The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-05-01
STORIES OF FAMOUS MEN
FROF. MAX MULLEK'S ANECDOTES
 OF HIS FRIENDS.

hih anu SehiuH-
 Brilliant Literary Lights of Past Gem
 eration.
 One of my earliest dinners I remem- Der at Oxford was to meet Thackeray. Thackeray was then writing 'Es- mond," and a MT, Stoddard-a fellow of St. Johns oollege-asked me to meet him at dinner. We were only four, and we were all very much awed by Thackeray's presence, particularly l, not being able as yet to express my self freely in English. We sat silent for some time, no one ventured to make the first remark, the soup was over, and there was fine John Dore on the table waiting to be splayed. We were hoping for some brilliant sally from Thackeray, but nothing came At last Thackeray suddenly turned his large spectacled eyes on me and said: Are you going to eat your own an cestor?" I stared, everybody else stared, At last we gave it up, and Thackeray, looking very grave and learned, said: Surely you are the son of Dorian Muller-the Muller who wrote that awfully learned book on the Dorians; and was not John Dore the ancestor of all the Dorians!" There was a general "Oh, oh!" but the ice was broken, and no one after this horrible pun was afraid to say anything. All could tell Thackeray was that l was not the son of Otfrien Muller who wrote on the Dorians, but of Wilhelm Muller, the poet, who wrote "D1e Hom- erische Vorschule, and as to John Dore being our ancestor, how could that be? The original John Dore, so l had been told, was il Janitore, that is, St. Peter, and had no wife-or at least he never acknowledged her in public | Though all this did not promise we'll, yet the rest of our little dinner party was more successful; it became noisy and even brilliant.
 Thackeray from his treasures of wit and sarcasm poured out anecdote after anecdote; he used plenty of vinegar and cayenne pepper, but there was all ways flavor of kindliness and good nature, even in his most cutting re- marks. I saw more of him when he came to Oxford to lecture on the -Four Georges" and when he stood for Parliament and was defeated by Card well and Charles Neate. After one of his lectures, when I expressed my de- light with his brilliant success, Wait, | ho 1Yy,n a when you will lecture at Oxford" At that time my English was still very I fragmentary, and there was no idea of my staying in England, still less of my ever becoming 8 professor at Oxford, I watched Clough before the world knew him. I knew Matthew Arnold l during many years of his early life, and, having had the honor of exam ming Swinburne, I was not surprised at his marvellous performances in later years He was even then a true artist, a commander of legions of words, who { might become an imperator at any time. Clough was a most fascinating character, thoroughly genuine, but so oppressed with the problems of life that it was difficult ever to get a smile out of him, and if one did, his round, rud- dy face, with the deep, heavy eyes, seemed really to suffer from the con- seriously, and made greater sacrifices to his convictions than the world ever suspected. He was poor, but from con scientious scruples gave up his fellow ship, and was driven at last to go to I America to make himself independent without giving up the independence ot his mind. With a little more sunshine above him and around him he might have grown to very considerable height, but there was always a heavy 1 weight ona him, that seemed to render every utterance and every poem a struggle.
 Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, aud whom watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold He was beautiful as a young man, strong an6 manly, yet full of dreams and schemes His Olympian manners began even al Oxford; there was no harm in them they were natural, not put on. The | very SUuIu OI HIS SOlcG ana the wave of his arm were Jovelike He grap. pied with the same problems as Clough but they never got the better of him or, rather, he never got the worse o1 them. Goethe helped him to soar where others toiled and sighed and were sink. ing under their self-imposed burdens Even though his later life was enough to dishearten a poet, he laughed at his being Pegasus i'm Joche. Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries most of them judges, bishops and min. isters, he would groan over the drud gerry he had to go through every day O his life i'll examining dirty school-boy and schoolgirls. But he saw the fur of it, and laughed. What a pity il was that his friends, and he had many could find no better place for him Most of his contemporaries rose tt high positions in church and state; ht remained to the end an examiner of le ementary schools. Of course, it may b said that, like so many of his literary friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by potboil CTS of various kinds. But there wa! something noble and refined in hin