Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on translating Homer, and Tennyson's "deficiency in intellectual power," and Mr Arnold's own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise some folk. It seems that he has "a strong sense of the irrationality of that period" and of "the utter folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it." Still it has "poetically the greatest charm and refreshment for me." One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is irrational and which you don't take seriously: the practice seems to be not unlike that mediaeval one of keeping fools for your delectation. Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its immediate predecessor--a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"--it would be difficult to find any adventurer who has _not_ entangled himself in that study--and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose, though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he took. And his first five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and others that there was to be "a great row") by reflecting that "it doesn't much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty years earlier. In neither case can the "row" have had any personal reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford. FOOTNOTES: