d honest man, but a ferocious pedant." 1879 yields a letter
to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book
of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request
resulted in one of the very best, perhaps _the_ very best, of
that critic's essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed
later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so prodigiously _au
serieux_, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet
mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its
faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears
agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this
year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.

1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a
semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk's in
May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the
autumn. Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit
by his letters to her. In one of them there is a very pleasing and
probably unconscious touch. "Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa's husband]
smokes the whole evening: _but I think he has a good heart_." And
later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information
that he is reading _David Copperfield_ for the first time (whence
no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the
description of Burns as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which
has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another
interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he
tells M. Fontanes, "I never much liked Carlyle," which indeed we knew.
The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean
Stanley's death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced
make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of
the _Nineteenth Century_ for 1882, when New Year's Day gives us a
melancholy prediction. If "I live to be eighty [_i.e._, in some
three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only
person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific
publications." Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in
it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of
his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary
(Richardson's) for good but unusual words--Theophile Gautier's way
also, as it happens, though probably he did not know tha