sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr
Arnold as an epistoler than the _Letters_ at large seem to have
given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the _Friendship's
Garland_ series, though the occasion for that name did not come
till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that
of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he
caught "_a_ salmon" in the Deveron during September.

The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations
between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent
in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The
author of the _Vie de Jésus_ was a very slightly younger man than
Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left
the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat
in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His
contributions to the _Débats_ and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single
book, _Averroès et l'Averroisme_, dates from that year. I do not
know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But
they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign
Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a
letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his
sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the
considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing,
however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a
high sense of the word, on the French," while _he_ is trying to
inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and
enthusiastic reference to the essay, _Sur la Poésie des Races
Celtiques_, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do
not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates--for the