directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the
wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be
eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the
clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what
followed was directly due to him.

The non-literary events of his life during this period were
sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the
domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858,
perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the
late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next
spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a
roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to
report on elementary education. "Foreign life," he says, with that
perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, "is still to
me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree." And he was
duly "presented" at home, in order that he might be presentable
abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them
recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that
death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.

He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the
Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of
half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without
rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck
him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising
but not performing dinner at Auray--"soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps,
_fricandeau_ of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;" but
"everything so detestable" that his dinner was bread and cheese. He
must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few