Sir Mountstuart gave a very hearty and just appreciation to
the beauty of Matthew Arnold's poems, and truly said that it would be by his poems, and not by his prose works, that he would be remembered. It is not saying much to declare, as he did, that Mr. Arnold's poems would be a great deal more popular thirty years hence than they are now. Had Matthew Arnold lived to survive Mr. Browning and Lord Tennyson, —and he was very much the junior of both,—he would inevit- ably have been made the next Poet-Laureate, and we do not know that he would have been regarded as a great falling-off even from the present very great holder of that office. Sir M. E. Grant-Duff remarked that both the great Dr. Arnold and his still more illustrious son had in a certain measure seemed to anticipate their own deaths. Dr. Arnold wrote in his diary on the day before his death : " How nearly can I say Viii." Matthew Arnold had filled up in his diary the actual day of his death by anticipation with a verse from Ecclesiastes " Weep bitterly over the dead as he is worthy, and then comfort thy- self ; drive heaviness away, thou shalt not do him good, but hurt thyself." Alas ! we are not generally in such danger of hurting ourselves in that way.
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