in 1871, they are arranging for him “a perfect district, Westminster and a small rural part near Harrow.”  So one hopes that the days of posting from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over.  He is interested about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles), receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for his services to Prince Thomas, and is proposed for the Middlesex magistracy, but (to one’s sorrow) declines.  There is fishing at Chenies (vide an admirable essay of Mr Froude’s) in the early summer, a visit to Switzerland in the later, and in September “the pigs are grown very large and handsome, and experts advise their conversion into bacon.”  But Mrs Arnold “does not like the idea.”  Indeed this is the drawback of pig-keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime; but you can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by merely breeding the pigs and selling the litters young.

After this respite fate was again cruel.  On February 16, 1872, Mr Arnold’s second son died at Harrow, and again the reception of the blow and its effect are marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief.  Yet one phrase, “I cannot write his name without stopping to look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive,” is equal to volumes.  The letters of this year are few, but in September begins a correspondence of some interest and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontanes.  Nor does 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to Cobham, which was Mr Arnold’s home for the rest of his life.  In September he “shoots worse than ever” (vide Friendship’s Garland) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon after his mother dies.  But it is not given to all men not to be motherless till they themselves are fifty.  And 1874 is again rather barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of Literature and Dogma.  A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her father’s death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.

Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to history, which long before its publication careful students of his works had always noticed in him.  The fact is, that to a man of ideas, as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called—­a man of theories or of crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did call him—­history must be an annoying study.  The things that ought to happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either caused