He was shortly afterwards invited with his wife to go, in company with Tennyson, in the Royal Society's expedition to see the eclipse from Etna. But he was unable to accept the tempting offer.
He lets a little light in on his literary profits when he tells his mother of an amusing interview he had in December, 1870, with the Tax Commissioner who had assessed his profits at £1000 a year, on the ground that he was a most distinguished literary man, his works mentioned everywhere. Matthew Arnold said: "You see before you, gentlemen, what you have often heard of, an unpopular author." Whereupon the assessment was cut down to £200 a year.
In February, 1872, Matthew Arnold's second son, Trevenen William, a youth of great promise and universally beloved, died quite suddenly at the age of eighteen. It was a great blow to his parents, but Matthew Arnold's beautiful faith enabled him to write:
But him on whom, in the prime
Of life, with vigor undimmed,
With unspent mind, and a soul
Unworn, undebased, undecayed,
Mournfully grating, the gates
Of the city of death have forever closed,—
Him, I count him, well-starred.
In 1873 the Arnolds, after having enjoyed a trip to Italy, left Harrow and took a house at Pain's Hill, near Cobham in Surrey: this was his home for the rest of his life. In September his mother, Mrs. Thomas Arnold of Fox How, died at the age of eighty-two. Matthew Arnold said of her that she had "a clearness and fairness of mind, an interest in things and a power of appreciating what might not be in her own line, which were very remarkable and which remained with her to the very end of her life." Her character seems to show in the very letters which Matthew Arnold sent her. Her appreciation of her son's work was very dear to him: even his "Literature and Dogma," which went through four editions that year, was not too strong for her advanced thinking.
In 1877 he was invited to stand for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford a second time; but he declined, partly so as to give younger men a chance, partly because he dreaded "the religious row" which he knew would ensue. He also declined to accept the Lord Rectorship of St. Andrews.
