ts, of
"perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was
wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes
too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the
warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy,
he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be
blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of
exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered
tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and
hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as
much Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play of the first
was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play
all the same. But we must return to our _Letters_.

A dinner with Lord Houghton--"all the advanced Liberals in religion
and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume"--a visit to Cambridge
and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate
appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the
article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the _Westminster Review_
for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and
Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the
_Joubert_, the _French Eton_, &c., fill up the year. The
death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great
contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the
words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on
friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the
personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden
cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am
forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much
more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I
should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice
to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength
and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however
rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his
mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about,
and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery."

An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may
suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. "It is only from
politicians who have themselves felt the spell of