the world, and we must hold together as long as we
can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party
leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at
all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how
strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed
to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.

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 _impres