ESSAYS IN CRITICISM

London: Macmillan, 1865. First Edition. 8vo, original light brown cloth, lettered and ruled in gilt on the spine, and with triple gilt fillet rules to the borders of the upper cover. xix, 302 pp, 30 ads. A handsome copy, light age evidence and some wear to the rear outer hinge. FIRST EDITION. 'It is said that when the poet in Arnold died, the critic was born; and it is true that from this time onward he turned almost entirely to prose. Some of the leading ideas and phrases were early put into currency in Essays in Criticism (First Series, 1865). The first essay in the 1865 volume, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” is an overture announcing briefly most of the themes he developed more fully in later work. It is at once evident that he ascribes to “criticism” a scope and importance hitherto undreamed of. The function of criticism, in his sense, is “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.” It is in fact a spirit that he is trying to foster, the spirit of an awakened and informed intelligence playing upon not “literature” merely but theology, history, art, science, sociology, and politics, and in every sphere seeking “to see the object as in itself it really is.” Brit