OFFERED TO

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CHILDREN

WITH AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE

"OF THAT UNRETURNING DAY"

"We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless, yet with all this agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond-tendentemque manus ripe ulterioris amore."—Essays in Criticism.

0 2-1-49 4B W

Handmar
1-31-49
539271

IT

PREFACE

It may be thought that some apology is needed for the production of yet another book about Matthew Arnold. If so, that apology is to be found in the fact that nothing has yet been written which covers exactly the ground assigned to me in the present volume.

It was Arnold's express wish that he should not be made the subject of a Biography. This rendered it impossible to produce the sort of book by which an eminent man is usually commemorated—at once a history of his life, an estimate of his work, and an analysis of his character and opinions. But though a Biography was forbidden, Arnold's family felt sure that he would not have objected to the publication of a selection from his correspondence; and it became my happy task to collect, and in some sense to edit, the two volumes of his Letters which were published in 1895. Yet in reality my functions were little more than those of the collector and the anno