bound to wear as a heavy yoke around their necks. "Who made Mr. Ruskin a judge or a nursery governess over us?" asks an irreverent contributor to Macmillan; and why, after all, should we abstain from reading Darwin, and Grote, and Coleridge, and Kingsley, and Thackeray, and a host of other writers, who may or may not be gratifying to our own tastes, because Mr. Ruskin has tried and found them wanting? It is not the province of a critic to bar us in a wholesale manner from all authors he does not chance to like, but to aid us, by his practiced judgment, to extract what is good from every field, and to trace, as far as in us lies, those varying degrees of excellence which it is to our advantage to discern. It was in this way that Mr. Arnold, working with conscientious and dispassionate serenity, opened our eyes to new beauty, and strengthened us against vicious influences; he added to our sources of pleasure, he helped us to enjoy them, and not to recognize his kindly aid would be an ungracious form of self-deception. If he were occasionally a little puzzling, as in some parts of Celtic Literature, where the qualities he
