,
scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have vindicated
its character for "character" by hospitably forcing him to eat dinner
and supper "on end," and by describing him in its newspapers as "an
elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis." The whole tour,
including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five months, and
brought--not the profit which some people expected, but--a good sum,
with wrinkles as to more if the experiment were repeated. And when he
came back to England, the lectures were collected and printed.

In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then
married and living in America, a definition of "real civilisation" as
the state "when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from
that till 1 A.M., not later." This is, though doubtless jestful,
really a _point de repere_ for the manners of the later
nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the
eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold
practically abstained from "the world" except quite rarely, while "the
world" was not busy. The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.

On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of "a horrid pain
across my chest," which, however, "Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly,
alas!] to be not heart" but indigestion. The _Discourses in
America_, for which their author had a great predilection, came out
later. In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent
remark, "I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner
brought me round," is another ominous hint that it was _not_
indigestion. Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in
October, one saying, "I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place
in the world to which I am most attached" ["And so say all of us"];
the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how "I got
out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I
cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me:
the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley
below." And this walk is again referred to later. He was pleased by a
requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry
Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it. And at the
beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to
get some information for the Government as to German school fees. He
was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much