in London, attending Bedford College, and F. D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment, a fine, restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some respects, and much older in others—with eyes fast opening on worlds hitherto unsuspected in the quiet home life. She

writes:

I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before. Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not think

those Poems could be read-quite independently of their poetical power-without leading one to expect a great deal from Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt there was so much more of this

practical questioning in Matt's book than

was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a knowledge of life and conflict which was strangely like experience if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most perhaps, as illustrating what I have been speaking of.

power

And again, to another member of the family:

It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the moral consciousness which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something altogether different from this, something which such a man as Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt; but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak of the impression received from those I understand. Some are perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which is surely more poetical than true.

Strangely like experience! The words are an interesting proof of the difficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the and things which are nearest to The astonishment of the sisters for the same feeling is expressed by Mrs. Forster was very natural. In these

persons

us.

early days, "Matt" often figures in the family letters as the worldling of the group the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown to the Fox How circle, where under the shadow of the mountains, the sisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for all their tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certain anxiety lest Matt should be "spoiled." As Lord Lansdowne's private secretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich and important people, and finds himself as a rule much cleverer than they; above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social and other success. Already at Oxford "Matt" had been something of an exquisite or as Miss Brontë puts it, a trifle "foppish"; and in the (manuscript) Fox How Magazine, to which all the nine contributed, and in which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are many family jests leveled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment.

But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehow separated from them by the "great world" passes away from mother and sisters for ever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, beside making the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, a more devoted son and brother. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's "Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, I would alone have saved him from it. And as to his relation to "society," and the great ones in it, no one more frankly amused himself within certain very definite limits-with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightly to them. He never denied-none but the foolish ever do deny the immense personal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, wherever it exists. He was quite conscious-none but those without imagination can fail to be conscious of the glamour of long descent and great affairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians," the materialized or stupid holders of power and place, and their "fortified posts," i.e. the country houses, just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles; when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menan

der's motto "Choose Equality"; and he and Clough-the Republican—were not really far apart.

On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionary spectacle of '48, an unpublished letter written-piquantly enough!-from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famous year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the artist in the writer! First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies" then the sudden clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house," writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, “might almost have been written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the book-case, and the clock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles... has been given to a local School of Art in Wiltshire! The green lawn remains, but I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer come up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies"" (i.e. Lord Lansdowne himself) "is still often to be seen in the gravel court! He was three years old when the letter was written."

Here then is the letter:

Lansdowne House,

Feb. 8, 1848. MY DEAREST TOм,-. . . Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture, Rembrandt's "Jewish Exiles," which would do for Consuelo and Albert resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony heath sloping to the Baltic-she leaning over her two children who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical clock, marking now 24 Minutes past I P.M. On my left two great windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an English February sometimes brings-so different from a November mildness. The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is studded over with crocuses of all colors-growing out of the grass, for there are no flower beds; delightful for the large

still-faced white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and the neighboring streets through the open door whereat the civil porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion.

But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear:

C

"Se ond Edition of the Morning Herald-L a. . . test news from Paris: arrival of the King of the French!"

I have gone out and bought the said portentous Herald, and send it herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race forever stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform Banquets (in Paris) last summer?-well!-the diners omitted the king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile: the majority and the king grew excited; the Government forbade the Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words "passions aveugles" to characterize the dispositions of the Banqueters: and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of Revolution all over the world. His practice suited his words, or seemed to suit it, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add to this the corruption cases you remember, the Praslin murder, and later events, which powerfully stimulated the disgust (moral indignation that People does not feel!) entertained by the lower against the governing class.

Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly defining the crisis as a question between revolution and counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest, were very damaging on the same side. The Government were harsh-abrupt-almost scornful. They would not yieldwould not permit banquets: would give no Reform till they chose. Guizot spoke (alone in the Chamber I think) to this effect. With decreasing Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the address, amidst furious scenes; opposition members crying that they were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22nd. In the week between the close of the debate and this day there

was a profound uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appall the rulers. They had the fortifications: all kinds of stores; and 100,000 troops of the line. To be quite secure, however, they determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the doors; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard, who sympathized, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then the Government forbade the meeting altogether-absolutely and the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law.

So did not the people!

They gathered all over Paris: the National Guard, whom Ministers did not trust, were not called out: the Line checked and dispersed the mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again: the Ministers in a constitutional fright called out the National Guard: a body of these hard by the Opera refused to clear the street: they joined the people. Troops were brought up: the Mob and the Nat. Guard refused to give them passage down the Rue Le Pelletier which they occupied: after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on along the Boulevard.

This settled the matter! Everywhere the

National Guard fraternized with the people: the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed the Ministers: he sent for Molé; a shade better: not enough: he sent for Thiers-a pause; this was several shades better-still not enough: meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different posts, with slight bloodshed, increased the excitement: finally the King abdicated in favor of the Count of Paris, and fled. The Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber-the people broke in; late-not enough:-a republic-an appeal to the people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu, England: a Provisional Government named.

too

You will see how they stand: they have adopted the last measures of Revolution.News has just come that the National Guard have declared against a Republic, and that a collision is inevitable.

If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper than the Herald by this mail.

Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom,
M. ARNOLD.

To this, let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been drawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describing his election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, in 1857. Here,

first of all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol of every well-disposed Anglican household:

I dined last night with a Mr. Grove,1 a celebrated man of science: his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The husband and I agree wonderfully in some points. He is a bad sleeper, and hardly ever free from headache, he equally dislikes and disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in which everybody lives: and he sighs after a paternal despotism and the calm existence of a Russian or Asiatic. He showed me a picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine: I am almost inclined to get it: it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm, earnest look unlike the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical, twinkling expression.

Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if any one will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly, what Matthew Arnold meant.

In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" three elder children-Jane, Matthew, and my father-married in that year, and a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How circle.

The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford. He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations:

Hampton,

May 15, 1857.

MY DEAR TOM,-My thoughts have often turned to you during my canvass for the Professorship and they have turned to you more than ever during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the freest and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced—and as such, Clough and Wal

Afterwards Sir William Grove, F.R.S., author of the famous essay on 'The Correlation of Physical Forces.'

rond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am told, as was perhaps likely from its couleur locale. I am hardly ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away, and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on Lutterworth road long years ago.

You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and hear so little of you, and, alas! can see and hear but so little of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English, might be stimulating and interesting.

As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford, while my uncle was still Professor. I remember well. some of his lectures, the crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my own shy pride in him-from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary England in general! Looking back one sees how the first series of Essays in Criticism, the Lectures on Celtic Literature, or On Translating Homer, Culture and Anarchy and the rest, were all the time working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual life of the country had absorbed for good and all an influence, and a stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few

people could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences:

Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain. . . . I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me, also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It was an immense victory— some 200 more voted than have ever, it is said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great lesson to Christchurch, which was rather disposed to imagine it could carry everything by its great numbers.

Good-by my dearest mother. . . . I have just been up to see the three dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep. My affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for their kind interest in my success.

...

It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age serene and bright," and of Scott's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger poet.

So the ten years of approach and attack-in the intellectual sense came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success began. Towards the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen I became a resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin the Stones of Venice, and certain chapters in Modern Paintershad been my chief intellectual passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read Essays in Criticism. It is not too much to say that the book set for me the currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of kinship. Above all it determined in me as in many others, an enduring love of France and of French literature, which played the part of schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer-if he had not died so soon after I had really begun to know him-how many debts to him would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were never said!

N Cobble Island the mother birds bring home young snakes to their nestlings; the apple blossoms are as large as pink bassinets, and the shadow of a cow on the grass is almost as refreshing as the shadow of a mountain on lake.

a

Indeed, everything on Cobble Island is so large and generous that one big woman like Mat Lemmons might have gone unnoticed but for provincial prejudice. Critics accustomed to veiling their ironical appreciations might have compared her to a Titanic queen or Cumean sibyl and let it go at that-but on Cobble Island irony does not take the trouble to go thus veiled.

The postmistress, aquiline eye-glasses set in a sour glimmer, complained, "The floor creaks whenever that woman sets foot in the door, and I've watched her comin' down the hill with the wind blowin' her skirts out, lookin' that coarse!"

The drug clerk, leaning at the little delivery-window of the combined grocery-store and post-office, squeezed his magenta necktie with a heavily ringed hand; turning to survey the result in the little mirror fixed in a slot-machine, he ostentatiously filched a Cocoanut cake from a stale-looking boxful, remarking as he ate it:

"Somebody ought to speak to her. It ain't mawdest for a woman to be as stout as that; it's cawmic, that's what it is. Now you take these here movin' pictures ain't you noticed how, when they want anything should be cawmic, they always have a fat lady actin' ridiculous?"

The postmistress, with a conscious adjustment of her own tight and niggard waistband, shoved his letters through the little window.

"Here's your mother has wrote you again. She ain't sick, is she? You going

to buy one of them Liberty loans? That letter's asking you to (they don't never tell us how they spend all that money)." She pushed a small wooden box at him. "And here's your anti-fat consignment. Now why don't you sell Mat Lemmons some of that?"

The drug clerk, arms full of mail matter, edged away from these familiar probings; detecting their ironical flavor, he paused at the door, remarking:

"I don't say it's my place to do nothing about it. I don't want to quarrel with nobody, but some one ought to speak to her; she might help herself. I tell you," the drug clerk argued, solemnly, "it ain't mawdest for any woman to go around lookin' like that. Do you ever see 'em like that in the fashionpapers? No, you don't. Why? Because it ain't refined!"

The summer boarders who took their meals at Mat's little house in the dip in the field also objected to her heroic proportions. Mat, they said, was "gross." They stale from Dervish luncheons, Yogi dinners, and all forms of faddy starvations-referred with anxiety to war populations reduced to bread-cards, but insisted that they themselves were accustomed to consume only an orange, a glass of milk, and a slice of denatured bread a day; hence their own smooth and even thinness.

But while the summer boarders and the postmistress were restrained in their criticisms, not so the other inhabitants of Cobble Island. In the few farms from which the little lonely paths ran across the fields to the one road the big woman was the summer and winter joke.

"I went into Mat's to-day-well, ain't she peculiar? She was settin' by her kitchen stove with a lot of old teapots and such truck set out on the table. It seems the summer people has stuffed her full of notions about anything that's bygone, and-well, it was real comical to see her fingering an old cracked sugar