literature that one
gets these charming speeches," he says, and they, not unnaturally,
charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella
behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He "means
to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting
ministers," and in the interval wants to know how "that beast of a
word 'waggonette' is spelt?" The early summer was spent at Woodford,
on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno,
where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race "quite
overpower" him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him
in September thinking _Enoch Arden_ "perhaps the best thing
Tennyson has done," we are not surprised to find this remarkable
special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is
quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a
criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, "How is that possible?"

From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the _Essays_,
and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the
Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central
European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have
sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr
Arnold as an epistoler than the _Letters_ at large seem to have
given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the _Friendship's
Garland_ series, though the occasion for that name did not come
till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that
of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he
caught "_a_ salmon" in the Deveron during September.

The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations
between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent
in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The
author of the _Vie de Jesus_ was a very slightly younger man than
Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left
the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat
in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His
contributions to the _Debats_ and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single
book, _Averroes et l'Averroisme_, dates from that year. I do not
know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But
they actually met in 1859, during th