Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Lectures and Essays on Criticism v. 3

The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Volume 3: Lectures and Essays in Criticism contains the first series of Essays in Criticism (with the exception of "A Persian Passion Play," which appears in a later volume), On the Study of Celtic Literature, and four critical essays of the period 1862-63 that Arnold did not reprint. One of these, the anonymous review of Willis's translation of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, was first traced by the present editor from Arnold's quarterly accounts. Except for his terminal lecture on "Culture and Its Enemies," all Arnold's surviving discourses from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford will be found either in the first volume or in this one. The principles upon which this volume is edited are those which governed the first and second volumes. The text is the latest which could have had Arnold's attention; for most of the volume this is the edition printed in Edinburgh for Macmillan and Company of New York in 1883. Variants in the language of earlier texts (if any) are recorded in the Textual Notes; variants in punctuation are generally ignored. Manifest misprints are corrected, but if there is any reasonable suspicion that they were errors of the author rather than the typesetter the fact of the correction is recorded. Notes at the bottom of the page are by Arnold himself, unless bracketed.