iam, which he has enshrined in verse.

He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the
Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of
half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without
rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck
him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising
but not performing dinner at Auray--"soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps,
_fricandeau_ of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;" but
"everything so detestable" that his dinner was bread and cheese. He
must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few
years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent
appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from
contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter
a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly
enough "the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the
feudal ages out of the minds of the country people"; but if he
reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he
does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like
it--weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently
without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though
he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his
feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris--in fact, he
speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England,
and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make
Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that
appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he
goes to Strasbourg, and Time--Time the Humourist as well as the
Avenger and Consoler--makes him commit himself dreadfully. He "thinks
there cannot be a moment's doubt" that the French will beat the
Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating
the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, "entirely shared" his conviction
that "the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into
the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the
English." Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy
down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he
is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly "for the
children, but partly also from affection for that fool