d L6 "author's rights" for a week, at L300 per annum, on the
sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are
fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred.
They put Mr Arnold's literary profits at L1000, and he had to
expostulate in person before they would let him down to L200, though
he pathetically explained that "he should have to write more articles
than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that.
About the catastrophe of the _Annee Terrible_, his craze for
"righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian--one thinks of
the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early 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
motherles