Introspection within a closed circle of experience was the trouble. I cannot ...

Introspection within a closed circle of experience was the trouble. I cannot doubt that if Arnold had not been a schoolmaster he would have been a fine historian.

Introverted is, somewhat surprisingly, a word of the forties: Wilberforce used it of Peel. This mode of pessimism can be followed through Disycual and Obermaen down to bedrock in the City of Dreadful Night.

Unluckily the world is not entirely peopled by young country gentlemen, newly married to chastely passionate brides, and it is perhaps, rash to identify the self-contentment which comes of a vigorous body and an assured income, with the glorious liberty of the children of God. Nevertheless, the name of Kingsley, naturalist, health reformer, poet and preacher, on the one hand silenced as an advocate of socialism, on the other denounced as

a propagator of impurity, may

stand for the meeting-place of all the forces at work on the younger imagination

of the years

when, as it seemed to those who recalled the sordid and sullen past, England was renewing her youth, at Lucknow and Inkerman, with Livingstone in the African desert, with Burton on the road to Mecca, and speaking to the oppressors of Europe in the

accents of Cromwell and Pitt.

Of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in. MR GLADSTONE, dwelling on the responsiveness of the people to good government, once said that every call from Parliament had been answered by a corresponding self-improvement of the masses.

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