ingular judgment that
George Sand, just dead, was "the greatest spirit in our European world
from the time that Goethe departed." The chronicle may be
appropriately closed for the time by mentioning that in the spring of
1877 Mr Arnold was approached with a view to his standing once more
for the Poetry Chair, and declined. The invitation, however, was a
sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, and in effect,
though doubtless not in intention, he had already obeyed it. "A French
Critic on Milton," published in January 1877, is the first literary
article of any importance that his bibliography records for the whole
decade which we have surveyed in this chapter.

_Note._--It is particularly unlucky that the _Prose
Passages_, which the author selected from his works and published
in 1879, did not appear later. It is almost sufficient to say that
less than one-fourth of their contents is devoted to literature, all
the rest to the "Dead Sea fruit." I have therefore said nothing about
the book in the text. It is, however, a useful though incomplete and
one-sided chrestomathy of Mr Arnold's style from the formal point of
view, illustrating both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious
_ordonnance_ of his paragraphs in building up thought and
statement.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p.
100). They were actually: "At that time [when they had met at Lord
Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were
little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but
you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you
deserve it." Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is
credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that "he shouldn't
_dare_ to be intimate" with so clever a young man as Matthew
Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr
Arnold in the Athenaeum, and asked "which of all my books I should
myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I
had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: 'Then it is some
other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.'" The passage, which
contains an odd prophecy of the speaker's own death, and an
interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the
_Essays_ to be "the book that got him his reputation," will be
found in _Letters_, i. 351.

[2] Of the remaining contents, the _Prefaces_ of 1853-5 are
invaluable