“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Your letter was directed to Oxford, a place with which I have now no connection, and it reaches me too late for signing your Memorial, but I should in any case have declined signing it, strongly as your cause speaks to my feelings; because, first, I greatly dislike the English way of employing, for public ends, private societies and Memorials to them; secondly, the signatures you will profit by, in this case, are not those of literary people, who will at once be disposed of as a set of unpractical sentimentalists. To yourself this objection does not apply, because you are distinguished not in letters only, but also as a lover and student of animals. I hope if you read my paper in the Contemporary, you observe how I apologise for calling them the lower animals, and how thoroughly I admit that they think and love.
“Sincerely yours,
“Matthew Arnold.”
In my first journey to Italy on my way to Palestine I made acquaintance with R. W. Mackay, the author of that enormously learned, but, perhaps, not very well digested book, the Progress of the Intellect. I afterwards renewed acquaintance with him and his nice wife in their house in Hamilton Terrace. Mr. Mackay was somewhat of an invalid and a nervous man, much absorbed in his studies. I have heard it said that he was the original of George Elliot’s Mr. Casaubon. At all events Mrs. Lewes had met him, and taken a strong prejudice against him. That prejudice I think was unjust. He was a very honest and real student, and a modest one, not a pretender like Mr. Casaubon. His books contain an amazing mass of knowledge, (presented, perhaps, in rather a crude state) respecting all the great religious doctrines of the world. I had once felt that both his books and talk were hard and steel-cold, and that his religion, though dogmatically the same as mine, was all lodged in his intellect. One day, however, when he called on me and we took a drive and walk in the Park together, I learned to my surprise that he entirely felt with me that the one direct way of reaching truth about religion was Prayer, and all the rest mere corroboration of what may so be learned. To have come round to this seemed to me a great evidence of intellectual sincerity.
I forget now what particular point we had been discussing when he wrote me the following curious bit of erudition:—
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Dixit Rabbi Simeon Ben Lakis,—Nomina angelorum et mensium ascenderunt in domum Israelis ex Babylone.”
“This occurs in the treatise Rosh Haschanah, which is part of the Mischna.
“The Mischna (the earliest part of the Talmud) is said to have been completed in the 3rd century, under the auspices of Rabbi Judah the Holy, and his disciples.