secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now
that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was
appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a
livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman,
daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas,
was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in
the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools,
which occupied--to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite
so in the third--most of his life that was not given to literature.
Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has
been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to
say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and
quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had
his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.

But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since _Alaric at
Rome_, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in
another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold
had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which
he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his
life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in
criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any
poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.

These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem
(_Cromwell_) of 1843: they consist of _The Strayed Reveller and other
Poems_, by "A.," 1849; _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_, [still]
by "A.," 1852; and _Poems_ by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853--the
third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with _Empedocles_
and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions,