We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted _Friendship's Garland_, which has always had some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that the period when _Essays in Criticism_, combined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the first years of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, when that brilliant periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the _Saturday Review_, and others, was renewing for the sixties the sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the _Saturday_ itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of _persiflage_, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in _Eothen_, and which the _Saturday_ had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in _Sartor_ and the _Latterday Pamphlets_. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and _comparses_--Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the _Daily Telegraph_, the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by their proper names--he instructed England on its own weakness, folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the importance of _Geist_ and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more puzzled, yet more _Prusso-mimic_, than ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and launched the whole as a book.