[1] Mr Disraeli’s words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 100).  They were actually:  “At that time [when they had met at Lord Houghton’s some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were little known.  Now you are well known.  You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet.  You have a great future before you, and you deserve it.”  Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that “he shouldn’t dare to be intimate” with so clever a young man as Matthew Arnold.  Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athenaeum, and asked “which of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation.  I said I had not a great reputation, upon which he answered:  ’Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.’” The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the speaker’s own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the Essays to be “the book that got him his reputation,” will be found in Letters, i. 351.

[2] Of the remaining contents, the Prefaces of 1853-5 are invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed.  Of The French Play in London, I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I take little interest in the acted drama.  It is much occupied with the inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of Hugo; the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle class.  There are good things in it, but they are better said elsewhere.  The rest needs no notice.

[3] A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him, he varied them not a little.  This first collection was advertised as comprehending “the First and Second Series of the Author’s Poems and the New Poems,” but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces—­including things as interesting as A Dream and Stagirius—­are omitted, though the fine In Utrumque Paratus reappears for the first time as a consolation.  As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped The Church of Brou except the third part, and recovered not only Stagirius and others but The New Sirens, besides giving, for the first time in book-form, Haworth Churchyard, printed twenty-two years before in Fraser.  A further reprint in 1881 restored the whole Church of Brou and A Dream, and gave two or three small additions, especially Geist’s Grave.  The three-volume edition of 1885 also republished Merope for the first time, and added Westminster Abbey and Poor Matthias.  The one-volume edition of 1890 reproduced all this, adding Horatian Echo and Kaiser Dead; it is complete save for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.

[4] “I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it.”