Lord Coleridge unveiled last Saturday in Westminster Abbey, an impressive
bust of Matthew Arnold, of which Mr.
Bruce Joy is the sculptor. It is placed in the Baptistery, and is near the statue of Wordsworth and the busts of Keble, Kingsley, and Maurice. The Dean of Westminster, speaking in the Jerusalem Chamber, expressed the satisfaction with which he had found room for this memorial of the poet who had produced such poems as " The Scholar-Gipsy," Thyrsis," and "Rugby Chapel,"—to which he might well have added the poems on the author of " Obermann," and on " The Grande Chartreuse." The Dean evidently felt confi- dent that, in spite of the growing difficulty of finding room in Westminster Abbey for memorials of even the greatest men, be had not judged wrongly in appropriating some space to Matthew Arnold ; and we are sure that his judgment, which is always shrewd and wise, will be confirmed by the critics of the future. Matthew Arnold, dim as was his own faith, was one of the most tender as well as the most lucid of the students of the Christian history and life. He said of him- self, and said most justly, that-
" Rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith and trimmed its fire, Showed me the high white star of truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire."
And whatever was the result upon his own theological con-
victions, it produced at least a very remarkable group of unsurpassed and unsurpassable poetic reveries on different aspects of Christian life and faith.
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