* * * * * CHAP. I. LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE _POEMS_ OF 1853 II. LIFE FROM 1851-62--SECOND SERIES OF _POEMS_--_MEROPE_--_ON TRANSLATING HOMER_ III. _A FRENCH ETON_--_ESSAYS IN CRITICISM_--_CELTIC LITERATURE_--_NEW POEMS_--LIFE FROM 1862 TO 1867 IV. IN THE WILDERNESS V. THE LAST DECADE VI. CONCLUSION * * * * * INDEX MATTHEW ARNOLD. * * * * * CHAPTER I. LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE _POEMS_ OF 1853. Even those who are by no means greedy of details as to the biography of authors, may without inconsistency regret that Matthew Arnold's _Letters_ do not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. And then they are not copious, telling us in particular next to nothing about his literary work (which is, later, their constant subject) till he was past thirty. We could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs. But the letters of an undergraduate--especially when the person is Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years 1841-45--ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover, it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen about his poems before _Sohrab and Rustum_--that is to say, about the great majority of the best of them. By the time at which we have full and frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married man, a harnessed and hard-working inspector of schools, feeling himself too busy for poetry, not as yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from without to betake himself to critical prose in any quantity or variety. Indeed, by a not much more than allowable hyperbole, we may say that we start with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the book of his prose all but unopened.