An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864.  “It is only from politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one gets these charming speeches,” he says, and they, not unnaturally, charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella behind him.  But the anti-crusade is more and more declared.  He “means to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting ministers,” and in the interval wants to know how “that beast of a word ‘waggonette’ is spelt?” The early summer was spent at Woodford, on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno, where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race “quite overpower” him.  Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him in September thinking Enoch Arden “perhaps the best thing Tennyson has done,” we are not surprised to find this remarkable special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is quite in keeping.  He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, “How is that possible?”

From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the Essays, and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central European capitals.  The tour lasted from April to November, and I have sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr Arnold as an epistoler than the Letters at large seem to have given.  Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the Friendship’s Garland series, though the occasion for that name did not come till afterwards.  And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he caught “a salmon” in the Deveron during September.

The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are.  The author of the Vie de Jesus was a very slightly younger man than Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat in advance of his English compeer in literary repute.  His contributions to the Debats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single book, Averroes et l’Averroisme, dates from that year.  I do not know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work.  But they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year.  He tells his sister of “Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris,” and notes the considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing,