And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that suppressio veri is always and not only sometimes suggestio falsi, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter, while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt.  He wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded and elaborately conditioned statements.  The immense popularity and influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of “perhapses”; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay’s fiddle, he was wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise.  If a critic makes too many provisos, if he “buts” too much, if he attempts to paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument.  The preambles of exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered tedious or impertinent.  The opposite plan of selecting a nail and hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as much Mr Arnold’s as it was Macaulay’s.  The hammer-play of the first was far more graceful and far less monotonous:  yet it was hammer-play all the same.  But we must return to our Letters.

A dinner with Lord Houghton—­“all the advanced Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume”—­a visit to Cambridge and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the article by the late Mr S.H.  Reynolds in the Westminster Review for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the Joubert, the French Eton, &c., fill up the year.  The death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the words, “I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on friendly terms:  and he was not to my mind a great writer.”  But the personal reflections which follow are of value.  He finds “the sudden cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering.  To-day I am forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much more than the middle.  I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I should be glad of as much time as possible.  Yet I can feel, I rejoice to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however rough.  But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about, and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery.”