their talk is delightful. We passed a yard the other day where there were cows, and N. said, 'What a nice smell from those dear cows, papa! Isn't it kind of the dear cows to give us smells ?" One can imagine with what pleasure the grandmother would read such instances of the little ones' quickness and sympathy; one can imagine with what pleasure the father would write them. But alien eyes, bent possibly upon their own children and their own cows, may be pardoned for reading unmoved such essentially familiar and domestic records. There is a saying: "Never tell your troubles; you only take up the time of the man who is waiting to tell you his." In this hard and busy world the saying perhaps holds good of other things than troubles. Mr. Morley has lately told us, in reviewing these very letters, that the epistolary charm vanishes in the anticipation of an audience. Walpole's letters and Gray's are banned by him for that reason, being written as with printer and publisher before them, and the whole literary and fine world looking over their shoulders." Letters, to be enjoyed as letters must be easy, careless, unpremeditated, flung off on the impulse of the moment; improvisations, in short, about yourself and your correspondent, and the personal things which you and your correspondent happen to be interested in and to care about. The public breaks the spell. That is an opinion, and Mr. Morley's opinion on any literary point will always be welcome. And very sound it is, no doubt, so far as the writer and his correspondent are concerned; but when the public is asked to join the party-how then? If the public does not happen to care about the personal things which interest the writer and his correspondent, what then? Then the public is apt to recollect a certain saying about easy writing and what so often comes of it. If Arnold had had leisure or inclination for a general correspondence on literature, public affairs, and public men, possibly his letters would have been as piquant as Walpole's, as polished as Gray's, as witty as Byron's. But he kept these things for his published writings; for his private correspondence he reserved those intimate confidences, "familiar matter of to-day," which every man is pleased to think important and interesting to those near and dear to him, but which no man of delicacy and dignity would wish to be bawled about the streets. "It is too much the habit of modern biographers to confuse epistolary talk with vital fact." With most of the subjects of modern biographers it must, it would seem, be epistolary talk or nothing; the vital fact is not indeed a conspicuous element in any form of our current literature. But Arnold was the last man to fall into this mistake. To get at the vital fact by all the means in his power was the great aim of his writing; to exhort others to strive for it was the great end of his teaching." To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will,—it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline." It seems hard that such a man should be forced to contribute to the everlasting welter of epistolary talk. Not here, oh Apollo, |