Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2: Deane remarks editorially, ‘helped by Standish O’Grady and ably seconded by Arnold and Renan on the Celtic spirit, a heroic vision of Ireland emerged, evoking the legendary past, the contemporary folk-culture, and the militant spirit’ [p.9]; Declan Kiberd remarks ‘Froude endorsed Arnold’s comment on the inability of the Celt to cope with the tyranny recte ‘harsh despotism’] of fact’ [p.375]; Terence Brown comments on ‘[T]he idea of the Celt, popularised by Arnold’s derivative but influential essay of 1867, On the Study of Celtic Literature’ [p.516]; Synge, Arnold, and Ruskin compared [idem., p.518]; D. P. Moran writes, ‘We were all on the look-out for someone to think for us, for we had given up that habit with our language. Matthew Arnold happily came along just in the nick of time, and in a much quoted essay suggested, among other things, that one of the characteristics of Celtic poetry was “natural magic”. I confess I don’t exactly know what “natural magic” means ... Then yet another Irish make-believe was born, and it was christened “The Celtic Note,” Mr W. B. Yeats standing sponsor for it ... caus[ing] a little stir among minor literary circles in London ... &c., &c.’ ( ‘the Battle of Two Civilizations’, in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, 1905) [p.555]; Seamus Heaney, introducing Yeats, compares Arnold’s plaintively forsaken merman with Yeats’s “Collar-Bone of a Hare” [p.786]; Luke Gibbons remarks editorially, ‘It was not as if abstract though is beyond the reach of “the Irish mind”, for in Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature (1867), the locus classicus for the myth of the imaginative Celt, it was the tendency to get lost in abstraction [..., &c.] - “[T]he abstract, severe character of the Druidical religion”, which prevented a more practical, down-to-earth approach to worldly affairs ... The Celt revolted against ‘the despotism of fact’, but was only too willing to fasten on to an ideal’ [p.950; see also ftn. to selection from Eglinton explaining references to Renan, p.956n]; Thomas MacDonagh, in Literature in Ireland (1916), Chapter IV, writes, ‘... Matthew Arnold in his essay On the Study of Celtic Literature, largely a work of fiction, has written interestingly of the Celtic Note, using the name in a sense of his own. He has been rather apprehended than understood; and with later writers the meaning has become vaguer’ [p.989].

D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Hodges Figgis 1912) contains a notice on Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, Bart., who was Arnold’s successor as Professor of Poetry (Chair) at Oxford, holding it from 1867 to 1877. He was born in England, 22 Aug. 1810, son of Major-General Sir Francis Doyle; ed. at Eton and Oxford; became Commissioner of Customs; died in London on 8 June 1888. His father is described as ‘an Irish officer’ which accounts for his inclusion in the reference work. Bibl. Miscellaneous Verses, London, 1834, 8vo; The Two Destinies, A Poem, London, 1844, 8vo; Edipus [sic], translated from Sophocles into English verse, London (?), 1849, 16mo; The Duke’s Funeral, a poem, London, 1852, 8vo; The Return of the Guards, and Other Poems, London, 1866, 8vo.; and other works. (O’Donoghue, p.121.)

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Notes
Oscar Wilde (1): On reading Grant Allen’s essay ‘The Celt in English Art’ in the Fortnightly Review (1 Feb. 1891) - the same issue of which contained his own essay ‘Man Under Socialism’ - Wilde wrote to Allen praising his ‘superb assertion of that Celtic spirit in Art that Arnold divined, but did not demonstrate, at any rate in the sense of scientific demonstration, such as yours is.’ (Isobel Murray, ed., Wilde, Man Under Socialism and Prison Writings, OUP 1990; quoted in Richard Haslam, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Imagination of the Celt’, in Irish Studies Review, 11 [Oscar Wilde Special Issue], Summer 1995, pp.2-5. [See also seq.]

Oscar Wilde (2) - again on Allen’s essay ‘The Celt in English Art’ in the Fortnightly Review (1 Feb. 1891): John Wilson Foster writes: Wilde wrote ot Grant Allen in early 1891 praising his essay [...] for its “scientific demonstration” of the Celtic spirit of Art that Arnold had merely “divined” - further noting that Allen wrote several books on evolution. (Foster, ‘Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde’, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture, Dublin: IAP 2009, pp.44-45 [n.9.], citing Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, NY: Harcourt, Brace 1962, pp.286-87.)

Oscar Wilde (2): Not that Basil Hallward’s phrase ‘the spirit that is Greek’ in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) is actually a permutation on Arnold’s ‘the Greek spirit’ in ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’, in Culture and Anarchy (1869) [q.p.]. See John Wilson Foster, ‘Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde’, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture(Dublin: IAP 2009), p.31 [n.7, p.44.]

George Moore chooses to use Arnold’s title Literature and Dogma for certain episodes in the second book of Hail and Farewell. (See “Salve”, Heinemann, 1926 edn., pp.180, 195, 206, 207, &c.)

Seán O’Faolain, in The Irish (West Drayton: Penguin 1947), quotes Arnold on the French revolution, ‘had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind’, and remarks: ‘Not that Arnold’s ideas in the first of his Essays in Criticism have any political validity, and certainly no validity as between Ireland and England since (as he recognises freely [...]), you might as well try to change an Englishman’s [p.105] political views about his Empire by reasoning with him as hope to stop the charge of an elephant with an epigram’. Further, ‘[it is] still true of our Irish rebels that it was upon the emotional content of the Revolution that they seized and not on its intellectual content, with the result that the whole of Irish patriotic literature ever since has either concerned itself with matters of sentiment rather than thought; or with interim solutions [...]’ (pp.105-06.)

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