his literary work (which is, later, their constant subject) till he
was past thirty. We could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often
interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs.
But the letters of an undergraduate--especially when the person is
Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years
1841-45--ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little
illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we
know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not
entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters
political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered
Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover,
it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen
about his poems before _Sohrab and Rustum_--that is to say, about the
great majority of the best of them. By the time at which we have full
and frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married man, a harnessed
and hard-working inspector of schools, feeling himself too busy for
poetry, not as yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from
without to betake himself to critical prose in any quantity or
variety. Indeed, by a not much more than allowable hyperbole, we may
say that we start with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the
book of his prose all but unopened.

We must therefore make what we can of the subject, and of course a
great deal more is to be made in such a case of the work than of the
life. The facts of the latter are but scanty. Matthew Arnold, as all
the world knows, was the son--the eldest son--of the famous Dr
(Thomas) Arnold, Head-master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern
History at Oxford, where he had earlier been a Fellow of Oriel. Dr
Arnold survives in the general memory now chiefly by virtue of his
head-mastership, which was really a remarkable one, whatever