the review of his Primer.  The next year continues the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper.  “My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy days than my own sisters”—­wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes Goblin Market, “there is no friend like a sister.”  Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, a la maniere noire, as “an ardent, learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant.” 1879 yields a letter to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request resulted in one of the very best, perhaps the very best, of that critic’s essays in English Literature.  Mr Arnold is distressed later at Renan’s taking Victor Hugo’s poetry so prodigiously au serieux, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its faults, half seriously enough.  Geist, the dachshund, appears agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.

1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk’s in May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the autumn.  Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit by his letters to her.  In one of them there is a very pleasing and probably unconscious touch.  “Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa’s husband] smokes the whole evening:  but I think he has a good heart.”  And later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information that he is reading David Copperfield for the first time (whence no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the description of Burns as “a beast with splendid gleams,” a view which has been fully developed since.  On February 21, 1881, there is another interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he tells M. Fontanes, “I never much liked Carlyle,” which indeed we knew.  The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean Stanley’s death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced make anything else superfluous.  They appeared in the first number of the Nineteenth Century for 1882, when New Year’s Day gives us a melancholy prediction.  If “I live to be eighty [i.e., in some three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.”  Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in it.  And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary (Richardson’s) for good but unusual words—­Theophile Gautier’s way also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.