usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an example of his actual accomplishment. We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to his sister, evidence that he was increasingly "spread" (as the French say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons--Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the last-named that the writer "is getting to like him "--the passages on the author of _Modern Painters_ in the earlier letters are certainly not enthusiastic--and that "he gains much by his fancy being forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats." This beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that Mr J.R. Green "likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he looks into them," again a not uncommon experience--and that Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his _Primer_. The next year continues the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper. "My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy days than my own sisters"--wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes _Goblin Market_, "there is no friend like a sister." Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, _a la maniere noire_, as "an ardent, learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant." 1879 yields a letter to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request resulted in one of the very best, perhaps _the_ very best, of that critic's essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so prodigiously _au serieux_, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.