In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then married and living in America, a definition of “real civilisation” as the state “when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from that till 1 A.M., not later.”  This is, though doubtless jestful, really a point de repere for the manners of the later nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society.  In the eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold practically abstained from “the world” except quite rarely, while “the world” was not busy.  The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.

On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of “a horrid pain across my chest,” which, however, “Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly, alas!] to be not heart” but indigestion.  The Discourses in America, for which their author had a great predilection, came out later.  In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent remark, “I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner brought me round,” is another ominous hint that it was not indigestion.  Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in October, one saying, “I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place in the world to which I am most attached” ["And so say all of us"]; the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how “I got out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs.  I cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me:  the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley below.”  And this walk is again referred to later.  He was pleased by a requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it.  And at the beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to get some information for the Government as to German school fees.  He was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much during his stay, the Crown Princess being specially gracious to him.

Nor was he long in England on his return, though long enough to bring another mention of the chest pain, and an excellent definition of education—­would there were no worse!—­“Reading five pages of the Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all the words I do not know.”  In February 1886 he was back again investigating the Swiss and Bavarian school systems; and that amiable animal-worship of his receives a fresh evidence in the mention and mourning of the death of “dear Lola” (not Montes, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh for “a meche of her hair.”  The journey was finished by way of France towards the end of March.  At Hamburg Mr Arnold was “really [and very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man Your Magnificence,” that being, it seems, the proper official style in addressing the burgomaster.  And May took him back to America, to see his married daughter and divers old friends.  He remained there till the beginning of September,