that the remnant must be sufficient, and the United States are therefore safe. I cannot suppose that this was anything but elaborate irony on Mr. Arnold's part, or that his more intelligent hearers were unconscious of the fact. But there were many digressions. It is here that he rebukes his old friends the French for their worship of "the great goddess Lubricity," called by the Greeks Aselgeia, and describes Vietor Hugo in one of his least felicitous phrases as "the average sensual man impassioned and grandiloquent.” The greatest of French dramatists since Molière is singularly free from the fault which Mr. Arnold here reprehends.

This was not Mr. Arnold's last visit to the United States, where his elder daughter married and settled. He went there again in 1886, and arrived at the singular conclusion that all the best opinion of America, the opinion of the "remnant," was hostile to the Irish policy of Mr. Gladstone. Truly the eye sees what it brings with it the power of seeing. This is not the place in which to discuss whether Home Rule for Ireland would be a good thing or a bad. That the majority of intelligent and cultivated Americans thought it in 1886, as they think it now, to be a good thing, there can be no doubt whatever. Although he had American friends, whom he valued and appreciated, Mr. Arnold did not altogether like America. In the Nineteenth Century for April 1888, the year and month of his death, may be seen his final judgment on the subject. He had written the year before for his nephew, Mr. Edward Arnold, then editor of Murray's Magazine, two articles on the rather dull Memoirs of General Grant, whom,

in one of his freaks of waywardness, he pronounced superior to Lincoln. Lincoln, it seems, the author of the speech at Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural, had no "distinction." Happy the nation where such classic eloquence is not distinguished. Mr. Arnold's last word on American life is the word "uninteresting." "The merc nomenclature of the country acts upon a cultivated person like the incessant pricking of pins." The "funny man is a "national misfortune." So he is here. And, after all, Mark Twain is better than Ally Sloper. Mr. Arnold's criticism of what was unsound in American institutions and manners would have been more effective if he had had, like Mr. Bryce, more sympathy with what was sound

in them.

Any survey of Matthew Arnold's politics would be incomplete without a reference to his opinions on Home Rule. To Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill of 1886 he was decidedly opposed. Both before and after the General Election of that year he wrote to the Times a strong protest against the policy embodied in it. These letters, except for the personal animosity to Mr. Gladstone which the second displays, are wholly admirable in tone and temper. In them Mr. Arnold admits to the full the grievances of Ireland against England, and calls for their redress. Only he would redress them, not by a "separate Parliament,' but by a "rational and equitable system of government." Lord Salisbury's policy of coercion suited him as little as Mr. Gladstone's policy of repeal. proposed that the local government of Ireland should be thoroughly overhauled and made truly popular, even before such a system was introduced into the

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rest of the United Kingdom. These letters show the Whig spirit at its best, and are thoroughly characteristic of Mr. Arnold. He followed them up the next year with three articles in the Nineteenth Century called respectively "The Zenith of Conservatism," "Up to Easter," and "From Easter to August." In these, while giving a general support to the Government of Lord Salisbury, he showed himself to be a very bad Unionist from the strictly orthodox point of view; for he proposed that there should be not a single Irish Parliament, but two Irish Parliaments, of which one should legislate for the North and the other for the South. The fact is, it was not Home Rule, but Gladstone's Home Rule, that Matthew Arnold disliked. Indeed, one might almost say that it was not Home Rule, but Gladstone.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE AFTERMATH.

DURING the last twenty years of his life Matthew Arnold wrote very little poetry; but the little he did write was very good There are lines in "Westminster Abbey" which he never surpassed, and a few which, in my opinion, he never equalled. This beautiful poem was composed in memory of Dean Stanley, and it could have had no worthier subject. For Stanley, Mr. Arnold's lifelong friend, was not merely the courtly ecclesiastic, the scholarly divine; he was the chivalrous defender of all causes and of all persons, however unpopular for the moment, that stood for freedom, charity, and truth. If the spirit of Dean Stanley had always dominated the Establishment, the Liberation Society would never have been formed. The chapter in Mrs. Besant's Autobiography describing Dr. Stanley is a noble picture of what a Christian minister should be. He delighted in all the traditions of his Abbey, and Mr. Arnold happily chose to connect with him the beautiful legend which tells of its mystic consecration by St. Peter himself. In spite of the fact that these sonorous stanzas recall Milton's great Ode on the Nativity, they are not disappointing; they have the note of the grand style

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"Rough was the winter eve;
Their craft the fishers leave,

And down over the Thames the darkness drew.
One still lags last, and turns, and eyes the Pile
Huge in the gloom, across in Thorney Isle,
King Sebert's work, the wondrous Minster new.
-'Tis Lambeth now, where then

They moor'd their boats among the bulrush stems;
And that new Minster in the matted fen

The world-famed Abbey by the westering Thames."

These verses deserve to be called Miltonic, even if they have not the inimitable touch of the master.

But it is the later lines about Demophoon, "the charm'd babe of the Eleusinian king," which I should be disposed to select as the high-water mark of Matthew Arnold's poetry. They haunt the memory with that ineffaceable charm which belongs only to the highest order of poetical expression

"The Boy his nurse forgot,

And bore a mortal lot.

Long since, his name is heard on earth no more.
In some chance battle on Citharon's side
The nursling of the Mighty Mother died,
And went where all his fathers went before."

Here one might well take leave of Matthew Arnold's poems, and pass to those literary essays which he wrote in the full maturity of his knowledge and his power. For, happy in so many things, he was happiest of all in this, that no bodily sense, and no mental faculty, ever suffered in him the smallest abatement. But I cannot omit all mention of the pretty, facile lyrics in which he paid tribute to his beloved dogs and birds. I reter, of course, to "Geist's Grave," to "Poor