her way. He was
responsible in 1882 for a third disappointment, but here again it has been
truly said that to appoint to the charity commission a man of sixty, who
had no intimate knowledge of charity law, and who had recently in his
articles irritated all the nonconformists in England by his ironical
references to dissent and dissenters, would not have been conducive to the
efficient transaction of public business. A year later Mr. Gladstone
proffered him, and his friends made him accept, a civil list pension of
two hundred and fifty pounds a year, "in public recognition of service to
the poetry and literature of England." Arnold in a letter here tries to
soften Mr. Gladstone's heart on the subject of copyright, on which, as I
often made bold to tell him, he held some rather flagrant heresies. Here
the poet begs the minister to consider whether an English author ought not
to have property in his work for a longer time than he has now. "For many
books the sale begins late, the author has to create, as Wordsworth said,
the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Such an author is surely the very
man one would wish to protect." I fear he made no convert.

Another poet, with no eye on patronage or pension, hopes to be permitted
to say (1869), "how very many of your countrymen whom you have forgotten
or never saw, follow your noble and courageous development of legislation
with the same personal devotion, gratitude, and gladness that I feel."
Then five years later he still assures him that among men of letters he
may have antagonists but he cannot have enemies--rather a fine distinction,
with painfully little truth in it as things happened.

To Miss Martineau, who had done hard work in more than one good cause, he
proposes a pension, which she honourably declines: "The work of my busy
years has supplied the needs of a quiet old age. On the former occasions
of my declining a pension I was poor, and it was a case of scruple
(possibly cowardice). Now I have a competence, and there would be no
excuse for my touching the public money. You will need no assurance that I
am as grateful for your considerate offer, as if it had relieved me of a
wearing anxiety."

In 1885 he wrote to Mr. Watts, the illustrious painter, to request, with
the sanction of the Queen, that he would allow himself to be enrolled
among the baronets of the United Kingdom. "It gives me lively pleasure,"
he said, "to have the means of thus doing honour to art in the