rs show us, no
very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own
family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of
letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my
readers many--or any--correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like
Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sevigne or like Lady Mary? He
is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the _Letters_ is
the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the
so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this
simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then
Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did
Southey's talent of universal writing, and Lamb's unalterable
quintessence of quaintness. But though I will allow no one to take
precedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sevigne, I do not think
that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious
person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace
Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, or
suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a
sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate
intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious
consciousness of "how it will look" on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's
letters there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to
comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a "point" or a
phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his family (and it should be
remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess
are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity
does not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the very early
letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any
appearance of second thought, of "conceit," in the good sense. Later,
he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of
official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and
talk without effort.

But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little as to
letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions
which have been just referred to. In later years (it is Mr Humphry
Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but
occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation
from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or
unwillingly, he never allowed either to us