_-artistic--at the unspeakable persons who think that by
blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any
one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of
being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to
underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of
these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in
the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English
essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special
division of _causerie_ the thing is not only without a superior, it is
almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are
usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the
above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill
indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the
completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired
to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an
example of his actual accomplishment.

We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative
of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to
his sister, evidence that he was increasingly "spread" (as the French
say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons--Mr Disraeli and Mr
Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the
last-named that the writer "is getting to like him "--the passages on
the author of _Modern Painters_ in the earlier letters are
certainly not enthusiastic--and that "he gains much by his fancy being
forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats." This
beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is
so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy
range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that
Mr J.R. Green "likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he
looks into them," again a not uncommon experience--and that Mr
Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his
_Primer_. The next year continues the series of letters to M.
Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs
Cropper. "My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy
days than my own sisters"--wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes
_Goblin Market_, "there is no friend like a sister." Later, Mr
Freeman is dashed off, _a la maniere noire_, as "an ardent,
learned, an