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clamour, and evil-speaking be put away from us, with all malice; and for our enjoyment of the pure milk of Christianity. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life. Some of these workers will doubtless suffer me to put my hand to their plough. Like the tailor to the poet Cowper, to some one or other of them I may be allowed to make my modest appeal :

"Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,

Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?"

If not on the hustings or the platform, at least I may do something in the closet, with the pen! My mind full of this new thought, as I passed down Regent Street yesterday, and saw in a shop window, in the frontispiece to one of Mr. Hepworth Dixon's numerous but well-merited editions, the manly and animated features of the author of the immortal Guide to Mormonism, I could not help exclaiming with pride: "I, too, am an author!"

And then, Leo, comes the reaction. I look up and see Arminius's vacant stool; I sniff, and my nostrils no longer catch the scent of his tobacco. The dreams of excitement and ambition fly away; I am left solitary with the remembrance of the past, and with those consolations of piety and religion,

which you, Leo, have outgrown. Yet how can I do you such an injustice?—when at this very moment my chief consolation, under our heavy bereavement, is in repeating to myself that glorious passage you read to me the other day from one of your unpublished articles for the D. T.:- "In the Garden of the Hesperides, the inscrutable-eyed Sphinx whispers, with half-parted lips, Mysteries more than Eleusinian of the Happy Dead!"

Believe me, my dear Leo,
Your faithful admirer,

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

To ADOLESCENS LEO, Esq.

etc.

etc.

etc.

(The acquaintance of the ever-to-be-lamented Arminius was made by the present Editor on the Continent in the year 1865. The early history of the noble family of Von-Thunder-ten-Tronckh, to which Arminius belonged, their establishment in Westphalia, the sack of their castle in the middle of the last century by the Bulgarians, the fate of their principal dependents (among whom was the famous optimist philosopher, Dr. Pangloss), the adventures of Arminius's grandfather and his deportation to the Jesuits at Rome, are recorded in a well-known treatise of Voltaire. Additional information is supplied in several of the following letters.

Arminius came to England in 1866, and the corre

spondence now given in a collected form to the public commenced in the summer of that year, at the outbreak of the war between Prussia and Austria. Many will yet remember the thrill with which they originally received, through the unworthy ministry of the present Editor, the communication of the great doctrine of "Geist." What, then, must it have been to hear that doctrine in its first newness from the lips of Arminius himself! Yet it will, I hope, be admitted, that even in this position of exceptional privilege, the present Editor succeeded in preserving his coolness, his independent judgment, and his proper feelings as a Briton.)-ED.

LETTER I.

I INTRODUCE ARMINIUS AND "GEIST TO THE

SIR,

BRITISH PUBLIC.

GRUB STREET, July 19, 1866.

A PRUSSIAN acquaintance of mine, one of the party of foreigners who so offensively criticised my countrymen to me when I was abroad last year, has been over here just now, and for the last week or so he has been favouring me with his remarks on all he hears us say about the present crisis in Germany. In confidence I will own to you that he makes himself intensely disagreeable. He has the harsh, arrogant, Prussian way of turning up his nose at things and laying down the law about them; and though, as a lover of intellect, I admire him, and, as a seeker of truth, I value his frankness, yet, as an Englishman, and a member of what the Daily Telegraph calls "the Imperial race," I feel so uncomfortable under it, that I want, through your kindness, to call to my aid the great British public, which never loses heart and has always a bold front and a rough word ready for its assailants.

My Prussian friend got a little mortification at the

beginning of his visit, and as it is my belief this mortification set him wrong from the first, I shall relate what it was. I took him with me down to Reigate by the railroad, and in the carriage was one of our representative industrial men (something in the bottle way), a famous specimen of that great middle class whose energy and self-reliance make England what it is, and who give the tone to our Parliament and to our policy. News had just come of the first bloodshed between the Austrians and Prussians now at war together in Germany. "So they've begun fighting," cried my countryman; "what fools they both are!" And he handed us Punch with that masterly picture in it of "Denmark avenged; that scathing satire which represents the King of Denmark sitting with his glass of grog and his cigar, to gloat over the terrible retribution falling upon his great enemy Prussia for her misdeeds towards him. My Prussian glared at the striking moral lesson thus brought to his notice, but rage and contempt made him speechless. I hastened, with a few sentences taken from Mr. Gladstone's recent advice to the Roumanians, to pay my homage to the great principles of peaceful, industrial development which were invoked by my countryman. "Yes; war," I said, "interrupts business, and brings intolerable inconvenience with it; whereas people have only to persist steadily in the manufacture of bottles, railways, banks, and finance companies, and all good things will come to them of their own accord." Before I had finished we reached Reigate, and I

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