Just when it seemed that both the City of New York and the federal government were willing to let Grant’s Tomb, on upper Fifth Avenue, sink into neglect, desuetude, and decay, with few to protest this indignity to an American president and a national monument, along has come a curious publication of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. I hope that this Association has the requisite power to shame the politicians (which would be a great deal of power indeed, as politicians have little enough shame) into repairing and renovating and protecting the resting place of one of the great heroes of the Republic.
In any case, the curious publication is “General Grant” by Matthew Arnold, with a Rejoinder by Mark Twain. This item is in fact the second edition of the 1966 publication that launched the Association’s massive edition of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. John Y. Simon, the director of that edition, which now comprises twenty volumes, has written a new introduction.
The interest of this little book lies in Matthew Arnold’s long two-part review, published in Murray’s Magazine in 1886, of the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant.Arnold’s aim was ostensibly to make British readers aware of an impressive, neglected military memoir by a taciturn general who had previously, in person, seemed to Arnold to have no recognizable point of interest. Arnold’s review—which elegantly and accurately summarized the principal facts of Grant’s life, his military