ts
immediate predecessor--a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true
for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"--it
would be difficult to find any adventurer who has _not_ entangled
himself in that study--and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar
papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very
unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing
twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at
eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical
attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W.
Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with
Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably.
Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy
over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official
etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose,
though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly
possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he
took. And his first five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with
the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which
he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and
others that there was to be "a great row") by reflecting that "it
doesn't much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do
not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same
fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty
years earlier. In neither case can the "row" have had any personal
reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by
undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little
biographical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold's first general
report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln,
Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick,
Leicester, Rutland and Northants, Gloucester, Monmouth, _all_
South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and
West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity
reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist
schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially
Wesleyan and the then powerful "British" schools. As the schools
multiplied the district was reduced, and at last