the Pall Mall Gazette, when that brilliant periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the Saturday Review, and others, was renewing for the sixties the sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the Saturday itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities.  As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks’ War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of persiflage, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in Eothen, and which the Saturday had taken up and widely developed.  He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in Sartor and the Latterday Pamphlets.  And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and comparses—­Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the Daily Telegraph, the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife’s sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by their proper names—­he instructed England on its own weakness, folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the importance of Geist and ideas, &c., &c.  The author brought himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other people.  When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more puzzled, yet more Prusso-mimic, than ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and launched the whole as a book.

The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book was very widely bought—­at any rate, its very high price during the time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was printed.  Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer.  Either, as some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented these much.  But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto.  Mr Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, “very witty and comedy,” but that we should not be altogether sorry if they would go.  Further, the direct personalities—­the worst instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr Sala—­struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good taste.  The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they were even then teasing, In all these points, if Friendship’s Garland be compared, I will once more not say with A Tale of a Tub, but even with the History of John Bull, its weakness will come out rather strongly.