Note 13 — Chapter IV

Footnote 13: Mr Disraeli’s words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 100). They were actually: “At that time [when they had met at Lord Houghton’s some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you deserve it.” Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that “he shouldn’t dare to be intimate” with so clever a young man as Matthew Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athenæum, and asked “which of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: ‘Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.’” The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the speaker’s own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the Essays to be “the book that got him his reputation,” will be found in Letters, i. 351.