[ Footnote 8: ] “The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do.”—Sydney Smith to Jeffrey.
[ Footnote 9: ] The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little biographical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold’s first general report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick, Leicester, Rutland and Northants, Gloucester, Monmouth, all South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially Wesleyan and the then powerful “British” schools. As the schools multiplied the district was reduced, and at last he had Westminster only; but the exclusion of Anglican and Roman Catholic schools remained till 1870. And it is impossible not to connect the somewhat exaggerated place which the Dissenters hold in his social and political theories (as well as perhaps some of his views about the “Philistine”) with these associations of his. We must never forget that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked in the shadow, not of Barchester Towers, but of Salem Chapel.
[ Footnote 10: ] “I have papers sent me to look over which will give me to the 20th of January in London without moving, then for a week to Huntingdonshire schools, then for another to London, ...and then Birmingham for a month.”
[ Footnote 11: ] There are persons who would spell this moral; but I am not writing French, and in English the practice of good writers from Chesterfield downwards is my authority.
[ Footnote 12: ] The letters are full of pleasant child-worship, the best passage of all being perhaps the dialogue between Tom and “Budge,” at vol. i. p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder’s reply, “Oh this is false Budge, this is all false!” to his infant brother’s protestations of affection.
[ Footnote 13: ] Mr Disraeli’s words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 100). They were actually: “At that time [when they had met at Lord Houghton’s some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you deserve it.” Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that “he shouldn’t dare to be intimate” with so clever a young man as Matthew Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athenæum, and asked “which of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: ‘Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.’” The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the speaker’s own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the Essays to be “the book that got him his reputation,” will be found in Letters, i. 351.
[ Footnote 14: ] Of the remaining contents, the Prefaces of 1853-5 are invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed. Of The French Play in London, I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with the inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of Hugo; the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle class. There are good things in it, but they are better said elsewhere. The rest needs no notice.
[ Footnote 15: ] A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him, he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised as comprehending “the First and Second Series of the Author’s Poems and the New Poems,” but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces—including things as interesting as A Dream and Stagirius—are omitted, though the fine In Utrumque Paratus reappears for the first time as a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped The Church of Brou except the third part, and recovered not only Stagirius and others but The New Sirens, besides giving, for the first time in book-form, Haworth Churchyard, printed twenty-two years before in Fraser. A further reprint in 1881 restored the whole Church of Brou and A Dream, and gave two or three small additions, especially Geist’s Grave. The three-volume edition of 1885 also republished Merope for the first time, and added Westminster Abbey and Poor Matthias. The one-volume edition of 1890 reproduced all this, adding Horatian Echo and Kaiser Dead; it is complete save for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.
[ Footnote 16: ] “I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it.”