The Poetical works of Matthew Arnold [Binding]

London: Macmillan, 1899.

Finely bound in full decorative gilt calf with heavily ornate side and spine, wide gilt dentelles, raised bands, all edges gilt. Reprint. 8vo. pp xii, [1], 497, [2], 502-510. Portrait frontispiece of the author, with tissue-guard. Light spotting to endpapers. A very handsome copy and a fine example of the library binder's art. Arnold was the son of the Thomas Arnold, the pioneering headmaster of Rugby School. In 1834, the Arnolds occupied a holiday home, Fox How, in the Lake District, where William Wordsworth was a neighbour and friend. In 1840, aged 17, Arnold entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he attended John Henry Newman's sermons at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin but did not join the Oxford Movement. Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, and was the first in this position to deliver his lectures in English rather than in Latin. in "Portraits of the Seventies", GWE Russell declaimed Arnold as 'a man of the world entirely free from worldliness and a man of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry'. In later life he became a regular attender at the Athenaeum Club, a frequent dinner guest at great country houses and fond of fishing. A lively conversationalist, with a self-consciously cultivated air combining foppishness and Olympian grandeur, he apparently read constantly, widely, and deeply, filling notebook after notebook with meditations of an almost monastic tone.