Matthew _Arnold's name has hitherto been free from scandal.
Indeed, he has seemed aloof from human frailty, and we have suspected that his impeccable good conduct kept his poems a little arid and all too refined. Mr. Hugh Kingsmill, however, has far other suspicions, and in his biographical study, Matthew Arnold (Duckwcirth, 12s. 6d.), he expresses them in a loud and confident voice. He accounts for Arnold's reserve as the outcome of a skeleton in the cupboard. He had fallen in love with a French companion-help whom he Met in Switzerland, but the difference between' their social stations and their moral conceptions made the passion hopeless.
" In the void air, towards thee, My stretch'd arms are cast, But a sea rolls between us—r Our different past ! "
There is a good deal of interest in Mr. Kingsmill's detective work, and there are passages of a true critical insight. On the whole, however, we feel that he over-exerts. himself in trying to fix upon Arnold's reputation this almost inconceivably small blot.
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