The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George Russell glances at in the preface to the _Letters_, a passage which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well; perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is 'important _for us_,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me and said, "_I_ didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or might not, be Socratic.