection of what he thought most likely to live. And we find among them the two poems on which most of those who esteem him most highly are willing to rest his fame-Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy: both of them comparatively short, and so much. more individual than most of his poetical works as to touch a chord of sympathy wanting in many of the others. The extreme diffuseness of much of his poetry is indeed one of the faults which will always keep it outside the popular heart. There is something in the flow of even rhyme, page after page, long, fluent, smooth, looking as if it might