improving, as he thought, in health, but meeting towards the close an awkward bathing accident, which involved no risk of drowning, but gave him a shock that was followed by a week or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the chest.  There is very much in the letters of the time about the political crisis of 1886.  His retirement from official work came in November, and the letters are fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape.

But the warnings grew more frequent, and we know that long before this he had had no delusions about their nature.  Indeed, it is doubtful whether he had ever had any, considering the fact of the malady, which had, as he says in a singularly manly and dignified commentatio mortis dated January 29, 1887, struck down his father and grandfather in middle life long before they came to his present age.  He “refuses every invitation to lecture or make addresses.”  The letters of 1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest, except an indication of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be said of those, also few, from the early months of 1888.  The last of all contains a reference to Robert Elsmere.  Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died.  He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be “the end as well as the climax”) by two years and three months.

CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.

The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as Mr Matthew Arnold.  Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer.  He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter’s model exactly “handsome”; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile.  Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had “tricks and manners” of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare.  One of these Mr George Russell glances at in the preface to the Letters, a passage which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold.  He had been good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French poet.  I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it was, but it was not Gautier.  I replied in some such words as, “Well; perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is ‘important for us,’ if I may borrow that.”  So he looked at me and said, “I didn’t write that anywhere, did I?” And when I reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it.  Which might, or might not, be Socratic.