The latest contribution to the department of national literature that we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.' No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid down by the eminent critic already cited--that they should be written for the eye of a friend, never for the public--is amply fulfilled. 'It will be seen' (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he must have been in touch with the leading men in the political, academical, and official society of his day. The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set aside those which fall under the class of _impressions de voyage_, for the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters, as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance, in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen: