IN letters, indeed the second in date, the future censor of the mind and manners of his countrymen foreshadowed with singular clearness the master passion of his life. Writing on March 7, 1848, he complained that England was not yet "liveable-in," that a wave of moral, intellectual, and social vulgarity was imminent. "In a few years people will understand better why the French are the most civilised of European peoples, when they see how fictitious our manners and civility have been, how little inbred in us." Youth has excused far more drastic generalisations in others, and if exoneration be necessary here the same plea may properly be advanced, for when Arnold thus lamented and predicted he was but twenty-six years of age. The words are not recalled, however, to serve as a test by which to compare maturer judgments, many of which, indeed, if less lively in expression, indicated much the same conviction, but rather for the evidence they furnish that his thoughts, tastes, predilections, took very early in life the distinctive tendency which his literary career was later destined to confirm. Those who have a mind to read Arnold's writings through a microscope, concerned to prove occasional contradiction and inconsistency, will find their amiable curiosity rewarded by the discovery that upon many points of opinion he revised himself, and in none more noticeably than in his judgments of foreign nations. With wider experience, gained by travel and contact with the large world of living thought abroad, he ceased more and more to dogmatise: here an unfair generalisation was modified, there a faulty comparison was recalled. But in the belief that a truer and more diffused culture was the most urgent need of his own people he never wavered, and the zeal with which he strove to gain for this belief general recognition never abated. Of his obligation to proclaim the message of culture he never had doubts: the only question which gave him scruple was the method that should be employed. The question really resolved itself. His gifts and tastes fell naturally into a congenial channel of influence; pre-eminently a scholar and a man of letters, literature was clearly marked out as his proper medium. Even so, there were obstacles to be overcome,-attachment to the life of pure reflection, dislike of the noisy world and its ways. In 1851 we find him still immersed in books, and public activity is no attractive exchange for the quiet of the study. "I read his [Goethe's] letters, |