SD2844. Matthew Arnold to Mary Penrose Arnold
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 349–350 (in part).
Athenæum
November 9, 1866
My dearest Mother
I have to thank dear Fan for a very pleasant little note and I will at once answer her communications from Miss Martineau by saying that Miss Martineau had already given me her cousin’s kind message …
We had a very pleasant dinner party last night which grew up out of small beginnings. First I had asked Lake to dine quite alone with us, then a M. Milsand, a Frenchman and a remarkable writer, who had been very civil to me when I was in Paris last year, called unexpectedly and I added him to Lake; then I found Milsand was staying with Browning and I added Browning; then Ld Houghton went with me and William Forster to Spurgeon’s lecture, and having asked William of course to dine if he stayed in London I found that Ld Houghton was a friend of Milsand’s and so I asked him too; then Flu suggested that we ought to ask the Custs, which was very true, so we asked them; and they all came. … Milsand speaks beautiful English, and William found out that he had once reviewed some essay of Milsand’s about the Quakers. … I wrote … a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette about Prussian tenant-right … The letter has been successful, and Browning and John Duke Coleridge have both been telling me that it is impossible to overrate the effect these letters produce and the change they promise to work. …
Publication: The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1996–2001), 3, 87–88.
Manuscript: Balliol College.
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