attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly
low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very
little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December
danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that
"it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see
Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or
third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"--that time so
fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is
followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is
difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving;
perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.

The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, where like other
people he found "the crowd very good-humoured," are noted; and the
beginning of _Thyrsis_ where and while the fritillaries blow. But
from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than
a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14,
1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of
which was offered for his lecture--later the well-known essay. His
object, he says, "is not so much to give a literary history of Heine's
work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special
tendency and significance of what he did." He will, therefore, not
even read these things of Heine's that he has not read, but will take
the _Romancero_ alone for his text, with a few quotations from
elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew
Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues
that plan of "placing" writers which some of his own admirers so
foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a _locus classicus_
for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible--I do not know
whether he did so--that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter,