Stuart P. Sherman
Published: 2015-07-13
Total Pages: 346
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Excerpt from Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him "The aimless and unsettled, but also open and liberal state of our youth we must perhaps all leave and take refuge in our morality and character; but with most of us it is a melancholy passage from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us." -Letters, I, 17. Matthew Arnold is a charming but not an altogether conciliatory writer. If you disagree with him, he does not encourage you to believe that you may be in the right. When he was a middle-aged man, his favorite sister said to him that he was "becoming as dogmatic as Ruskin." "I told her," writes Arnold, good-humoredly reporting the incident to his mother, "the difference was that Ruskin was 'dogmatic and wrong." This is in the true critical temper - gentle but firm and just a little provocative! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.