But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are.  Somebody talks of the “wicked charm” which a popular epithet or nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about “The Apostle of Culture,” “The Prophet of Sweetness and Light,” and the rest.  He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any undue way affected to “look the part” or live up to them.  And as for the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact.  Has any of my readers many—­or any—­correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sevigne or like Lady Mary?  He is lucky if he has.  Indeed, the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature.  In the so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent.  Scott had it; but then Scott’s genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did Southey’s talent of universal writing, and Lamb’s unalterable quintessence of quaintness.  But though I will allow no one to take precedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sevigne, I do not think that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron.  Some of these, as we know, or suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious consciousness of “how it will look” on paper.  Of this in Mr Arnold’s letters there is absolutely no sign.  Even when he writes to comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a “point” or a phrase, rarely even for a joke.  To his family (and it should be remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity does not bring with it any quips or gambols.  Only in the very early letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any appearance of second thought, of “conceit,” in the good sense.  Later, he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and talk without effort.