THE time has come for an impartial estimate of Arnold. Sixteen years have elapsed since the grave closed over him at Rugby, amidst the heartfelt grief of several generations of pupils, who had had the inestimable benefit of his teaching; the more sober, but not less sympathetic, regret of a bright array of distinguished friends, who loved his intellectual and moral greatness; the profound respect of a large circle of adversaries in opinion, who lamented the loss of a noble foe; and the mournful consciousness among many of the English nation, that a good and able man had passed away, who, whenever he touched upon public affairs, made their real interests his paramount object. This interval has not removed him from us as a contemporary, or obscured the recollections of those who witnessed his career; and yet it has placed him in that historical perspective in which his life can be seen in full completeness, and the character of his works can best be determined. In addition to this, it has dissipated a mass of prejudice against him; it has directed to other objects the currents of opinion which, some years ago, unduly elevated or depressed him; and it has brought the tendency of English thought into a closer sympathy with him than it ever displayed in his lifetime. The generation that has become mature since 1842 can better appreciate his speculations in theology than that which only heard the outbreak of the conflict between the old Erastian High Church doctrines, the Anglo-Catholicism of the school of Pusey, and the teaching of the Evangelical and Dissenting parties. At present, too, when philosophy pur

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sues her researches among us with a singular mixture of freedom and reverence, his theory of Church and State is, perhaps, more respected than when Bentham and Paley were the oracles of our thinkers. And, although recent criticism has shown that his implicit faith in Niebuhr has led him astray in several passages of Roman History, his merits as an historian can best be appreciated since the appearance of such masters as Froude and Lord Macaulay.

Arnold was born in 1795, in the Isle of Wight. He belonged to an English family, of the middle class, outside the circle of an aristocracy, then prejudiced and exclusive, but within that accustomed to receive the highest education. At eight years old he was sent to Warminster school, and thence, in 1807, to Winchester college; but his vacations were spent in the Isle of Wight; and when there, within sight of the Piræus of England, then crowded with the trophies and armaments of the war, he acquired that fondness for sea views, and that interest in naval and military evolutions which form so marked a characteristic of his writings. At school the love of the picturesque, so evident in his history, found its natural vent in boyish verses. was known by the name of Poet Arnold, a title since gained in manhood by his gifted son; and, as the readers of his "Roman Legends" might have expected, he had a fine sense of the beauty of our ancient ballads. But already his real studies were history and geography. He showed skill in realizing to his mind the aspect of countries, and their relations to each other; and, at the age of fourteen, he

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had detected the difference, so seldom intelligible to boyish minds, between "the modest, unaffected, and impartial narratives" of the great Greek historians, and "the scandalously exaggerated boasts of the Latin writers." At this time, too, he probably betrayed that dislike to the mere niceties of language which he carried with him into afterlife, for his scholarship was not at all at the level of his powers; and his Latin verses and attempts at English composition were somewhat crude, stiff, and ungainly.

At the age of sixteen he was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi at Oxford, and remained there about four years in the companionship of several distinguished youths, who have since risen to eminence in Church and State. His principal friends at Corpus were Keble and Sir John Taylor Coleridge; and though all three, in manhood, took different, and often crossing, lines of life and opinion, it is touching to observe, in a letter of the Judge to Mr. Stanley, how the bond of this friendship was never severed; and how each of them regarded it as a pleasing link of memory. At Corpus the abilities of Arnold began rapidly to be developed. He gave great promise of historical criticism in his studies of Herodotus and Thucydides; he mastered those portions of Aristotle's ethics and politics which more especially relate to law and government, and showed much aptitude for social philosophy; and he already evinced that strong sympathy with actual political questions which was so distinctive a feature of his character. Already, too, his fellow collegians had learned to admire in him a nature earnest, sanguine, truthful, and manly, hating wrong and meanness in all their shapes; sincerely reverent of real greatness, and ever anxious to reach the bottom of questions; but, perhaps, somewhat intolerant of inferior minds, a little hasty and bold in forming opinions, and rather too prone to believe in the efficacy of change in ameliorating social and political institutions. At this time, also, we may remark that he had not yet supplied his deficiencies as a scholar; and that, although his real powers were already acknowledged, his undergraduate career was not as brilliant as might have been expected.

Having taken a first class in classics

in 1814, he was elected, in the next year, to a fellowship at Oriel, then, as now, the blue ribbon of an Oxford graduate. Within two years he had gained the prize for both the University Essays; but, although there is much vigour and freshness in these compositions, they are not free from unripeness of style and thought, and have certainly been surpassed by others in the series. He remained at Oriel about five years; and when there was the associate of a set of young men, several of whom were destined to influence deeply the mind of England. Among them was Pusey, already distinguished for mediæval learning, the future renovator in the Church of England of the tenets of Laud. John Henry Newman was there, full of subtle logic, destined hereafter to have an influence, perhaps still inappreciable. There, too, was Hampden, one of the founders of the Broad Church school of Theology; and Whately, eminently qualified to restore and make popular the study of the moral sciences; and Davison, too soon removed from his place on earth, but even now conspicuous for brilliant abilities; and Copleston, who, perhaps, more than any man of his day, contributed to the revival of learning at Oxford. When, in 1815, Arnold entered this high companionship, how few of its members, however conscious of great powers, could even guess the place they were to hold as leaders of opinion, or the results they were to accomplish in their generation!

With these associations, and in diligent study, Arnold spent the years between 1815 and 1820. In these years his faculties, though still growing, and happily kept back from a precocious development, took a decided turn towards theology and history, combined with what we may term the social science. Unlike most Oxford graduates, he also showed an acute and earnest sympathy with existing politics, especially as regards the condition of the poorer classes, who were then suffering from the great dislocation of employment, that was one of the consequences of the Peace. Having taken orders in 1818, he married in 1820, and, as his fellowship was held by the tenure of celibacy, he left Oxford after a residence of nearly eleven years, and betook himself to tuition at Laleham,

near Staines. He remained about eight years in this occupation; and these years, in all probability, determined the place which he was to hold in general estimation. They gave him an early opportunity for his fitting work the education of the young and afforded him ample experience in it, while they left him leisure for that study and reflection which were soon to produce such fruitful results. But, at the same time, by withdrawing him from the world, while still in youth, they tended to form in him those habits of inexperienced theorizing upon the most difficult problems of national life of fixedly working out his own opinions into system without much regard to the actual state of affairs, or to the adverse beliefs of others and of attacking existing abuses energetically, without weighing maturely the dangers of change which in some degree impaired his intellectual usefulness. In short, these years made Arnold what he became a great educator, a powerful thinker, a noble writer, and a bold, but hasty, Iconoclast in Church and State.

We know from the testimony of one of his pupils at Laleham, that when there Arnold showed that faculty of instruction which was destined to become so conspicuous at Rugby. Indeed, he devoted himself to this, his appointed work, with a zeal, an energy, and an affection, which recall to our minds the relations of the Greek philosophers to their charges. At the same time his intellectual progress was rapid; the views he subsequently made public were gradually formed; and some essays which he now wrote in Encyclopædias and Reviews, display the vigour and ease of his later compositions. The creed in theology and politics which he now evolved from his studies and reflections was in marked contrast with those of the different parties in Church and State. But Arnold never essentially modified it; and although it was not yet enunciated to the public, it had already separated him widely from most received opinions. He looked with peculiar dislike upon the Orthodox High Church party, whose opposition to Catholic Emancipation and to the relief of the Dissenters, he considered equally selfish and unchristian. He condemned the Tories of the

school of Eldon and Percival, as a narrow and bigoted oligarchy, who could not read the signs of the times. He had a moral sympathy with evangelical principles; but, on the whole, thought the party ignorant, and unfit for social life, and with entirely wrong views on the true relations of Church and State. So, although he agreed with the Whigs as regards the policy of Reform in Parliament, then becoming the paramount question of the day, he thought their ideas somewhat exclusive and superficial; he disliked the economic school of Bentham and Horner, as one that preferred the lesser to the greater end in politics; while he had a peculiar aversion to the Radical party, whom he considered essentially Jacobin and Destructive. Having already formed an ideal of what a Christian commonwealth should be, out of principles derived from Greek philosophy and the Bible, put together by his own intellect, and having resolved that that ideal was applicable to England, it is not surprising that, at this time, he stood in isolation from the ordinary currents of public opinion. Besides, the age was one of somewhat shallow and worn-out ideas; and since the deeper thought which had gradually been forming in England had not, as yet, had full time to influence the general mind, it was natural that one who belonged to the class of profound thinkers, should have little in common with the notions dominant in 18201827.

In 1827, chiefly in consequence of the recommendation of Dr. Hawkins, Arnold was elected to the head mastership of the school of Rugby. Here his public life may be said to have commenced; and from this point he becomes conspicuous as an educator and an author. He assumed the reins of government at Rugby at a time when there was a great outcry against the public schools of England, and when, unquestionably, many faults in their system were evident. They were generally denounced as behind the age, as imparting only an obsolete learning, as tending to make boys brutal and vicious, and as soon to yield to the prevalent mania for reform. Much of this clamour was undoubtedly untrue, but yet it was not altogether unfounded: and it is the peculiar glory of Arnold that he silenced it through