On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionary
spectacle of 1848, an unpublished letter written--piquantly
enough!--from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famous
year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the
artist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard,
the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies"; then the sudden
clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house,"
writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have been
written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and
Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the bookcase, and the
clock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles...has been
given to a local School of Art in Wiltshire! The green lawn remains, but
I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer
come up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies'
[i.e., Lord Lansdowne himself] is still often to be seen in the gravel
court! He was three years old when the letter was written."

Here, then, is the letter:

LANSDOWNE HOUSE, _Feb. 8, 1848._

MY DEAREST TOM,--...Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus
and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and
the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little
demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture,
Rembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert
resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony
heath sloping to the Baltic--she leaning over her two children
who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical
clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 P.M. On my left two great