In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volunteer, commenting not too happily on “the hideous English toadyism which invests lords and great people with commands,” a remark which seems to clench the inference that he had not appreciated the effect of the Revolution upon France.  For nearly three parts of 1860 we have not a single letter, except one in January pleasantly referring to his youngest child “in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck that it was hard to take one’s eyes off him."[4] This letter, by the way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted just now.  He says of the Americans, “It seems as if few stocks could be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an aristocracy to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of their national existence.”  This is a confession.  The gap, however, is partly atoned for by a very pleasant batch in September from Viel Salm in the Ardennes, where the whole family spent a short time, and where the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain had splendid fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being only accustomed to nets.

Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on translating Homer, and Tennyson’s “deficiency in intellectual power,” and Mr Arnold’s own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise some folk.  It seems that he has “a strong sense of the irrationality of that period” and of “the utter folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it.”  Still it has “poetically the greatest charm and refreshment for me.”  One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is irrational and which you don’t take seriously:  the practice seems to be not unlike that mediaeval one of keeping fools for your delectation.  Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite pleasant.  But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its immediate predecessor—­a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true for all that.  Then he “entangles himself in the study of accents”—­it would be difficult to find any adventurer who has not entangled himself in that study—­and groans over “a frightful parcel of grammar papers,” which he only just “manages in time,” apparently on the very unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o’clock.  Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W.  Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably.  Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much.  Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose, though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly possible,