voyageant

Updated: May 28, 2025

Few are those who can still recall the graceful figure in its silken gown; the gracious address, the slightly supercilious smile, of the Milton jeune et voyageant, just returned from contact with all that was best in French culture to instruct and astonish his own university; few who can still catch the cadence of the opening sentence: "It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer"; few that heard the fine tribute of the aged scholar, who, as the young lecturer closed a later discourse, murmured to himself, "The Angel ended."

George William Erskine Russell - Matthew Arnold

This violence and one-sidedness Arnold believes it the work of criticism to temper, or as he expresses it, in Culture and Anarchy, "Culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism, its fierceness and its addiction to an abstract system." "Un Milton jeune et voyageant" was George Sand's description of the young Arnold.

Matthew Arnold - Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold