In February next year Mr Arnold’s double repute, as a practical and official “educationist” and as a man of letters, brought him the offer of the care of Prince Thomas of Savoy, son of the Duke of Genoa, and grandson of Victor Emmanuel, who was to attend Harrow School and board with the Arnolds.  The charge, though honourable and, I suppose, profitable, might not have been entirely to the taste of everybody; but it seemed to Mr Arnold a new link with the Continent, and he welcomed it.  The same year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very interesting and by no means unsound criticism on that important event in the life of a poet, the issue of the first collected edition of his poems.[3] This was in two volumes, and is now rather precious.  “It might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn.”  One can only query whether poetry has anything to do with “modern development,” and desiderate the addition to “sentiment” of “art.”  He seems to imply that Mr Gladstone personally prevented his appointment to a commissionership under the Endowed Schools Act.  But the year ended with a complimentary reference from Mr Disraeli at Latimers about “Sweetness and Light.”

In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa (now in the most comfortable lap of all the gods or goddesses, with Hodge and Bona Marietta and Hinse of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in June Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L.  He set it down to “a young and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor”; and Lord Salisbury himself afterwards told him that “no doubt he ought to have addressed him as ‘vir dulcissime et lucidissime.’” But though he was much pleased by his reception, he thought Lord Salisbury “dangerous,” as being unliterary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes.

In December he had an amusing and (as it ended well) not unsatisfactory experience of the ways of Income Tax Commissioners.  These gentlemen acted on even vaguer principles than those on which they once assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident received L6 “author’s rights” for a week, at L300 per annum, on the sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred.  They put Mr Arnold’s literary profits at L1000, and he had to expostulate in person before they would let him down to L200, though he pathetically explained that “he should have to write more articles than he ever had done” to prevent his being a loser even at that.  About the catastrophe of the Annee Terrible, his craze for “righteousness” makes him a very little Pecksniffian—­one thinks of the Tower of Siloam.  But it is pleasant to hear that, early