ave the practice
of eating alone, and these he extols as much superior to the
English.... Macaulay is the king of diners-out. I do not know when I
have seen such wonderful vivacity. He has the strength of ten men,
immense memory, fun, fire, learning, politics, manners, and pride, and
talks all the time in a steady torrent. You would say he was the best
type of England."

Of Tennyson he writes: "I saw Tennyson, first at the house of Coventry
Patmore, where we dined together. I was contented with him at once. He
is tall and scholastic looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain
strength about him, and though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet,
sluggish sense and thought; refined, as all English are, and
good-humored. There is in him an air of great superiority that is very
satisfactory. He lives with his college set, ... and has the air of
one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives
with. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness, and let him talk easily and
fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson. I told him that his
friends and I were persuaded that it was important to his health to
make an instant visit to Paris, and that I was to go on Monday if he
was ready. He was very good-humored, and affected to think that I
should never come back alive from France; it was death to go. But he
had been looking for two years for somebody to go to Italy with, and
was ready to set out at once, if I would go there.... He gave me a
cordial invitation to his lodgings (in Buckingham Palace), where I
promised to visit him before I went away.... I found him at home in
his lodgings, but with him was a clergyman whose name I did not know,
and there was no conversation. He was sure again that he was taking a
final farewell of me, as I was going among the French bullets, but
promised to be in the same lodgings if I should escape alive....
Carlyle thinks him the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and
used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall,
where Tennyson's pipe was laid up."

XXXII

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS OF MAX MUELLER

Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I
watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was
beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and
schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm
in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice
and the wave o