sisters--forever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, besides
making the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, a
more devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published letters
are there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter of
Mrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the
_Poems by A._ She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to become
William Forster's wife, were at the time in London. "K" had been
seriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time.

Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we
came up--now so long ago!--and it is pleasant indeed to see his
dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so
unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society
entirely different from anything we can enter into.

But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by a
run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one
or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make,
was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple
kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and
later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people,
till after his death--kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful
writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, a
school-boy. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's
"Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, would alone have saved
him from it. And as to his relation to "society," and the great ones in
it, no one more frankly amused himself--within certain very definite
limits--with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightly
to them. He never denied--none but the foolish ever do deny--the immense
personal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, wherever