very much at Mr
Arnold's heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or
share his qualities.

However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the
fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went
circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would
have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the
Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany.
Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined
system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd,
there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and
would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all
reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly
all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his
lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short
apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private
secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now
that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was
appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a
livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman,
daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas,
was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in
the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools,
which occupied--to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite
so in the third--most of his life that was not given to literature.
Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has
been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to
say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and
quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had
his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.

But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since _Alaric at
Rome_, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in
another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold
had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which
he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his
life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in
criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any
poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.

These documents can hardly b