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Primrose was on the monogamy of While the worthy vicar never wearies us by insistence on his great doctrine, Mr. Arnold sometimes bores even those who are of his own way of thinking by his iteration, and now and then, by his want of taste, offends those whose opinions he attacks. In the following correspondence, however, he is seen in that pleasant, gentle light which he so well knew how to diffuse around him:

TO MATTHEW ARNOLD, ESQ.:

MY DEAR SIR, I hope you will excuse this letter's liberty and abruptness. Weak sight makes writing painful, but a sense of duty compels the effort. You are a powerful public teacher, and must feel how important it is that your teaching should be sound. On one point on which I have a strong personal feeling I deem it otherwise. Again and again you have thrown ridicule on those who seek to remove the prohibition on marrying a deceased wife's sister. Now that prohibition has kept me a widower nearly forty years, the alternative having been to act unjustly to my sister-in-law and to my children, mutually and strongly attached. In effect, out of the eighty years of my life I have passed but eight in the married state, and I cannot but thank and honour those who would have released

me and many more from a very painful and most unprofitable dilemma.

Pray forgive me for thus writing, and believe

me,

To

Esq.:

Ever

yours sincerely,

WESLEYAN TRAINING COLLEGE, WESTMINSTER S. W., December 19th, 1878.

your

MY DEAR SIR, I have to thank you for letter, and I assure you I was both interested and touched in reading it. I need not remind you that a rule may operate severely in individual cases, and yet may be for the general advantage. For instance, I can conceive a case in which the prohibition to marry one's niece (a marriage permitted in Protestant Germany) may be felt to press hardly; yet I have no doubt at all that such a prohibition is for the general advantage. Still, though I may continue to differ from you on the main point in question, I am not the less grieved to have said anything to give pain to one for whom I feel if you will allow me to say so such sincere esteem and regard as yourself.

Believe me, dear Mr.

Most truly yours,

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

My readers must not infer from the address of this letter that Matthew Arnold, who was never weary of scoffing at the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion, lived in the Wesleyan Training College. It was, no doubt, as an inspector of schools that he was visiting it. While the students were writing their answers to the questions he had set them, he would fill up the time by his private correspondence. Against his confident belief on this marriage question it is interesting to set the no less confident belief on the same question of a brother poet, a man of vast learning and a strong Churchman. "Has it never occurred to you," wrote Robert Southey, "that this law is an abominable relic of ecclesiastical tyranny? Of all second marriages, I have no hesitation in saying that these are the most natural and the most suitable."

Few among my autographs do I value more highly than the following letter from Sir Thomas Browne to the antiquary Dugdale, the author of the "Monasticon." Browne, Johnson, and Blackstone are the great boasts of Pembroke College, Oxford, in which I passed nearly four years of my student life. By the side of these three great luminaries, her other sons, such as Shenstone and Whitefield, are stars of small magnitude. "Sir Thomas Browne," writes Johnson, "was the

first man of eminence graduated from the new college, to which the zeal or gratitude of those that love it most can wish little better than that it may long proceed as it began." De Quincey, in his Essay on Rhetoric, speaks of him as "deep, tranquil and majestic as Milton." Johnson, however, described his style as "indeed a tissue of many languages." Nevertheless he sometimes imitated it. When he tells how Frederick the Great "commanded one of his Titanian retinue to marry a tall woman that they might propagate procerity," Boswell accuses him of “indulging his Brownism." The "defect of faith" with which Browne had been charged, Johnson victoriously repels. "Nor," he writes, "can contempt of the positive and ritual parts of religion be imputed to him who doubts whether a good man would refuse a poisoned eucharist, and 'who would violate his own arm rather than a church.'" In his Dictionary, the great lexicographer, quoting this passage, defines "violate " "to injure by irreverence." In the In the year in which Browne wrote his letter to Dugdale he took unto himself a wife. The marriage was a happy one, even though he had lately declared in his "Religio Medici" that "the whole world was made for man, but only the twelfth part of man for woman," and that "man is the whole world, but woman only the rib or crooked part of man."