^ o LIBEARY OP THE Theological Seminary, PRINCETON, N. J. Case, wC-^-- Dlv Shelf, Cj.3lOJ... Sect. Booh, No,. / DR. ARNOLD'S WORKS. D, Appleton $f Compuny Publish I. THE HISTORY OF ROME, FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD. BY THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D , Late Head Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of History in the University of Oxford. The three volumes of the last London edition reprinted entire in two handsome 8vo. volumes. Price $5. The History of Rome will remain to the latest age of the woild, the most attrnctive, the most useful and the most elevat- ing subject of human contemplation. It must ever form the basis of a liberal and enlightened education and present the most important object to the contemplation of the statesman. It. is remarkable that until the appearance of Dr. Arnold's volumes no history (excepting " Niebuhr's," whose style is often obscure,) of this wonderful people existed, commensurate either to their dignity, their importance, or their intimate connection with modern institutions. Dr. Arnold's History of Rome has long since been admitted, by the most eminent scholars, to excel all others. II. SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL OF RUGBY SCHOOL. With an address before Confirmation. BY THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D. One neat volumej,16mo. • Price 75 cts. These discourses are part of the series of didactic morality with which the renowned author enlightened and guided the large number of youth who were placed under his care, during their academic course, prior to their admission into the British Universities. Although they naturally are directed to the existing state of education in the Anglican endowed schools, and to the condition of the students in them ; yet the author's far-reaching views, high-toned morality, and monitions respecting the adequate and right improvement of their privileges are of universal application ; and with few exceptions are similarly adapted, ceteris paribus, to the higher classes in our grammar schools, and the various grades of collegians in our own country as in England. The volume will be highly prized by tutors and professors of every department, and will be found to be an edifying manual to all interested in the education of youth. III. LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY: BY THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D. With an Introduction and Notes, by Henry Reed. Professor of English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania One handsome volume, 12mo. $1 25. This volume contains the first lectures which were delivered by Dr. Arnold after his appointment as Regus Professor of History in the University of Oxford. The series of Lectures must be considered merely as introductory to the expanded views and researches which the author would have developed had his life been prolonged. In the primary lecture which was deliv- ered when he entered upon his official duty, the lecturer presented his definition of history with a summary of the duties ap- pertaining to the professor of it. Appropriate, dignified and perspicuous, it exhibits both originality and power in a high de- gree, commingled with felicitous illustrations of the characteristics, effects, and value of historical literature. Four lectures follow on the study of history, rich in the prominent topics of inquiry concerning national prosperity — among which, with masterly eloquence and delineations he adverts to the political economy, the religious controversies, the national wars, and the geographical relations of countries. — The next three lectures contain a survey of European history, particularly examining the revolutions in ecclesiastical affairs, and the continuous struggles to cast off the despotic yoke, and to gain and establish religious and civil freedom.— The eighth lecture displays the nature of that historical testimony which claims and merits cre- dence. In this disquisition the author exhibits in its truth and forcefulness the law of evidence and the method of its applica- tion in investigating historical facts. The couise of lectures is an elegant memorial of the author whose unquenchable philan- thropy and untiring zeal in behalf of the best interests of mankind render his decease the subject of regret to the civilized world. IV. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D., Late Head Master at Rugby School, and Regius Professor of History in the University of Oxford. One handsome 8vo. volume. $2 00. The topics of this volume are greatly diversified ; including disquisitions on the " Church," on " Church and State," in its existing British combinations— on Scriptural and Secular Histoiy— and on Education, with various other subjects of Political Economy With few exceptions, the matter is of general application and lasting interest; and the whole is full of far-reaching perspicacity, and a burning philanthropic attachment to the accelerating progress of sterling knowledge, genuine freedom, pure religion and molality, and the best interests and permanent enjoyment of mankind. The volume of Miscellanies is a suitable counterpart to the " Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold ;" and scholars who have been so deeply interested in that impres- sive biography, will be gratified to ascertain the deliberate judgment of the Author, upon the numerous important themes which his " Miscellaneous Works" so richly and clearly announce. V. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D. BY THE REV. A. P. STANLEY. A. M. Two vols, of English edition in one vol. 8vo. large type, $2 50. It is not possible strictly to characterize a volume so peculiarly miscellaneous in its contents. Not only is the individual fully portrayed ;but his official relations are displayed in their prominency. Hence to Collegiate Professors and other Tutors his life is a manual whence they may learn much knowledge respecting tuition, and its associated duties. The volume com- bines a mass of literary history and portraits of his contemporaries, with a full development of the great Oxford controversy. tt is the best picture of England which can be procured— and is an essential work for all scholars and professional men who would accurately comprehend the character and actions and influence of many persons who new stand prominent in Britain, especially in connection with the Church of England and the University of Oxford, and modern literature. IN PRESS. HISTORY OF THE LATER ROMAN COMMONWEALTH. BY THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D. Two vols, of English edition, in one handsome 8vo volume. This work firms a continuation of the two volumes of the Early History just published ; and brings the History down to the period of " Gibbon." D. Appleton fy Co.'s Educational Publications. T. K. ARNOLD'S GREEK AND LATIN BOOKS, FOR SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES. REVISED AND CAREFULLY CORRECTED BY THE REV. J. A. SPENCER, A. M. *** T/iii Series of Classical Works has attained a circulation almost unparalleled, being introduced into nearly all the great Public Sehools and leading Educational Institutions in England. They art also very highly recommended by some of the best American Scholars, for introduction into the Clas- sical Schools of the United States. NOW READY. I. A FIRST AND SECOND LATIN BOOK AND PRACTICAL GRAMMAR. One neat volume, 12mo. Price 75 cts. The chief object of this work (which is f >unded on the principles of imitation and frequent repetition), is to enable the pupil to do exercises from the first day of his beginning his acci- dence. # The First Book can be had separately for Junior Classes in Schools. Price 50 cts. II. A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO LATIN PROSE COMPOSITION. ONE VOLUME, 12MO. This work is also founded on the principles of imitation and frequent repetition. It is at once a Syntax, a Vocabulary, and an Exercise Book; and considerable attention has been paid to the subject of Synonyms. IN PREPARATION. I. A FIRST AND SECOND GREEK BOOK, with Easy Exer- cises and Vocabulary. One volume, 12mo. II. A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO GREEK PROSE COMPOSITION. One volume, 12mo. This work consists of a Greek Syntax, founded on Butimann's, and Easy Sentences transla- ted into Greek, after given Examples, and with given Words. III. CORNELIUS NEPOS, with Critical Questions and Answers, and an Imitative Exercise on each Chapter. IV. ECLOGiE OVIDIANvE, with English Notes, fcc. This work is from the fifth part of the Lateinsches Elementarbuch of Profs. Jacobs and Do- ring, which has an immense circulaiion on the Continent. V. HISTORIC ANTIQUE EPITOME, from Cornelius Nepos, Justin, &c., with English Notes, Rules for Constructing, Ques- tions, Geographical Lists, &c. This is a most valuable collection of Classical School Books ; and its publication may be re- garded as the presage of better things in respect to the mode of teaching and acquiring Lan- guages. Heretofore hoys have been condemned to the diudgery of going over Latin and Greek Grammar without the remotest conception of the value of what they were learning, and every day becoming more and more disgusted with the dry and unmeaning task ; but now. by Mr. Ar- nold's admirable method — substamially the same with that of Ollendorff — the moment they take up the study of Latin or Greek, they begin to learn sentences, to acquire ideas, to see how the Romans and Greeks expressed themselves, how their mode of expression differed from ours, and by degrees they lay up a stock of knowledge which is utterly astonishing to those who have dragged on month after month in the old-fashioned, dry, studious way of learning Lan- guages. Mr. Arnold, in fact, has had the good sense to adopt the system of Nature. A child learns his own language by imitating what he hears, and cons'antly repeating it till it is fastened in the memory. In the same way Mr. A puts the pupil immediately toworK at Exercises in Latin and Greek involving the elementary ptinciplcs of the language — words are supplied — the mode of putting tliL'ii togeihcr is told the pupil— -he is shown how the Ancients expressed their ideas; and then by repeating these things again and again — iterum iterumquc — the docile pupil has them indelibly impressed upon his memory and rooted in his understanding. The American edition comes out under the most favorable auspices. The Editor is a tho- rough Classical Scholar and bus been a practical teacher for years in this city : be has devoted the utmost care to u complete revision of Mr. Arnold's Woks, has corrected several errors of inadvertence or otherwise, has reananged and improved various matters in the early volumes of the series, and has attended most diligently to the accurate printing and mechanical execution of the whole. We anticipate most confidently the speedy adoption of these works in our Schools and Colleges. THE LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE '4 THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D., K LATE HEAD-MASTER OF RUGBY SCHOOL, AND REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. BY ARTHUK PENRHYN STANLEY, M.A., FELLOW AND TUTOR OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. SECOND AMERICAN EDITION, REPRINTED ENTIRE FROM THE LAST LONDON EDITION TWO VOLUMES COMPLETE IN ONE. NEW- YORK: D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 200 BROADWAY. PHILADELPHIA: GEO. S. APPLETON, 148 CHESNUT-ST. MDCCCXLVI. PKEFACE. The sources from which this work has been drawn have ne- cessarily been exceedingly various. It was in fact originally intended that the several parts should have been supplied by different writers, as in the instance of the valuable contri- bution which, in addition to his kind assistance throughout, has been furnished to the earlier part by Mr. Justice Cole- ridge ; and although, in its present shape, the responsibility of arranging and executing it has fallen upon one person, yet it should still be clearly understood how largely I have avail- ed myself of the aid of others, in order to supply the defects of my own personal knowledge of Dr. Arnold's life and character, which was confined to the intercourse I enjoyed with him, first as his pupil at Rugby, from 1829 to 1834, and thenceforward, on more familiar terms, to the end of his life. To his family, I feel that the fewest words will best ex- press my sense, both of the confidence which they reposed in me by intrusting to my care so precious a charge, and of the manifold kindness with which they have assisted me, as none others could. To the many attached friends of his earlier years, the occurrence of whose names in the following pages makes it unnecessary to mention them more particu- Q PREFACE. larly here, I would also take this opportunity of expressing my deep obligations, not only for the readiness with which they have given me access to all letters and information that I could require, but still more for the active interest which they have taken in lightening my responsibility and labour, and for the careful and most valuable criticism to which some of them have allowed me to subject the whole or the greater part of this work. Lastly, his pupils will perceive the unsparing use I have made of their numerous contribu- tions. I had at one time thought of indicating the various distinct authorities from which the chapter on his " School Life at Rugby" has been compiled, but I found that this would be impracticable. The names of some of those who have most aided me will be found in the Correspondence. To those many others, who are not there mentioned — and may I here be allowed more especially to name my younger schoolfellows, with whom I have become acquainted chiefly through the means of this work, and whose recollections, as being the most recent and the most lively, have been amongst the most valuable that I have received — I would here express my warmest thanks for the more than assistance which they have rendered me. Great as has been the anxiety and difficulty of this undertaking, it has been relieved by nothing so much as the assurance which I have received through their co-operation, that I was not mistaken in the estimate I had formed of our common friend and master, and that the influence of his teaching and example continues and will continue to produce the fruits which he would most have desired-to see. The Correspondence has been selected from the mass of letters preserved, in many cases, in almost unbroken series from first to last. One large class — those to the parents of his pupils — I have been unable to procure, and possiblv they could not have been made available for the present work. Another numerous body of letters — those PREFACE. 1 which were addressed to scientific or literary men on ques- tions connected with his edition of Thucydides or his His- tory,— I have omitted, partly as thinking them too minute to occupy space wanted for subjects of more general im- portance ; partly because their substance or their results have for the most part been incorporated into his published works. To those which appear in the present collection, something of a fragmentary character has been imparted by the necessary omission, wherever it was possible, of repetitions, such as must necessarily occur in letters written to different persons at the same time,-r-of allusions which would have been painful to living individuals, — of domestic details, which, however characteristic, could not have been published without a greater infringement on pri- vacy than is yet possible, — of passages which, without further explanation than could be given, would certainly have been misunderstood. Still enough remains to give in his own words, and in his own manner, what he thought and felt on the subjects of most interest to him. And though the mode of expression must be judged by the rela- tion in which he stood to those whom he addressed, and with the usual and just allowance for the familiarity and unreservedness of epistolary intercourse, yet, on the whole, the Letters represent (except where they correct themselves) what those who knew him best believe to have been his deliberate convictions and his habitual feelings. The object of the Narrative has been to state so much as would enable the reader to enter upon the Letters with a correct understanding of their writer in his different periods of life, and his different sphere of action. In all cases where it was possible, his opinions and plans have been given in his own words, and in no case, whether in speaking of what he did or intended to do, from mere conjecture of my own or of any one else. Wherever the narrative has gone into greater detail, as in the chapter on his " School 8 PREFACE. Life at Rugby," it has been where the Letters were com- paratively silent, and where details alone would give to those who were most concerned a true representation of his views and actions. In conclusion, it will be obvious that to have mixed up any judgment of my own, either of praise or censure, with the facts or statements contained in this work, would have been wholly irrelevant. The only question which I have allowed myself to ask in each particular act or opinion that has come before me, has not been whether I approved or disapproved of it, but whether it was characteristic of him. To have assumed the office of a judge, in addition to that of a narrator or editor, would have increased the responsi- bility, already great, a hundredfold ; and in the present case, the vast importance of many of the questions discussed — the insufficient time and knowledge which I had at com- mand— the almost filial relation in which I stood towards him — would have rendered it absolutely impossible, even had it hot been effectually precluded by the nature of the work itself. For similar reasons, I have abstained from giv- ing any formal account of his general character. He was one of a class whose whole being, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, is like the cloud of the poet, " Which moveth altogether, if it move at all," and whose character, therefore, is far better expressed by their own words and deeds, than by the representation of others. Lastly, I would also hope that the plan, which I have thus endeavoured to follow, will in some measure com- pensate for the many deficiencies, which I have vainly en- deavoured to remedy in the execution of the task which I have undertaken. Some, indeed, there must be, who will painfully feel the contrast, which probably always exists in the case of any remarkable man, between the image of his inner life, as it was known to those nearest and dearest to him, and the outward image of a written biography, which PREFACE. g can rarely be more than a faint shadow of what they cherish in their own recollections — the one representing what he was — the other only what he thought and did ; the one formed in the atmosphere which he had himself created, — the other necessarily accommodating itself to the public opinion to which it is mainly addressed. But even to these — and much more to readers in general — it is my satisfaction to reflect that any untrue or imperfect impression of his thoughts and feelings which may be gathered from my ac- count of them will be sufficiently corrected by his own rep- resentation of them in his Letters, and that the attention will not be diverted by any extraneous comments or infer- ences from the [lessons which will be best learned from [the mere record itself of his life and teaching. May 14th, 1844. University College, Oxford. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION. Page Birth. — Education at Warminster and Winchester. — Character and pursuits as a boy. — Associations of his childhood in after life. — Letter from Mr. Justice Coleridge. — Education at Oxford. — Corpus Society. — Early friends — Tucker. — Cornish. — Dyson. — Keble, — Pursuits. — Attic Society. — Religious doubts ou his ordination ........ 25 CHAPTER II. LIFE AT LALEUAM. Election at Oriel. — Fellows of Oriel. — Marriage and settlement at Laleham. — For- mation of his religious character and belief. — Early objects of ambition. — Love for Laleham. — Occupations and views as private tutor. — Letter from Mr. Price. — General pursuits. — Lexicon and edition of Thucydides. — Articles on Roman His- tory in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. — First acquaintance with Niebuhr's history, and with German literature. — First visit to Rome, and friendship with Chevalier Bunsen. — Formation of his views on social and theological subjects. — Independent views. — First volume of Sermons. — Election to the Head-mastership of Rugby. — Prediction of Dr. Hawkins . . . . . . .39 LETTERS. 1. To. J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Choice of a profession . . . .55 2. To Rev. G. Cornish. Leaving Oxford . . . . .56 3. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Incapacity for the profession of a Schoolmaster 56 4. To Rev. J. Tucker. Oxford Friends. — Religious state . . .57 5. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Occupations at Laleham . . . .58 6. To Rev. G. Cornish. Winter at Fledborough . ' . . .59 7. To the same. Interest in India. — Pupijs. — Religious state . . .60 8. To the same. Death of his Brother. — Domestic life and interests at Laleham. — Pupils. — Desire of personal intercourse with his friends . . .61 9. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. On his style . . ' . . .63 10. To Rev. J. Tucker. Ecclesiastical History. — State of the religious world. — Ireland ......... 63 11. To J. T. Coleridge. Christian year. — Roman History . . .64 22 CONTENTS. 12. To Rev. J. Tucker. Pupils. — Intercourse with poor. — Tour in Scotland and the Lakes. — West Indian slavery . . . . . .64 13. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Niebuhr.— Pupils . . . . .65 14. To Rev. J. Tucker. Aristotle's Politics. — Prophecy. — Daniel. — English Re- formation . . . . . . . . .65 15. To Rev. G. Cornish. Tour in Italy. — Contrast of lower orders in England and Italy . . . . . . . . .66 16. To Rev. J. Tucker. Tour in Italy. — Quarterly Review . . .67 17. To Rev. G. Cornish. Prevalence of intellectual activity united with moral depravity. — Roman Catholicism . . . . . .67 18. To Rev. J. Tucker. Church Reform . . . . .68 19. To Rev. E. Hawkins. Edition of Thucydides . . . .68 20. To Rev. J. Tucker. Pain of having given offence by opinions on inspiration 69 21. To Rev. E. Hawkins. Doubts about standing for the Head-mastership of Rug- by.— Expulsion at public schools . . . . . .70 22. To Rev. G. Cornish. Views in offering himself as a candidate for Rugby . 70 23. To Rev. J. Tucker. Election at Rugby . . . . .71 24. To Rev. E. Hawkins. Election at Rugby -. . . . .71 25. To Rev. J. Tucker. Intentions at Rugby. Church Reform . . .71 26. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Hopes for Rugby. —Church and State. — Reform 72 27. To Augustus Hare, Esq. Rome. — Bunsen. — " Guesses at Truth." — Bohemia 73 28. To Rev. J. Tucker. — Protest against supposed worldliness . . .73 29. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Intercourse with friends. — Dyson. — Love for Laleham 74 30. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Laleham and Rugby . . . .74 31. To W. W. Hull, Esq. First volume of Sermons. — Leaving Laleham . . 75 32. To Rev. J. Tucker. Laleham and Rugby. — First volume of Sermons . 75 33. To Rev. G. Cornish. Settlement at Rugby . . . . .76 CHAPTER III. SCHOOL LIFE AT RUGBY. State of opinion on English Public Schools. — His qualifications for the situation of Head-master of Rugby. — Difficulties. — Changes. — Fixed principles of education. — His relation to the public. — To the trustees. — To the assistant masters. — To the school. — His views of Christianizing public schools. — Peculiarity of public schools. — General mode of dealing with it. I. Discipline in the school. 1. Pun- ishments. 2. Fagging. — Influence of the Sixth Form. 3. Removal of boys. — II. Instruction. — Religious spirit. — Stimulus to exertion. — Respect for industry. — View of .academical distinctions. 1. Importance of classics. 2. Modern History, modern languages, and mathematics. 3. Lessons in the Sixth Form. 4. Gene- ral effect of his intellectual teaching. — III. The scihool chapel. — Services. — Com- munion.— Confirmation. — Sermons — IV. Personal intercourse with the boarders in his own house, and with his scholars generally. — V. General results of his head-mastership at Rugby. — Letter from Dr. Moberly . . . .77 CHAPTER IV. » GENERAL LIFE AT RUGBY. Intellectual advance on coming to Rugby. — His views and writings. — I. Practical element. — Interest in public and national life. — Vehement language on political and ecclesiastical subjects. — Conservatism. — Jacobinism. — Popular principles. — CONTENTS. 13 Liberal principles. — II. Speculative element. — Design of three great works. 1. History of Rome. 2. Commentary on the Scriptures. 3. " Christian Politics," or " Church and State." — Private life at Rugby. — Domestic circle. — Friendships. — Intercourse with the poor. — Life at Fox How ..... 128 CHAPTER V. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, AUGUST 1828 TO AUGUST 1830. Hopeful view. — First volume of his edition of Thucydides. — Essay on the social progress of States. — Pamphlet on " the Christian duty of conceding the Roman Catholic claims " . . . . . . . .156 7. [8. 9, 10. 11. 12. 13. 14 15. 1G. 17. 58. 19. -20. 21 To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Entrance on his work at Rugby To Rev. C. Blackstone. First impressions of Rugby . . To the same. Differences of opinion ...... To Mrs. Evelyn, (on the death of her husband) .... To Rev. C. Hare. " Defence of Niebuhr." — Pamphlet " On Roman Catholic Claims." — Estimate of the past. — Spirit of Chivalry To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Pamphlet " On Roman Catholic Claims." — Toryism. — Ignorance of the Clergy . ...... To the Parent of a pupil holding Unitarian opinions .... To Rev. G. Cornish. Domestic happiness. — Pamphlet. — Schism To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Idolatry, how far applicable to the Church of Rome ......... To Rev. J. Tucker. Thoughts of emigration to Australia To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Death of his father-in-law. — School. — Latin verse and prose. — Thucydides. — Pamphlet . . . . To Rev. H. Jenkyns. Thucydides. — True principles of Philology To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Libel in John Bull. — Respect for Episcopacy To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. On the same ...... To F. Hartwell, Esq. Interest in school ..... To T. F. Ellis, Esq. Roman History . . . To the same. On the same ....... To the same ......... To the same . . . . ... To Rev. G. Cornish. School.— French Revolution of 1830.— Guizot. — Nie- buhr.— Grande Chartreuse. — Venice. — Padua. — Tyrol. — Old Testament. — School Sermons ........ To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Church, in what sense a Society. — French Revolution of 1830.— Belgian Revolution ...... 157 158 158 159. 160 161 162 163 164 165 165 167 167 167 168 168 169 169 170 170 172 CHAPTER VI. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, SEPTEMBER 1830 TO DECEMBER 1832. Alarm at the social condition of the lower orders in England. — Wish to rouse the Clergy. — Attempts to influence the Useful Knowledge Society. — Establishment of the " Englishman's Register." — Thirteen letters in the " Sheffield Courant."— Want of sympathy. — Evangelical party. — Wish for Commentary on Old Testa- ment.— Second volume of Sermons, with Essay on Interpretation of Scripture . 174 14 CONTENTS. 22. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Want of sympathy. — Public affairs. — False reports of his proselytizing his pupils. — Conservatism .... 177 23. To Susannah Arnold. Public affairs. — Duty of the Clergy. — State of the lower orders. — Record Newspaper ...... 179 24. To Rev. Julius Hare . . . . . . . .180 25. To Rev. Augustus Hare. Public affairs. — Old Testament Prophets. — St. Paul and St. James. — Want of a Magazine for the poor J. . . . 180 26. To Rev. H. Massingbird. Liberal Party and Reform .... 181 27. To the Archbishop of Dublin.. Proposal of setting up a newspaper . . 181 28. To Chevalier Bunsen. Death of Niebuhr. — Italy. — First news of the French Revolution. — Interview with Niebuhr. — Church Reform, and Reform Bill. — Dread of warlike spirit in France . . . . . . 1 82 29. To John Ward, Esq. Englishman's Register. — Aristocracy. — Reform Bill. — National debt. — Monopolies. — Corn Laws. — Political excitement . . 184 30. To Susannah Arnold. Liberal Conservatives ..... 185 31. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Englishman's Register— Thucydides . . .186 32: To the Archbishop of Dublin. Failure of " Englishman's Register" . . 186 33. To W. Tooke, Esq. Refusal of an offer of preferment. — Useful Knowledge Society. — " Cottage Evenings " ...... 187 34. To Mrs. Fletcher. On the death of her son . . . . .188 35. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Sheffield Courant Letters . . . 188 36. To the Archbishop of Dublin. The same. — Pestilences . . . 189 37. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Irvingism. — Gift of tongues. — Coming of" the day of the Lord." — Whigs and Tories ...... 189 38. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Contrast of private happiness with public distress. — Cholera. — Work on the Evidences ...... 190 39. To Rev. J. C. Hare. Philological Museum. — Religion and ttoXitikyj . . 191 40. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Farewell on his leaving Oxford. — Danger of public schools. — Church reform ...... 191 41. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Essay on Interpretation of Scripture. — Right use of the Second Commandment ....... 192 42. To Rev. G. Cornish. Rydal. — Intercourse with friends. — Archbishop Whate- ly.— Essay . . . . . . . . .192 43. To the same. On the death of a child ..... 193- 44. To the Lady F. Egerton. On the conversion of an Atheist . . . 193 45. To the-same. On the same . . . : . . 194 46. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Rydal. — Newspapers. — Sheffield Courant. — School Composition ........ 195 47. To Rev. G. Cornish. Rugby Life. — Penny Magazine . . . 196 48. To Rev. J. E. Tyler. Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. — Usefulness of miscellaneous information for the people . . . 196 49. To J. Ward, Esq. Domestic Life. — Intercourse with poor. — Useful Know- ledge Society ........ 197 50. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Wish for a Commentary on the Bible . 19 51. To Rev. J. E. Tyler. Collection of Sermons . . . . 1 ^ 52. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Idea of a Commentary without Sectarianism — Death of his sister Susannah ...... 199 53. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Family Sickness.— Friendship . . .201 CONTENTS. 15 CHAPTER VII. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, JANUARY 1833 TO SEPTEMBER 1835. Fears for the Church Establishment. — Pamphlet on the " Principles of Church Reform. — Outcry occasioned by it. — Settlement of his own views. — Preface to third volume of Thucydides. — Fragments on " the State and the Church." — Third Volume of Sermons. — Purchase of Fox How. — Return to Roman Histo- ry.— Influence over his Scholars ...... 203 54. To Rev. J. Hearn. New Year's Day in Westmoreland. — Intolerance . 209 55. t To W. K. Hamilton, Esq.1 Rome, and the towns of Italy, — Gloomy prospects . ...... 209 56. To the. Archbishop of Dublin. Pamphlet on Church Reform. — Reasons for writing it . . . . . . . . . 210 57. To the same. Reasons for his coming to Westmoreland. — Commentary. — Magazine . . . . . . . . . 210 58. To Rev. J. Tucker. Farewell on his going to India. — Recollections of Ox- ford.— Gloomy views of Europe and England . . . .211 59. To an old pupil, (a.) Advice on living in uncongenial society . . 212 60. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Remonstrance against a charge of haste and ignor- ance in his writings ....... 212 61. To the same . . . . . . . .213 62. To W. Smith, Esq. Unitarians. — In what sense Christians . . . 214 63. To Chevalier Bunsen. Political opinions. — Jacobinism. — Economistes. — To- ryism.— Historical Liberty. — Reform Bill. — Articles of Liturgy . . 215 64. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Calumnies ..... 217 65. To Rev. J. Hearn. False view of what is Christian doctrine . . 217 66. To Lady Cavan. The right use of the Fourth Commandment . . 218 67. To J. T. Coleridge, Esq. Description of Fox How . . . .219 68. To a pupil. Want of devotion and reverence .... 219 69. To W. W. Hull, Esq. His birthday.— Pamphlet.— Confirmation.— Cricket- matches ...... ~. . . 220 70. To. Rev. Augustus Hare. Pamphlet. — Not latittfdinarian . . . 221 71. To Rev. G. Cornish. The same. — Westmoreland and Warwickshire . 221 72. To Rev. J. C. Hare. Bunsen. — Third Volume of Niebuhr. — Roman His- tory ......... 222 73. To Mr. Sergeant Coleridge. Birth of his youngest daughter. — Bunsen's let- ters.— Political excitement. — Whately. — Oxford Party. — Church of Eng- land.—Christ the only object of religious affection. — Church and State. — School. — Allan Bank. — Teaching his Daughters . . . .222 74. To Jacob Abbott. Interest in America. — Young Christian. — Unitarianism . 225 75. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Translation of the New Testament. — Grounds of Roman Catholic Relief Act. — High Churchmen . . .225 76. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Health.— Confession.— Faith.— Uncertainty of Life. — Death of his Friends Lowe and Augustus Hare . . .226 77. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Fixing of views. — Mountain scenery.— School . 227 1 The names of his Laleham pupils in this table of Contents are marked by an f. 16 CONTENTS. 78. To Rev. J. C. Hare. On the death of Augustus Hare . . .228 79. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Tracts for the Times. — Episcopacy not essential . 228 80. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Abstract of his work on the Identity of Church and State 229 81. To Rev. J. C. Hare. Declaration for the admission of Dissenters to the Uni- versities.— Unitarians. — Petition against the Jew Bill . . . 230 82. * To H. Balston, Esq.1 Advice on Composition .... 230 83. To W. Empson, Esq. Irish Establishment. — Colleges and halls . . 231 84. To Rev. Dr. Longley. False hopes of reaction. — School. — Pupils in West- moreland ......... 232 85. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Respect for Episcopacy. — Church and State. — Sermons on the Evidences. — Mechanics' Institute . . . 232 86. To a former landlord. Advice under painful illness. — Forgiveness of injuries 233 87. To Mrs. Delafield. On her 77th birthday . . . . .234 88. To Chevalier Bunsen. Roman History. — Illyrians. — Physical History. — Trades' Unions. — Letters on Christian Sacrifice. — Abbott's Works. — America ......... 234 89. To an old pupil, (a.)8 Right use of University distinctions. — Reserve . 236 90. To T. F. Ellis, Esq. Course of study desirable for Orders . . . 236 91. * To H. Highton, Esq. Rugby Magazine . . . . -237 92. To Rev. J. Hearn. New Poor Law.— Name of Christ . . .238 93. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. On his elevation to the Bench. — Church govern- ment.— Wordsworth. — Coleridge's " Letters on Inspiration" . . 238 94. To Rev. J. C. Hare. Plan of a theological review .... 239 95. To Rev. Dr. Longley. Fifth Form. — Number of the school — School-gram- mar.— Expulsion. — Entrance. — Examination .... 239 96. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Influence over pupils. — Church government . 241 97. To Chevalier Bunsen. Want of Sympathy. — rroXinrin. — Hymn-book. — High Church party.— Evangelicals. — Whigs. — Philosophy of parties. — Interest in school. — Hebrew . . . . • • . 241 98. * To C. J. Vaughan, Esq. Interest in old pupils. — Advice to learn German. — Advice for reading ....... 243 99. * To A. P. Stanley, Esq. Oxford. — Popular and liberal principles. — Tory re- action ......... 100. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Origin of Civilization. — Influence of Greek philosophy. — Odium ....... 245 101. To an old pupil, (a.) Value of veneration. — Calumnies . . . 246 102. To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Comparative advantages of private and public ed- ucation . . . . • • • 247 103. t To H. Strickland, Esq. Advice for a tour in Asia Minor . . . 248 104. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Calumnies. — Example of Burnet. — Aristophanes. — Pindar. — Homer. — Pupils. — Oxford and the London University . . 249 105. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Heads of houses and convocation. — Clergy and Dis- senters ......... 250 106. To a person distressed by skeptical doubts ..... 250 107. * To H. Hatch, Esq. Consumption ..... 252 1 The names of hia former Rugby pupils, where not otherwise specified, aro marked with an *. 2 The letters of the alphabet thus affixed arc merely for the sake of distinguishing between the sev- eral pupils so addressed. 244 CONTENTS. 17 108. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Want of leisure. — Defects in existing books. — Liberty and Toryism ....... 252 109. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Separation from friends .... 253 110. * To C. J. Vaughan, Esq. Hatch. — Intercourse with poor. — Phaedo of Plato. — Livy . . . . . . . . .254 111. To Chevalier Bunsen. Polybius. — Hannibal's passage. — Hebrew . . 254 112. * To J. P. Gell, Esq. Interest'in former pupils . . . .255 113. * To A. P. Stanley, Esq. Hatch.— Pupils . . . .256 114. To an old pupil (b.) Health. — Exercise ..... 256 115. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Rugby in the holidays. — Rugby Magazine — Pupils.— Phaedo.— Coleridge's Table Talk . . . .256 CHAPTER VIII. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, SEPTEMBER 1835 TO NOVEMBER 1838. (1.) Contest with the Oxford school of theology. — Change of feeling towards the High Church party. — Oxford school. — Hampden controversy. — Article in the Edinburgh Review. — (2.) Contest in the London University. — Endeavour to alter the Examination in Arts. — Failure. — Retirement from the Senate . . 258 LETTERS. 116. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Acceptance of a Fellowship in the London Uni- versity.— Idea of a Church ....... 265 117. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. The same. — Idea of an Establishment . . 266 118. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Irvingism. — Miraculous gifts. — True develope- ment of Christianity .. . . ' . . . 267 119. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Conservatism and Toryism . . . 267 120. To W. Empson, Esq. Party feeling.— Ireland . . . .268 121. To Chevalier Bunsen. Roman History. — Niebuhr. — Etruscan and Oscan languages. — Pastoral Epistles ...... 269 122. To J. C. Piatt, Esq. Lieber on Education. — London University. — " Religion and Politics." — Roman History ...... 269 123. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Interest in school. — Southey. — Coleridge . 270 124. * To J. C. Vaughan, Esq. Congratulations on success at Cambridge . 271 125. To an old Pupil (b.) Failure in successes at Oxford. — Hampden controversy 272 126. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Hampden controversy . . . .273 127. The same. The same . . .' . . . .273 128. To Rev. J. Hearn. Youth and old age. — Dr. Hampden and the Reformers 273 129. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Petition against the Jew Bill.— Ireland . . 274 130. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Wish to circulate " Church of England Tracts." — Church authority. — Jew Bill. — Pamphlet on Roman Catholic Claims ......... 275 131. To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Reality . . . . . "276 132. * To Dr. Greenhill. Medicine.— Physical science . . . 276 133. To the Archbishop of Dublin. The Jew Bill. — Ireland. — Pastoral Epistles. — Idolatry and Unitarianism. — Wish for the Chair of Theology at Oxford. — Love for Rugby ........ 277 134. * To A. P. Stanley, Esq. Fanaticism.— Oxford Tracts . . .279 135. To the Earl of Howe. Authorship of the Edinburgh Review . • 280 136. To the same. On the same . . . . . • -280 137. To the same. On the same . . . . . • -281 2 18 CONTENTS. 138. To Mrs. Buckland. Visit to the Isle of Wight. — Fox How. — Winchester. — Rugby . . . . . . . . .281 139. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Marriage Act . . ... . 282 140. To Sir J. Franklin, Bart. Colonial Society. — Convicts. — Missionary spirit . 282 141. To Rev. J. Hearn. Rest. — Family circle. — Conservatism . . . 283 142. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Fox How. — Mountains. — Latin verse. — Teaching Shakspeare to Greeks. — Barante ...... 284 143. * To A. P. Stanley, Esq. Oxford in autumn. — Utilitarianism. — Faith and reason . . . . . . . . . 285 144. To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Administration of the Sacraments . . 286 145. * To Dr. Greenhill. Supposed dangers of study of Medicine . . . 287 146. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Coleridge's Literary Remains . . .288 147. To the Archbishop of Dublin. Neutrality. — Rest. — Celtic languages . 288 148. * To W. C. Lake, Esq. Germany. — Excess in division of labour. — Institutes of Gaius. — Edition of St. Paul's Epistles. — Priesthood . . . 289 149. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Illness. — Death of his aunt. — Church and Priesthood 290 150. To J. C. Piatt, Esq. New Poor Law.— Reactions . . . .291 151. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. English divines. — Pilgrim's Progress . . 292 152. To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Christianity and the Church.— Succession . 293 153. To J. C. Piatt, Esq. Church rates. — " Impartiality" in religious matters . 294 154. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Fox How in winter. — Plan of Roman History. — Study and practice of Law. — Medicine. — Oxford .... 295 155. To Rev. G. Cornish. Fox How.— Oxford.— Corpus . . .296 156. To Rev. J. Hearn. Consent of antiquity. — Eucharist . . . 297 157. To W. W. Hull, Esq. Grammars 298 158. To Crabbe Robinson, Esq. London University. — Degree in Arts. — Unitari- ans.— Examiners ........ 299 159. To Sir S. T. Pasley, Bart. Oxford.— Abbott's " Way to do Good."— Duke of Wellington's Dispatches. — Weather ..... 300 160. To an old Pupil (c). Religious duty of cultivating the intellect . . 301 161. To Bishop Otter. London University. — Charter. — Different plans . . 302 162. To Rev. H. Hill. Thucydides.— Rome.— Ordination . . .304 163. * To C. J. Vaughan, Esq. Roman History. — Professions . . . 305 164. To Rev. J. Hearn. Parties and individuals ..... 305 165. *To Dr. Greenhill. Homoeopathy. — Magnetism. — Study and practice of law and medicine ........ 306 166. To W. Empson, Esq. London University ..... 306 167. To Rev. T. Penrose. Peace. — Contrast of parish and school . . 307 168. To W; Empson, Esq. London University. — Degrees in Arts . . 308 169. To J. C. Piatt, Esq. Newspapers. — Tour in France. — Security of English aristocracy ........ 309 170. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Legends in Roman History. — Charter of London University . . . . . . . . 309 171. tTo Rev. T. J. Ormerod. The two Antichrists . . . .310 172. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Legends in Roman History . . . 310 173. To the Rev. Dr. Hawkins. London and Oxford. — Sanderson. — Fox How . 311 174. To Chevalier Bunsen. Archbishop of Cologne. — Church and State. — Rothe 312 175. * To A. H. Clough, Esq. Oxford Scenery • • . . .313 176. To Sir T. Pasley, Bart. Defeat of the London University.— Herman Meri- vale. — Eton. — Railway . . . . . . .314 CONTENTS. ] 9 177. To the Bishop of Norwich. Difficulties in London University. — Respect for Bishops ......... 315 178. To Rev. J. E.Tyler. The same.— King's College . . . .315 179. To an old Pupil (d). Oxford theology . . . . .316 180. To C. J. Vaughan, Esq. Congratulations on success at Cambridge . . 318 181. To the Earl of Burlington. Viva voce examination . . . • . 318 182. *To Dr. Greenhill. Sermons on Prophecy.— Weather . . .319 183. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. First Volume of Roman History — Aristocracy. — London University. — Rugby ...... 320 184. To the Bishop of Norwich. Reasons for retiring from the London University 321 185. To an old Pupil (d). Athanasian Creed ..... 321 186. To T. F. Ellis, Esq. Advice for visiting Rome . . . .322 187. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Oxford Examinations. — Physical science. — Fronde's Remains .......... 323 188. To Rev. W. K. Hamilton Wordsworth's Greek Grammar. — Skepticism. — Bunsen . . . . . . . . .324 189. To the Earl of Burlington. Retirement from the London University . 325 CHAPTER IX. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, NOVEMBER 1838 TO AUGUST 1841. Desire for peace, and for positive truths. — " Lecture on the divisions of knowledge." — "Two Sermons on Prophecy." —Second edition of Thucydides. — Attempt to form a Society for drawing attention to the state of the lower orders. — " Herts Reformer Letters." — Views on the Church. — Subscription. — Fourth volume of Sermons ......... 326 LETTERS. 190. To Rev. J. Hearn. Rest of parish contrasted with anxiety of school. — Bun- sen. — State of lower orders. — Egyptian discoveries . . .330 191. To Chevalier Bunsen. Church and State.— Eucharist . . . .331 192. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Wish to remove suspicion of heterodoxy . . 333 193. To J. C. Piatt, Esq. Chartism.— New Poor Law .... 334 194. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Gladstone on Church and State. — Despondency. — Roman History. — Social evils. — Reactions .... 334 195. * To A. P. Stanley, Esq. Restoration of deacons .... 335 196. *To J. P. Gell, Esq. Appointment to College in Van Diemen's Land . 336 197. To James Stephen, Esq. Advantage of uniting the office of a clergyman with that of a teacher . . . . . . . 337 198. * To E. Wise, Esq. Private tuition . . . . . .337 199. * To J. P. Gell, Esq. On the death of his brother . . . .338 200. To James Stephen, Esq. Inconvenience of local committees in educational institutions ........ 338 201. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Legal decision on the foundationers of Rugby School . . . . . • . 338 202. To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Chartism.— Reality of politics.— Confirmations 339 203. To Archdeacon Hare. Niebuhr's letters. — Thucydides . . . 339 204. To an old Pupil (e). Unitarianism. — Priestley .... 340 205. To Rev. G. Cornish. Childishness of boys. — Oxford commemoration of 1839 341 206. To Chevalier Bunsen. Birthday. — South of France. — Italy. — Provencal lan- guage.— Despondency ....... 341 20 CONTENTS. 207. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. South of France. — Spanish manners. — Coleridge's Literary Remains. — Chartism ...... 342 208. To Sir T. S. Pasley. Toulon.— Pope's Palace at Avignon.— Pony.— British Association at Birmingham ...... 343 209. * To J. L. Hoskyns, Esq. Reading for ordination .... 344 210. * To T. Burbidge, Esq. 211. To Chevalier Bunsen 212. To J. Marshall, Esq. orders 213. *ToH. Balston, Esq 214. To an old Pupil (d). 215 ( On the doctrine of the Eucharist Society for calling attention to the state of the lower 347 346 348 349 350 351 351 351 Liveliness necessary for a schoolmaster Ordination. — Difficulties in subscription. — Deacons On Church Endowments . 216. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. State of the poor. — Westmoreland . 217. To James Marshall, Esq. Necessity of union of parties 218. To Rev. J. Hearn. Westmoreland. — Aurora Borealis. — Taylor's Ancient Christianity.— Early Church ...... 352 219. To J. C. Piatt, Esq. Lectures for Mechanics' Institutes. — State of the poor. — Trials of Chartists ........ 353 220. To Thomas Carlyle, Esq. State of the poor .... 354 221. To J. Marshall, Esq. Englishman's Register. — Political creed. — Economists. — King's supremacy. — Christian Church. — Dissent. — Historical Reforms. — Aristocracy. — Political privileges ...... 355 To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Difficulties of Scripture. — Colonization. — Daniel 357 222. 223. 224. To Archdeacon Hare. Niebuhr. — Coleridge. — Thirlwall's Greece To W. W. Hull, Esq. Political differences . 225. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Formation of his opinions. — Prophecy 226. To Sir Culling E. Smith, Bart. Anonymous writing in newspapers 227. * To Rev. H. Fox. Call to a Missionary life 228. * To the same. On the same .... 229. To Chevalier Bunsen. Berne. — Roman History. — Privilege question 230. To W. W. Hull, Esq. War with China 231. To W. Leaper Newton, Esq. Railway Travelling on Sundays 232. To the same ....... 233. To the same . 234. To Howell Lloyd, Esq 235. To W. W. Hull, Esq. 236. To the same . . ... 237. To the same . . . ... 238. * To J. P. Gell, Esq. Van Diemen's Land. — Sacred names 239. t To Rev. W. K. Hamilton. Music. — Flowers — Keble 240. To Rev. Herbert Hill. Importance of Mathematics . 241. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Church extension. — Prophecy 242. To Chevalier Bunsen. Rugby Life. — Second Volume of Roman History Subscription, — Deacons. — State services 243. To the same. On the accession of the King of Prussia. — Refusal of the Wardenship of Manchester .... 244. To an old Pupil (b.) Danger of Oxford Society. — Tour in Italy 245. * To the Rev. H. Balston. Consumption. — Responsibility of school To Chevalier Bunsen. Russia. — War. — Fox How. — Want of leisure On the study of Welsh On Subscription 246. 247. CONTENTS. 21 375 248. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Bampton Lectures. — Episcopacy. — Internal eviden- ces . . ... 249. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Illness. — Ottery. — School. — Oxford. — Rational- ists.— Second Volume of Roman History , 376 250. * To W. S. Karr, Esq. Sanscrit.— Football matches . . . . 377 251. To Archdeacon Hare. Sermons on " Victory of Faith." — King's supremacy 377 -252. * To Rev. H. Balston. Guernsey . . . . • .378 253. * To the same. The School.— Consumption . . . .379 254. To an old Pupil (g.) Law and Orders. — Parochial ministry and education . 379 255. To the same. Dangers not to be sought ..... 380 256. To an old Pupil, (h.) Importance of good men engaged in business . 381 257. t To Rev. W. K. Hamilton. Salisbury.— War . . . .381 258. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. " Via Media." — Succession. — Gladstone on Church principles. — Church ....... 381 259 To an old Pupil (g.) Ordination . . . . . .383 260. To the same. Oaths . . . . . . .383 261. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Shooting. — Education of Girls. — Agreement with Pearson's definition of the Church. — Fourth Volume of Sermons . . 384 262. To W. Balston, Esq. On the death of his Son, H. Balston . . 385 263. To Rev. T. Penrose. On the same. — Third Volume of Roman History . 385 264. t To Rev. T. J. Ormerod. Fox How.— Southey.— Wordsworth . . 386 265. To. W. W. Hull, Esq. Winter Holidays.— Future prospects . . 386 266. To Rev. J. Hearn. Occupations. — Over caution . . . 386 267. To Chevalier Bunsen. Third Volume of Roman History. — Hannibal and Nelson. — War. — Oxford school ...... 387 268. * To Rev. A. P. Stanley. Modern Greece. — Tour in Italy. — Oxford . 388 269. * To J. P. Gell, Esq. Van Diemen's Land. — Rugby Life. — Public affairs . 389 270. To Sir J. Franklin, Bart. Difficulties of education in Van Diemen's Land . 391 271. To the same . . . . . . . .392 272. To Rev. T. Penrose. Provident and Masonic Clubs ... 393 273. t To Rev. T. J. Ormerod. True and False Sacrifice . . . 393 274. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Fourth Volume of Sermons. — Differences of opin- ion.— Rugby. — Aristotle. . ..... 394 275. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Dissent • . . . . .396 276. To Rev. James Randall. Dissent. — The doctrine of the Trinity . .396 277. To Rev. J. Hearn. Fever at Rugby.— Return 6f Mr. Tucker . .397 278. To Rev. J. Tucker. Renewal of intercourse ; . . . 397 279. To the same . . . . . . . .398 280. To the same. Farewell on his return to India .... 399 CHAPTER X. General Views during his last year . , . ... . 400 281. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Acceptance of Professorship of Modern History . 402 282. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. School difficulties. — Difficulties of Hannibal's march. — Notes. — Professorship ...... 402 283. To Sir T. S. Pasley, Bart. Bishoprick of Jerusalem. — Christian ministry . 404 284. * To Rev. A. P. Stanley. Plan for lectures ..... 404 22 CONTENTS. 285. To W. Empson, Esq. Professorship. — Tour to Spain. — Guelph and Ghibelin controversy. — Lamennais ....... 405 286. To'Rev. T." Hill. Popery and Protestantism . . . .405 287. To an old Pupil, (d.) Roman Catholics and Oxford School . . . 406 288. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Oxford School.— Bishop Selwyn . . 407 289. To Chevalier Bunsen. Advance of life ..... 407 Inaugural lecture. — Introductory lectures. — Intentions for the future. — Course on English History. — Terminal lectures on Biography .... 408 290. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. — Influence of Jews. — Church and State . . 414 291. To Rev. F. C. Blackstone. Professorship . .... . . .414 292. * To Rev. R. Thorpe. Oxford School . . . • .415 293. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. High and' Low Church. — Roman Catholics and Protestants . . . . . . . .415 294. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Offer to resign the Professorship . . .416 295. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Intentions for the Professorship . . . 417 296. To the same . . . . . . . . .417 297. To Rev. J. Hearn. Windermere in winter. — Occupations . . .417 298. To Rev. H. Hill. Stay in Oxford . • . . . .418 299/ To an old pupil (k). Influences of Oxford . . ... -.418 300. To Mr. Justice Coleridge. Stay in Oxford . . . . .419 301. To Archdeacon Hare. Charge. — Despondency .... 419 302. To Rev. H. Fox. India. — Difficulties of moral sense. — Elphinstone's India .419 303. To Chevalier Bunsen. Basque language. — Carthagena . . . 420 304. To Rev. Dr. Hawkins. Terminal lecture. — Carlyle's visit . . , 421 305. To Mr. Justice Coleridge Colonial Bishoprics .... 421 Last days. — Diary. — Occupations. — Farewell sermon. — Last evening. — Death. — Conclusion ......... 422 APPENDIX A. Prayers written for various occasions at Rugby School .... 438 APPENDIX B. Selection of subjects for School Exercises ...... 444 APPENDIX C. Travelling Journals . . . . ' . . . . 446 I. TOUR IN NORTH OF ITALY, 1825. 1. Contrast of English and Italian peasantry . . . . 448 2. Cliff above the Lake of Como, (first visit) ..... 448 II. TOUR TO ROME THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY, 1827. 1. Prayers for Kings ........ 449 2. French people . . . . . . . . . 449 3. Approach to Rome, (first vist) ...... 449 4. View from the Capitol. — Arch of Titus ..... 450 5. Monte Mario . ■ . . . . . . .451 6. Roman churches ........ 451 7. Evils of residence abroad ....... 452 CONTENTS. 23 8. Meeting with Savigny 9. Colosseum ..... 10. Cliff above the Lake of Como, (second visit) . III. TOUR IN GERMANY, 1828 1. First view of the Rhine 2. The Elbe. — Rivers and human life IV. TOUR IN SWITZERLAND AND NORTH OF ITALY, 1829. 1. The Jura ....... 2. The Mediterranean ...... 3. The Lake of Como. — England and Italy V. TOUR IN THE SAME. 1. French Liberals at Geneva 2. View from S. Maria del Monte 3. Cliff above the Lake of Como, (third visit) 4. Good influence of Italian clergy on wills 5. Imitation of Herodotus 6. Visit to Niebuhr at Bonn 7. Germany, France, and England VI. TOUR IN SCOTLAND, 1831. 1. Contrast of Scotch and English Churches 2. Church reform ..... VII. TOUR IN NORTH OF FRANCE, 1837. 1. Recollections of different visits to Dover 2. Chartres. — Good and evil of Roman Catholicism 452 452 453 453 454 454 455 455 455 456 457 458 458 459 461 461 462 462 463 VIII. TOUR IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE. 1. Paris . 2. France and England 3. Palace at Avignon 4. Plain of Crau . 5. Geneva 6. Roads and Railways 7. France 465 465 465 465 466 466 467 IX. TOUR TO ROME AND NAPLES THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY, 1840. 1. Orleans. — Siege of Orleans . . . . . . .467 2. Use of images . . . . . . . . 468 3. Ancient and modern times . . . . . '. 468 4. Italians ......... 468 5. Campo Santo at Pisa ........ 469 6. Approach to Rome. — Tuscan population. — Sienna. — Scenery. — Radicofani. — Campagna. — Rome. — Athens. — Jerusalem . . . . . 469 7. Pantheon. — St. Stephano Rotondo. — Martyrs , 474 8. Appii Forum ......... 475 9. Mola di Gaeta. — Cicero's villa ...... 475 24 CONTENTS. 10. Naples .... 11. Pompeii .... 12. Vale of Rieti. — Moral and natural beauty 13 Banks of Metaurus 14. Classical inscriptions . 15. Papal Government 16. Modena. — Political freedom . 17. Swiss nation .... 18. Swiss and English scenery 19. Farewell to France 20. Landing in England . 21. Arrival at Fox How . X. TOUR IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE, 1841. 1. French scenery .... 2. Contrast of St. Jean de Luz and Mola di Gaeta 3. Birth-place of Scaliger 4. Translation of the Bible into French 5. Roman Catholicism 6. Prospects for England 7. Prospects for France. — Return List of Works Index .... 475 476 476 477 478 478 479 480 480 481 481 482 482 483 483 483 463 481 484 485 487 THE LIFE OP THOMAS AKNOLD, D.D. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION. Thomas Arnold, seventh child and youngest son of William and Martha Arnold, was born on June 13th, 1795, at West Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, where his family had been settled for two generations, their original residence having been at Lowestoff. in Suffolk. His father, who was collector of the customs at Cowes, died suddenly of spasm in the heart, on March 3rd, 1801. His two elder brothers, William and Matthew, died, the first in 1806, the second in 1820. His sisters all survived him, with the exception of the third, Susannah, who, after a lingering complaint in the spine, died at Laleham, in 1832. His early education was confided by his mother to her sister Miss Delafield, who took an affectionate pride in her charge, and directed all his studies as a child. In 1803, he was sent to War- minster school, in Wiltshire, under Dr. Griffiths, with whose assist- ant master, Mr. Lawes, he kept up his intercourse long after they had parted. In 1807, he was removed to Winchester, where hav- ing entered as a commoner, and afterwards become a scholar of the college, he remained till 1811. In after life he always cherished a strong Wykehamist feeling, and during his head-mastership at Rugby, often recurred to his knowledge, there first acquired, of the peculiar constitution of a public school, and to his recollection of the tact in managing boys shown by Dr. Goddard, and the skill in imparting scholarship which distinguished Dr. Gabell, who, during his stay there, were successively head masters of Winchester. 3 26 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. Ha was then, as always, of a shy and retiring disposition, but his manner as a child, and till his entrance at Oxford, was marked by a stiffness and formality the very reverse of the joyousness and simplicity of his later years ; his family and schoolfellows both re- member him as unlike those of his own age, and with peculiar pursuits of his own ; and the tone and style of his early letters, which have been for the most part preserved, are such as might naturally have been produced by living chiefly in the company of his elders, and reading, or hearing read to him before he could read himself, books suited to a more advanced age. His boyish friend- ships were strong and numerous. It is needless here to enumerate the names of those Winchester schoolfellows of whose after years it was the pride and delight to watch the course of their companion through life ; but the fond recollections, which were long cherished on both sides, of his intercourse with his earliest friend at Warmin- ster, of whom he saw and heard nothing from that time till he was called upon in 1829 to write his epitaph, is worth recording,1 as a remarkable instance of strong impressions of nobleness of character, early conceived and long retained. Both as a boy and a young man he was remarkable for a diffi- culty in early rising, amounting almost to a constitutional infir- mity ; and though his after life will show how completely this was overcome by habit, yet he often said that early rising was a daily effort to him, and that in this instance he never found the truth of the usual rule that all things are made easy by custom. With this, however, was always united great occasional energy ; and one of his schoolfellows gives it as his impression of him that " he was stiff in his opinions, and utterly immoveable by force or fraud, when he made up his mind, whether right or wrong." It is curious to trace the beginnings of some of his later inte- rests in his earliest amusements and occupations. He never lost the recollection of the impression produced upon him by the excite- ment of naval and military affairs, of which he naturally saw and heard much by living at the Isle of Wight, in the time of the war ; and the sports in which he took most pleasure, with the few play- mates of his childhood, were in sailing rival fleets in his father's garden,' or acting the battles of the Homeric heroes, with whatever implements he could use as spear arid shield, and reciting their several speeches from Pope's translation of the Iliad. He was from his earliest years exceedingly fond of ballad poetry, which his Win- chester schoolfellows used to learn from his repetition before they had seen it in print ; and his own compositions as a boy all ran in the same direction. A play of this kind, in which his schoolfel- lows were introduced as the dramatis personae, and a long poem of " Simon de Montfort," in imitation of Scott's Marmion, procured for him at school, by way of distinction from another boy of the same name, the appellation of Poet Arnold. And the earliest specimen 1 See Letters on the death of George Evelyn, in 1829. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 27 of his composition which has been preserved is a little tragedy, written before he was seven years old, on " Piercy Earl of Nor- thumberland," suggested apparently by Home's play of Douglas ; which, however, contains nothing worthy of notice, except, perhaps, the accuracy of orthography, language, and blank verse metre, in which it is written, and the precise arrangement of the different acts and scenes. But he was most remarked for his forwardness in history and geography. His strong power of memory, (which, however, in later years depended mainly on association,) extending to the exact state of the weather on particular days, or the exact words and position of passages which he had not seen for twenty years, showed itself very early and chiefly on these subjects. One of the few recollections which he retained of his father was that he re- ceived from him, at three years old, a present of Smollett's History of England, as a reward for the accuracy with which he had gone through the stories connected with the portraits and pictures of the successive reigns ; and at the same age he used to sit at his aunt's table arranging his geographical cards, and recognizing by their shape at a glance the different counties of the dissected map of England. He long retained a grateful remembrance of the miscellaneous books to which he had access in the school library at Warminster, and when, in his professorial chair at Oxford, he quoted Dr. Priestley's Lectures on History, it was from his recollection of what he had there read when he was eight years old. At Win- chester he was a diligent student of Russell's Modern Europe ; Gibbon and Mitford he had read twice over before he left school : and amongst the comments on his reading and the bursts of political enthusiasm on the events of the day in which he indulged in his Winchester letters, it is curious, as connected with his later labours, to read his indignation, when fourteen years old, "at the numerous boasts which are every where to be met with in the Latin writers." "I verily believe," he adds, "that half at least of the Roman history is, if not totally false, at least scandalously exaggerated : how far different are the modest, unaffected, and impartial narrations of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon." The period both of his home and school education was too short to exercise much influence upon his after life. But he always looked back upon it with a marked tenderness. The keen sense which he entertained of the bond of relationship and of early association, — not the less from the blank in his own domestic recollections occasioned by his father's death, and his own subse- quent removal from the Isle of Wight, — invested with a peculiar interest the scenes and companions of his childhood. His strong domestic affections had acted as an important safeguard to him, when he was thrown at so early an age into the new sphere of an Oxford life ; and when, in later years, he was left the head of the family, he delighted in gathering round him the remains of his 23 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. father's household, and in treasuring up every particular relating to his birth-place and parentage, even to the graves of the older generations of the family in the parish church at Lowestoff, and the great willow tree in his father's grounds at Slattwoods, from which he transplanted shoots successively to Laleham, to Rugby, and to Fox How. Every date in the family history, with the alteration of hereditary names, and the changes of their residence, was carefully preserved for his children in his own handwriting, and when in after years he fixed on the abode of his old age in Westmoreland, it was his great delight to regard it as a continua- tion of his own early home in the Isle of Wight. And when, as was his wont, he used to look back from time to time over the whole of this period, it was with the solemn feeling which is ex- pressed in one of his later journals, written on a visit to the place of his earliest school-education, in the interval between the close of his life at Laleham, and the beginning of his work at Rugby. " Warminster, January 5th [1828]. I have not written this date for more than twenty years, and how little could I foresee when I wrote it last, what would happen to me in the interval. And now to look forward twenty years — how little can I guess of that also. Only may He in whose hands are time and eternity, keep me evermore his own ; that whether I live, I may live unto Him ; or whether I die, I may die unto Him ; may he guide me with his counsel, and after that receive me to glory, through Jesus Christ our Saviour." In 1811, in his 16th year, he was elected as a scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford ; in 1814, his name was placed in the first class in Litterae Humaniores ; in the next year he was elected Fellow of Oriel College ; and he gained the Chancellor's prize for the two University Essays, Latin and English, for the years 1815 and 1817. Those who know the influence which his college friendships exercised over his after life, and the deep affection which he always bore to Oxford, as the scene of the happiest recollections of his youth, and the sphere which he hoped to occupy with the employments of his old age, will rejoice in the possession of the following record of his under-graduate life by that true and early friend, to whose timely advice, protection, and example, at the critical period when he was thrown with all the spirits and the inexperience of boyhood on the temptations of the University, he always said and felt, that he had owed more than to any other man in the world. LETTER FROM MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Heath's Court, September, 1843. HT DEAR STANLEY, When you informed me of Mrs. Arnold's wish that I would contribute to your memoir of our dear friend, Dr. Arnold, such LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. •29 recollections as I had of his career as an nnder-graduate at Oxford, with the intimation that they were intended to fill up that chapter in his life, my only hesitation in complying with her wish arose from my doubts, whether my impressions were so fresh and true, or my powers of expression such as to enable me to do justice to the subject. A true and lively picture of him at that time would be, I am sure, interesting in itself; and I felt certain also that his Oxford residence contributed essentially to the formation of his character in after life. My doubts remain ; but I have not thought them important enough to prevent my endeavouring at least to comply with her request ; nor will I deny that I promise myself much pleasure, melancholy though it may be, in this attempt to recall those days. They had their troubles, I dare say, but in retrospect they always appear to me among the brightest and least chequered, if not the most useful, which have ever been vouchsafed to me. Arnold and T, as you know, were under-graduates of Corpus Christi, a college very small in its numbers, and humble in its buildings, but to which we and our fellow-students formed an at- tachment never weakened in the after course of our lives. At the time I speak of, 1809, and thenceforward for some few years, it was under the Presidency, mild and inert, rather than paternal, of Dr. Cooke. His nephew, Dr. Williams, was the vice-president, and medical fellow, the only lay fellow permitted by the statutes. Re- tired he was in his habits, and not forward to interfere with the pursuits or studies of the young men. But I am bound to record not only his learning and good taste, but the kindness of his heart, and his readiness to assist them by advice and criticism in their compositions. When 1 wrote for the Latin Verse prize, in 1810, I was much indebted to him for advice in matters of taste and La- tinity, and for the pointing out many faults in my rough verses. Our tutors were the present Sedleian Professor, the Rev. G. L. Cooke, and the lately deceased President, the Rev. T. Bridges. Of the former, because he is alive, I will onlysay that I believe no one ever attended his lectures without learning to admire his unwearied industry, patience, and good temper, and that few if any quitted his pupil room without retaining a kindly feeling towards him. The recent death of Dr. Bridges would have affected Arnold as it has me : he was a most amiable man ; the affectionate earnestness of his manner, and his high tone of feeling, fitted him especially to deal with young men ; he made us always desirous of pleasing him ; perhaps his fault was that he was too easily pleased ; I am sure that he will be long and deeply regretted in the University. It was not, however, so much by the authorities of the college that Arnold's character was affected, as by its constitution and sys- tem, and by the residents whom it was his fortune to associate with familiarly there. I shall hardly do justice to my subject unless I state a few particulars as to the foimer, and what I am at liberty to mention as to the latter. Corpus is a very small establishment, 30 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. — twenty fellows and twenty scholars, with four exhibitioners, form the foundation. No independent members were admitted except gentlemen commoners, and they were limited to six. Of the scho- lars several were bachelors, and the whole number of students actually under college tuition seldom exceeded twenty. But the scholarships, though not entirely open, were yet enough so to admit of much competition ; their value, and still more, the creditable strictness and impartiality with which the examinations were con- ducted, (qualities at that time more rare in college elections than now,) insured a number of good candidates for each vacancy, and we boasted a more than proportionate share of successful com- petitors for University honours. It had been generally understood, (I know not whether the statutes prescribe the practice,) that in the examinations, a large allowance was made for youth ; certain it was that we had many very young candidates, and that of these, many remarkable for early proficiency succeeded. We were then a small society, the members rather under the usual age, and with more than the ordinary proportion of ability and scholarship ; our mode of tuition was in harmony with these circumstances ; not by private lectures, but in classes of such a size as excited emulation, and made us careful in the exact and neat rendering of the origi- nal, yet not so numerous as to prevent individual attention on the tutor's part, and familiar knowledge of each pupil's turn and talents. In addition to the books read in lecture, the tutor at the beginning of the term settled with each student upon some book to be read by himself in private, and prepared for the public examin- ation at the end of term in Hall ; and with this book something on paper, either an analysis of it, or remaiks upon it, was expected to be produced, which insured that the book should really have been read. It has often struck me since, that this whole plan, which is now I believe in common use in the University, was well de- vised for the tuition of young men of our age. We were not en- tirely set free from the leading-strings of the school ; accuracy was cared for; we were accustomed to viva voce lendering, and viva voce question and answer in our lecture-room, before an audience of fellow-students, whom we sufficiently respected : at the same time, the additional reading trusted to ourselves alone, prepared us for accurate private study, and for our final exhibition in the schools. One result of all these circumstances was, that we lived on the most familiar terms with each other ; we might be, indeed we were, somewhat boyish in manner, and in the liberties we took with each other ; but our interest in literature, ancient and modern, and in all the stirring matters of that stirring time, was not boyish ; we debated the classic and romantic question ; we discussed poet- ry and history, logic and philosophy ; or we fought over the Pet in- sular battles and the Continental campaigns with the energy of disputants personally concerned in them. Our habits weie inex- pensive and temperate : one break-up party was held in the junior common room at the end of each term, in which we indulged our LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 31 genius more freely, and our merriment, to say the truth, was some- what exuberant and noisy; but the authorities wisely forbore too strict an inquiry into this. It was one of the happy peculiarities of Corpus that the bache- lor scholars were compelled to residence. This regulation, seem- ingly inconvenient, but most wholesome as I cannot but think for themselves, and now unwisely relaxed, operated very beneficially on the under-graduates ; with the best and the most advanced of these they associated very usefully : I speak here with grateful and affectionate remembrances of the privileges which I enjoyed in this way. You will see that a society thus circumstanced was exactly one most likely to influence strongly the character of such a lad as Ar- nold was at his election. He came to us in Lent Term, 1811, from Winchester, winning his election against several very respectable candidates. He was a mere boy in appearance as well as in age ; but we saw in a very short time that he was quite equal to take his part in the arguments of the common room; and he was, 1 rather think, admitted by Mr. Cooke at once into his senior class. As he was equal, so was he ready to take part in our discussions : he was fond of conversation on serious matters, and vehement in argument; fearless too in advancing his opinions — which, to say the truth, often startled us a good deal ; but he was ingenuous and candid, and though the fearlessness with which, so young as he was, he advanced his opinions might have seemed to betoken pre- sumption, yet the good temper with which he bore retort or rebuke, relieved him from that imputation ; he was bold and warm, because so far as his knowledge went he saw very clearly, and he was an ardent lover of truth, but I never saw in him even then a grain of vanity or conceit. I have said that some of his opinions startled us a good deal ; we were indeed for the most part Tories in Church and State, great respecters of things as they were, and not very tolerant of the disposition which he brought with him to question their wisdom. Many and long were the conflicts we had. and with unequal numbers. I think I have seen all the leaders of the com- mon room engaged with him at once, with little order or considera- tion, as may be supposed, and not always with great scrupulosity as to the fairness of our arguments. This was attended by no loss of regard, and scarcely ever, or seldom, by even momentary loss of temper. We did not always convince him — perhaps we ought not always to have done so — yet in the end a considerable modification of his opinions was produced : in one of his letters to me, written at a much later period, he mentions' this change. In truth, there were those among us calculated to produce an impression on his affec- tionate heart and ardent ingenuous mind ; and the rather, because the more we saw of him, and the more we battled with him, the more manifestly did we respect and love him. The feeling with which we argued gave additional power to our arguments over a disposition such as his ; and thus he became attached to young 32 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. men of the most different tastes and intellects ; his love for each taking a different colour, more or less blended with respect, fond- ness, or even humour, according to those differences ; and in return they all uniting in love and respect for him. There will be some few to whom these remembrances will speak with touching truth ; they will remember his single-hearted and devout schoolfellow, who early gave up his native land, and devoted himself to the missionary cause in India ; the high-souled and imaginative, though somewhat indolent lad, who came to us from Westminster — one bachelor, whose father's connexion with the House of Commons and residence in Palace Yard made him a great authority with us as to the world without, and the statesmen whose speeches he sometimes heard, but we discussed much as if they had been personages in history ; and whose remarkable love for historical and geographical research, and his proficiency in it, with his clear judgment, quiet humour, and mildness in communi- cating information, made him peculiarly attractive to Arnold ; — and above all, our senior among the under-graduates, though my junior in years, the author of the Christian Year, who came fresh from the single teaching of his venerable father, and achieved the highest honours of the University at an age when others frequently are but on her threshold. Arnold clung to all these with equal fidelity, but regarded each with different feelings ; each produced on him a salutary, but different effect. His love for all without ex- ception I know, if I know any thing of another man's heart, con- tinued to his life's end ; it survived (how can the mournful facts be concealed in any complete and truth-telling narrative of his life?) separation, suspension of intercourse, and entire disagreement of opioion, with the last of these, on points believed by them both to be of essential importance. These two held their opinions with a zeal and tenacity proportionate to their importance ; each believed the other in error pernicious to the faith and dangerous to himself; and what they believed sincerely, each thought himself bound to state, and stated it openly, it may be with too much of warmth ; and unguarded expressions were unnecessarily, I think inaccu- rately, reported. Such disagreements in opinion between the wise and good are incident to our imperfect state ; and even the good qualities of the heart, earnestness, want of suspicion, may lay us open to them ; but in the case before me the affectionate interest with which each regarded the other never ceased. I had the good fortune to retain the intimate friendship and correspondence of both, and I can testify with authority that the elder spoke and wrote of the younger as an elder brother might of a younger whom he ten- derly loved, though he disapproved of his course ; while it was not in Arnold's nature to forget how much he had owed to Keble : he bitterly lamented, what he laboured to avert, the suspension of their intimate intercourse ; he was at all times anxious to renew it ; and although where the disagreement turned on points so vital between men who held each to his own so conscientiously, this may have LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 33 b33n too much to expect, yet it is a most gratifying thought to thier common friends that they would probably have met at Fox Low under Arnold's roof, but a few weeks after he was called away to that state, in which the doubts and controversies of this life will receive their clear resolution. I return from my digression, — Arnold came to us of course not a formed scholar, nor, I think, did he leave the college with scho- larship proportioned to his great abilities and opportunities. And this arose in part from the decided preference which he gave to the philosophers and historians of antiquity over the poets, coupled with the distinction which he then made, erroneous, as I think, and certainly extreme in degree, between words and things, as he termed it. His correspondence with me will show how much he modified this too in after life ; but at that time he was led by it to under- value those niceties of language, the intimate acquaintance with which he did not then perceive to be absolutely necessary to a pre- cise knowledge of the meaning of the author. His compositions, therefore, at this time, though full of matter, did not give promise of that clear and spirited style which he afterwards mastered ; he gained no verse prize, but was an unsuccessful competitor for the Latin Verse in the year 1812, when Henry Latham succeeded, the third brother of that house who had done so ; and though this is the only occasion on which I have any memorandum of his writ- ing, I do not doubt, that he made other attempts. Among us were several who were fond of writing English verse ; Keble was even then raising among us those expectations, which he has since so fully justified, and Arnold was not slow to follow t example. I have several poems of his written about this time, neat and pointed in expression, and just in thought, but not remarkable for fancy or imagination. I remember some years after, his telling me that he continued the practice " on principle," he thought it a useful and humanizing exercise. But, though not a poet himself, he was not insensible of the beauties of poetry — far from it. 1 reflect, with some pleasure, that I first introduced him to what has been somewhat unreasonably called the Lake Poetry; my near relation to one, and connexion with another of the poets, whose works were so called, were the occasion of this ; and my uncle having sent me the Lyrical Bal- lads, and the first edition of Mr. Wordsworth's poems, they became familiar among us. We were proof, I am glad to think, against the criticism, if so it might be called, of the " Edinburgh Review ;" we felt their truth and beauty, and became zealous disciples of Wordsworth's philosophy. This was of peculiar advantage lo Arnold, whose leaning was too direct for the practical and evi- dently useful — it brought out in him that feeling for the lofty and imaginative which appeared in all his intimate conversation, and may be seen spiiitualizing those even of his writings, in which, from their subject, it might seem to have less place. You know in later life how much he thought his beloved Fox How enhanced in 34 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. value by its neighbourhood to Rydal Mount, and what store he set on the privilege of frequent and friendly converse with the venera- ble genius of that sweet spot. But his passion at the time I am treating of was for Aristotle and Thucydides ; and however he became some few years after more sensible of the importance of the poets in classic literature, this passion he retained to the last ; those who knew him inti- mately or corresponded with him, will bear me witness how deeply he was imbued with the language and ideas of the former; how in earnest and unreserved conversation, or in writing, his train of thoughts was affected by the Ethics and Rhetoric ; how he cited the maxims of the Stagyrite as oracles, and how his language was quaintly and racily pointed with phrases from him. I never knew a man who made such familiar, even fond use of an author : it is scarcely too much to say, that he spoke of him as of one intimately and affectionately known and valued by him ; and when he was selecting his son's University, with much leaning for Cambridge, and many things which at the time made him incline against Ox* ford, dearly as he loved her, Aristotle turned the scale ; " I could not consent," said he, " to send my son to a University where he would lose the study of him altogether." " You may believe," he said with regard to the London University, " that I have not for- gotten tUe dear old Stagyrite in our examinations, and I hope that he will be construed and discussed in Somerset House as well as in the schools." His fondness for Thucydides first prompted a Lexi- con Thucydideum, in which he made some progress at Laleham in 1821 and 1822, and ended as you know in his valuable edition of that author. Next to these he loved Herodotus. I have said that he was not, while I knew him at Oxford, a formed scholar, and that he com- posed stiffly and with difficulty, but to this there was a seeming ex- ception ; he had so imbued himself with the style of Herodotus and Thucydides, that he could write narratives in the style of either at pleasure with wonderful readiness, and as we thought with the greatest accuracy. I remember, too, an account by him of a Vacation Tour in the Isle of Wight after the manner of the Anabasis. Arnold's bodily recreations were walking and bathing. It was a particular delight to him, with two or three companions, to make what he called a skirmish across the country ; on these occasions we deserted the road, crossed fences, and leaped ditches, or fell into them : he enjoyed the country round Oxford, and while out in this way, his spirits would rise, and his mirth overflowed. Though delicate in appearance, and not giving promise of great muscular strength, yet his form was light, and he was capable of going long distances and bearing much fatigue. You know that to his last moment of health he had the same predilections ; indeed he was, as much as any I ever knew, one whose days were " Bound each to each by natural piety." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 35 His manner had all the tastes and feelings of his youth, only more developed and better regulated. The same passion for the sea and shipping, and his favourite Isle of Wight ; the same love for exter- nal nature, the same readiness in viewing the characteristic fea- tures of a country and its marked positions, or the most beautiful points of a prospect, for all which he was remarkable in after life, we noticed in him then. When Professor Buckland, then one of our Fellows, began his career in that science, to the advancement of which he has contributed so much, Arnold became one of his most earnest and intelligent pupils, and you know how familiarly and practically he applied geological facts in all his later years. In June, 1812, I was elected Fellow of Exeter College, and de- termined to pursue the law as my profession : my residence at Ox- ford was thenceforward only occasional ; but the friendship which had grown up between us suffered no diminution. Something, I forget now the particular circumstance, led to an interchange of let- ters, which ripened into a correspondence, continued with rather unusual regularity when our respective occupations are considered, to within a few days of his death. It may show the opinion which I even then entertained of him, that I carefully preserved from the beginning every letter which I ever received from him: you have had an opportunity of judging of the value of the col- lection. After I had ceased to reside, a small debating society called the Attic Society was formed in Oxford,' which held its meetings in the rooms of the members by turns. Arnold was among the earli- est members, and was, I believe, an embarrassed speaker. This I should have expected ; for, however he might appear a confident advancer of his own opinions, he was in truth bashful, and at the same time had so acute a perception of what was ill-seasoned or ir- relevant, that he would want that freedom from restraint which is essential at least to young speakers. This society was the germ of the Union, but I believe he never belonged to it. In our days, the religious controversies had not begun, by which the minds of young men at Oxford are, I fear, now prematurely and too much occupied ; the routine theological studies of the University were, I admit, deplorably low, but the earnest ones amongst us were diligent readers of Barrow, Hooker, and Taylor. Arnold was among these, but I have no recollection of any thing at that time distinctive in his religious opinions. What occurred afterwards, does not properly fall within my chapter, yet it is not unconnected with it, and I believe I can sum up all that need be said on such a subject, as shortly and as accurately, from the sources of information in my hands, as any other person can. His 1 In this society he formed or confirmed his acquaintance with a new circle of friends, chiefly of other colleges, whose names will appear in the ensuing correspondence by the side of those of an earlier date from Corpus, and of a somewhat later date from Oriel, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Hull, Mr. Randall, Mr. Blackstone, and Mr. Hare, and through him with his Cambridge brother, now Archdeacon flare. 36 LIFE OF J)R. ARNOLD. was an anxiously inquisitive mind, a scrupulously conscientious heart; his inquiries, previously to his taking orders, led him on to distressing doubts on certain points in the Articles ; these were not low nor rationalistic in their tendency, according to the bad sense of that term ; there was no indisposition in him to believe merely because the article transcended his reason ; he doubted the proof and the interpretation of the textual authority. His state was very painful, and I think morbid ; fori remarked that the two occasions on which I was privy to his distress, were precisely those in which to doubt was against* his dearest schemes of worldly happiness ; and the consciousness of this seemed to make him distrustful of the arguments which were intended to lead his mind to acquies- cence. Upon the first occasion to which I allude, he was a Fellow of Oriel, and in close intercourse with one of the friends I have before mentioned, then also a Fellow of the same college : to him as well as to me he opened his mind, and from him he received the wisest advice, which he had the wisdom to act upon : he was bid to pause in his inquiries, to pray earnestly for help and light from above, and turn himself more strongly than ever to the practi- cal duties of a holy life ; he did so, and through severe trials was finally blessed with perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction. If there be any so unwise as to rejoice that Arnold, in his youth, had doubts on important doctrines, let him be sobered with the conclusion of those doubts, when Arnold's mind had not become weaker, nor his pursuit of truth less honest or ardent, but when his abilities were matured, his knowledge greater, his judgment more sober; if there be any who, in youth, are suffering the same dis- tress which befell him, let his conduct be their example, and the blessing which was vouchsafed to him, their hope and consolation. In a letter from that friend to myself of the date of February 14, 1819, I find the following extract, which gives so true and so con- siderate an account of this passage in Arnold's life, that you may be pleased to insert it. " I have not talked with Arnold lately on the distressing thoughts which he wrote to you about, but I am fearful, from his manner at times, that he has by no means got rid of them, though I feel quite confident that all will be well in the end. The subject of them them is that most awful one, on which all very inquisitive reasoning minds are, I believe, most liable to such temptations — I mean the doctrine of the blessed Trinity. \ o not start, my dear Coleridge: I do not believe that Arnold has any serious scruples of the understanding about it, but it is a defect of his mind that he cannot get r!d of a certain feeling of objections — and particu- larly when, as he fancies, the bias is so strong upon him to decide one way from interest ; he scruples doing what I advise him, which is, to put down the objections by main force whenever they arise in his mind, fearful that in so doing he shall be violating his con- science for maintenance' sake. I am still inclined to think with you that the wisest thing he could do would be to take John M. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 37 (a young pupil whom I was desirous of placing under his care) and a curacy somewhere or other, and cure himself not by physic, i. e. reading and controversy, but by diet and regimen, i. e. holy living. In the mean time what an excellent fellow he is. I do think that one might safely say as some one did of some other, ' One had better have Arnold's doubts than most men's certain- ties.' " I believe I have exhausted my recollections ; and if I have accomplished as I ought, what I proposed to myself, it will be hardly necessary, for me to sum up formally his character as an Oxford under-graduate. At the commencement a boy — and at the close retaining, not ungracefully, much of boyish spirits, frolic, and simplicity ; in mind vigorous, active, clear-sighted, industrious, and daily accumulating and assimilating treasures of knowledge ; not averse to poetry, but delighting rather in dialectics, philosophy, and history, with less of imaginative than reasoning power ; in argument bold almost to presumption, and vehement ; in temper easily roused to indignation, yet more easily appeased and entirely free from bitterness ; fired indeed, by what he deemed ungenerous or unjust to others, rather than by any sense of personal wrong ; somewhat too little deferential to authority ; yet without any real inconsistency loving what was good and great in antiquity the more ardently and reverently because it was ancient ; a casual or unkind observer might have pronounced him somewhat too pug- nacious in conversation and too positive. I have given, I believe, the true explanation ; scarcely any thing would have pained him more than to be convinced that he had been guilty of want of modesty, or of deference where it was justly due ; no one thought these virtues of more sacred obligation. In heart, if I can speak with confidence of any of the friends of my youth, I can of his, that it was devout and pure, simple, sincere, affectionate and faithful. It is time that I should close: already, I fear, -I have dwelt with something like an old man's prolixity on passages of my youth, forgetting that no one can take the same interest in them which I do myself; that deep personal interest must, however, be my excuse. Whoever sets a right value on the events of his life for good or for evil, will agree that next in importance to the recti- tude of his own course and the selection of his partner for life, and far beyond all the wealth or honours which may reward his labour, far even beyond the unspeakable gift of bodily health, are the friendships which he forms in youth. That is the season when natures soft and pliant grow together, each becoming part of the other, and coloured by it ; thus to become one in heart with the good, and generous, and devout, is, by God's grace, to become, in measure, good, and generous, and devout. Arnold's friendship has been one of the many blessings of my life. I cherish tbe memory of it with mournful gratitude, and I cannot but dwell with linger- ing fondness on the scene and the period which first brought us 38 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. together. Within the peaceful walls of Corpus I made friends, of whom all are spared me but Arnold !— he has fallen asleep— but the bond there formed, which the lapse of years and our differing walks in life did not unloosen, and which strong opposition of opinions only rendered more intimate ; though interrupted in time, I feel not to be broken — may I venture, without unseasonable solemnity, to express the firm trust, that it will endure for ever in eternity. Believe me, my dear Stanley, Very truly yours, J. T. C. CHAPTER II. LIFE AT LALEHAM. The society of the Fellows of Oriel College then, as for some time afterwards, numbered amongst its members some of the most rising men in the University, and it is curious to observe the list which, when the youthful scholar of Corpus was added to it, con- tained the names of Copleston, Davison, Whately, Keble, Hawkins, and Hampden, and shortly after he left it, those of Newman and Pusey, the former of whom was elected into his vacant Fellow- ship. Amongst the friends with whom he thus became acquainted for the first time, may chiefly be mentioned Dr. Hawkins, since Provost of Oriel, to whom in the last year of his life he dedicated his Lectures on Modern History, and Dr. Whately, afterwards Principal of St. Alban's Hall, and now Archbishop of Dublin, towards whom his regard was enhanced by the domestic inter- course which was constantly interchanged in later years between their respective families, and to whose writings and conversations he took an early opportunity of expressing his obligations in the Preface to his first volume of Sermons, in speaking of the various points on which the communication of his friend's views had " extended or confirmed his own." For the next four years he remained at Oxford taking private pupils, and reading extensively in the Oxford libraries, an advantage which he never ceased to remember gratefully himself, and to impress upon others, and of which the immediate results remain in a great number of MSS., both in the form of abstracts of other works, and of original sketches on history and theology. They are remarkable rather as proofs of industry than of power, and the style of all his composi- tions, both at this time and for some years later, is cramped by a stiffness and formality alien alike to the homeliness of his first published works and the vigour of his later ones, and strikingly ' recalling his favourite lines, " The old man clogs our earliest years, And simple childhood comes the last." But already in the examination for the Oriel Fellowships, Dr. Whately had pointed out to the other electors the great capability of " growth" which he believed to be involved in the crudities of the youthful candidate's exercises, and which, even in points where 40 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. he was inferior to his competitors, indicated an approaching supe- riority. And widely different as were his juvenile compositions in many points from those of his after life, yet it is interesting to ob- serve in them the materials which those who knew the pressure of his numerous avocations used to wonder when he could have ac- quired, and to trace amidst the strangest contrast of his general thoughts and style occasional remarks of a higher strain, which are in striking, though in some instances perhaps accidental, coinci- dence with some of his later views. He endeavoured in his histor- ical reading to follow the plan, which he afterwards recommended in his Lectures, of making himself thoroughly master of some one period, — the 15th century, with Philip de Comines as his text book, seems to have been the chief sphere of his studies, — and the first book after his election which appears in the Oriel library as taken out in his name, is Rymer's Foedera. Many of the judgments of his maturer years on Gibbon, Livy, and Thucydides, are to be found in a MS. of 1815, in which, under the name of " Thoughts on History," he went through the characteristics of the chief ancient and modern historians. And it is almost startling, in the midst of a rhetorical burst of his youthful Toryism in a journal of 1815, to meet with expressions of real feeling about the social state of Eng- land such as might have been written in his latest years; or amidst the commonplace remarks which accompany an analysis of St. Paul's Epistles and Chrysostom's Homilies, in 1818, to stumble on a statement, complete as far as it goes, of his subsequent doctrine ot the identity of Church and State. Meanwhile he had been gradually led to fix upon his future course in life. In December, 1818, he was ordained deacon at Ox- ford ; and on August 11th, 1820, he married Mary, youngest daugh- ter of the Rev. John Penrose, Rector of Fledborough, in Notting- hamshire, and sister of one of his earliest school and college friends, Trevenen Penrose ; having previously settled in 1S19 at Laleham, near Staines, with his mother, aunt, and sister, where he remained for the next nine years, taking seven or eight young men as pri- vate pupils in preparation for the Universities, for a short time in a joint establishment with his brother in-law, Mr. Buckland, and afterwards independently by himself. In the interval which had elapsed between the end of his under- graduate career at Oxford, and his entrance upon life, had taken place the, great change from boyhood to manhood, and with it a corresponding change or growth of character, more marked and more important than at any subsequent period of his life. There was indeed another great step to be taken before his mind reached that later stage of development which was coincident with his tran- sition from Laleham to Rugby. The prosaic and matter of fact element which has been described in his early Oxford life still re- tained its predominance, and to a certain extent dwarfed and nar- rowed his sphere of thought ; the various principles of political and theological science which contained in germ all that was to grow LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 41 out of them, had not yet assumed their proper harmony and pro- portions; his feelings of veneration, if less confined than in later years, were also less intense ; his hopes and views, if more prac- ticable and more easily restrained by the advice of others, were also less wide in their range, and less lofty in their conception. But, however great were the modifications which his character subsequently underwent, it is the change of tone at this time, be- tween the earlier letters of this period (such as the one or two first of the ensuing series) and those which immediately succeed them, that marks the difference between the high spirit and warm feelings of his youth and the fixed earnestness and devotion which hence- forth took possession of his whole heart and will. Whatever may have been the outward circumstances which contributed to this — the choice of a profession — the impression left upon him by the sudden loss of his elder brother — the new and to him elevating in- fluences of married life — the responsibility of having to act as the guide and teacher of others — it was now for the first time that the principles, which before he had followed rather as a matter of course, and as held and taught by those around him, became em- phatically part of his own convictions, to be embraced and carried out for life and for death. From this time forward such defects as were peculiar to his boyhood and early youth entirely disappear; the indolent habits — the morbid restlessness and occasional weariness of duty — the in- dulgence of vague schemes without definite purpose — the intellec- tual doubts which beset the first opening of his mind to the reali- ties of religious belief, when he shared at least in part the state of perplexity which in his later sermons he feelingly describes as the severest of earthly trials, and which so endeared to him throughout life the story of the confession of the Apostle Thomas — all seem to have vanished away and never again to have diverted him from the decisive choice and energetic pursuit of what he set before him as his end and duty. From this time forward no careful observer can fail to trace that deep consciousness of.the invisible world, and that power of bringing it before him in the midst and through the means of his most active engagements, which constituted the pecu- liarity of his religious life, and the moving spring of his whole life. It was not that he frequently introduced sacred names in writing or in conversation, or that he often dwelt on divine interpo- sitions ; where many would have done so without scruple, he would shrink from it, and in speaking of his own religious feelings, or in appealing to the religious feelings of others, he was, except to those most intimate with him, exceedingly reserved. But what was true generally of the thorough interpenetration of the several parts of his character, was peculiarly true of it in its religious as- pect : his natural faculties were not unclothed, but clothed upon ; they were at once coloured by, and gave a colour to, the belief which they received. It was in his common acts of life, whether public or private, that the depth of his religious convictions most 4 42 LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. visibly appeared ; it was in his manner of dwelling on religious subjects, that the characteristic tendencies of his mind chiefly dis- played themselves. Accordingly, whilst it is impossible, for this reason, to under- stand his religious belief except through the knowledge of his actual life and his writings on ordinary subjects, it is impossible, on the other hand, to understand his life and writings without bearing in mind how vivid was his realization of those truths of the Christian Revelation on which he most habitually dwelt. It was this which enabled him to undertake labours which without such a power must have crushed or enfeebled the spiritual growth which in him they seemed only to foster. It was the keen sense of thankfulness consciously awakened by every distinct instance of his many blessings, which more than any thing else explained his close union of joyousness with seriousness. In his even tenor of life it was difficult for any one who knew him not to imagine " the golden chain of heavenward thoughts and humble prayers by which, whether standing or sitting, in the intervals of work or of amusement," he '; linked together" his " more special and solemn devotions," (Serm. vol. iii. p. 277,) or not to trace some- thing of the consciousness of an invisible presence in the collect- edness with which, at the call of his common duties, he rose at once from his various occupations ; or in the calm repose which, in the midst of his most Active labours, took all the disturbing accidents of life as a matter of course, and made toil so real a pleasure, and relaxation so real a refreshment to him. And in his solemn and emphatic expressions on subjects expressly reli- gious ; in his manner of awful reverence when speaking of God or of the Scriptures ; in his power of realizing the operation of something more than human, whether in his abhorrence of evil, or in his admiration of goodness ; — the impression on those who heard him was often as though he knew what others only be- lieved, as though he had seen what others only talked about. " No one could know him even a little," says one who was him- self not amongst his most intimate friends, " and not be struck by his absolute wrestling with evil, so that like St. Paul he seemed to be battling with the wicked one, and yet with the feeling of God's help on his side, scorning as well as hating him." Above all, it was necessary for a right understanding, not only of his religious opinions but of his whole character, to enter into the peculiar feeling of love and adoration which he entertained towards our Lord Jesus Christ — peculiar in the distinctness and intensity which, as it characterized almost all his common im- pressions, so in this case gave additional strength and meaning to those feelings with which he regarded not only His work of Redemption but Himself, as a living Friend and Master. " In that unknown world in which our thoughts become instantly lost," it was his real support and delight to remember that " still there is one object on which our thoughts and imaginations may fasten, no LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 43 less than our affections ; that amidst the light, dark from excess of brilliance, which surrounds the throne of God, we may yet dis- cern the gracious form of the Son of Man." (Serm. vol. iii. p. 90.) In that consciousness which pressed upon him at times even heavily, of the difficulty of considering God in his own nature, be- lieving as he did that " Providence, the Supreme Being, the Deity, and other such terms repel us to an infinite distance," and that the revelation of the Father, in Himself unapproachable, is to be look- ed upon rather as the promise of another life, than as the support of this life, it was to him a thought of perhaps more than usual comfort to feel that " our God" is " Jesus Christ our Lord, the image of the invisible God," and that " in Him is represented all the fulness of the Godhead, until we know even as we are known." (vol. v. p. 222.) And with this full conviction both of his con- science and understanding, that he of whom he spoke was "still the very selfsame Jesus in all human affections and divine ex- cellences ;" there was a vividness and tenderness in his conception of Him, on which, if one may so say, all his feelings of human friendship and affection seemed to fasten as on their natural object, "bringing before him His actions, imaging to himself His very voice and look," there was to him (so to speak) a greatness in the image thus formed of Him, on which all his natural instincts of reverence, all his range of historical interest, all his admiration of truth and goodness at once centered. " Where can we find a name so holy as that we may surrender our whole souls to it, before which obedience, reverence without measure, intense hu- mility, most unreserved adoration may all be duly rendered?" was the earnest inquiry of his whole nature intellectual and mo- ral, no less than religious. And the answer to it in like manner expressed what he endeavoured to make the rule of his own per- sonal conduct, and the centre of all his moral and religious con- victions : " One name there is, and one alone, one alone in hea- ven and earth — not truth, not justice, not benevolence, not Christ's mother, not His holiest servants, not his' blessed sacraments, nor His very mystical body the Church, but Himself only who died for us and rose again, Jesus Christ, both God and man." (Serm. vol. iv. p. 210.) These were the feelings which, though more fully developed with the advance of years, now for the first time took thorough possession of his mind ; and which struck upon his moral nature at this period, with the same kind of force (if one may use the comparison) as the new views, which he acquired from time to time of persons and principles in historical or philosophical specu- lations, impressed themselves upon his intellectual nature. There is naturally but little to interrupt the retirement of his life at Lale- ham, which was only broken by the short tours in England or on the Continent, in which then, as afterwards, he employed his vacations. Still it is not without interest to dwell on these years the profound peace of which is contrasted so strongly with the al- 44 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. most incessant agitations of his subsequent life, and " to remain awhile" (thus applying his own words on another subject) " on the high ground where the waters which are hereafter to form the separate streams" of his various social and theological views, " lie as yet undistinguished in their common parent lake." Whatever may have been the exact notions of his future course which presented themselves to him, it is evident, that he Was not insensible to the attraction of visions of extensive influence, and al- most to his latest hour he seems to have been conscious of the existence of the temptation within him, and of the necessity of contending against it. " I believe," he said, many years after- wards, in speaking of these early struggles to a Rugby pupil who was consulting him on the choice of a profession, — " I believe that naturally I am one of the most ambitious men alive," and " the three great objects of human ambition," he added, to which alone he could look as deserving the name, were " to be the prime minis- ter of a great kingdom, the governor of a great empire, or the Avriter of works which should live in every age and in every coun- try." But in some respects the loftiness of his aims made it a matter of less difficulty to confine himself at once to a sphere in which, whilst he felt himself well and usefully employed, he felt also that the practical business of his daily duties acted as a check upon his own inclinations and speculations. Accordingly, when he entered upon his work at Laleham, he seems to have regarded it as his work for life. " I have always thought," he writes in 1823, " with regard to ambition, that I should like to be aut Caesar aut nullus, and as it is pretty well settled for me that I shall not be Caesar, I am quite content to live in peace as nullus." It was a period indeed on which he used himself to look back, even from the wider usefulness of his later years, almost with a fond regret, as to the happiest time of his life. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all other things shall be added to you," was a passage to which now more than any other time he was in the habit of recurring as one of peculiar truth and comfort. His situation supplied him exactly with that union of retirement and work which more than any other condi- tion suited his natural inclinations, and enabled him to keep up more uninterrupted than was ever again in his power the commu- nication which he so much cherished" with his friends and rela- tions. Without undertaking any directly parochial charge, he was in the habit of rendering constant assistance to Mr. Hearn, the curate of the place, both in the parish church and workhouse, and in visiting the villagers — thus uniting with his ordinary occupa- tions greater means than he was afterwards able to command, of familiar intercourse with his poorer neighbours, which he always so highly valued. Bound as he was to Laleham by all these ties, he long loved to look upon it as his final home ; — -and the first reception of the tidings of his election at Rugby was overclouded with deep sorrow at leaving the scene of so much happiness. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 45 Years after he had left it, he still retained his early affection for it, and till he had purchased his house in Westmoreland, he enter- tained a lingering hope that he might return to it in his old age, when he should have retired from Rngby. Often he would revisit it, and delighted in renewing his acquaintance with all the families of the poor whom he had known during his residence ; in showing to his children his former haunts; in looking once again on his favourite views of the great plain of Middlesex— the lonely walks along the quiet banks of the Thames — the retired garden, with its " Campus Martius," and its " wilderness of trees," which lay behind his house, and which had been the scenes of so many sportive games and serious conversations — the churchyard of Laleham, then doubly dear to him as containing the graves of his infant child whom he buried there in 1832, and of his mother, his aunt, and his sister Susannah, who had long formed almost a part of his own domestic circle, and whom he lost within a few years after his departure to Rugby. His general view of his work as a private tutor is best given in his own words in 1831, to a friend who was about to engage in a similar occupation. " I know it has a bad name, but my wife and I always happened to be fond of it, and if I were to leave Rugby for no demerit of my own, I would take to it again with all the pleasure in life. I enjoyed, and do enjoy, the society of youths of seventeen or eighteen, for they are all alive in limbs and spirits at least, if not in mind, while in older persons the body and spirits often become lazy and languid without the mind gaining any vigour to compensate for it. Do not take your work as a dose, and I do not think you will find it nauseous. I am sure you will not, if your wife does not, and if she is a sensible woman, she will not either if you do not. The misery of private tuition seems to me to consist in this, that men enter upon it as a means to some further end ; are always impatient for the time when they may lay it aside ; whereas if you enter upon it heartily as your life's business, as a man enters upon any other profession, you are not then in danger of grudging every hour you give to it, and thinking of how much privacy and how much society it is robbing you ; but you take to it as a matter of course, making it your material occupation, and devote your time to it, and then you find that it is in itself full of interest, and keeps life's cur- rent fresh and wholesome by bringing you in such perpetual contact with all the spring of youthful liveliness. I should say, have your pupils a good deal with you, and be as familiar with them as you possibly can. I did this continually more and more before I left Laleham, going to bathe with them, leaping and all other gymnastic exercises within my capacity, and some- times sailing or rowing with them. They I believe always liked it, and I enjoyed it myself like a boy, and found myself constantly the better for it." In many respects his method at Laleham resembled the plan which he pursued on a larger scale at Rngby. Then, as after- wards, he had a strong sense of the duty of protecting his charge, at whatever risk to himself, from the presence of companions who were capable only of exercising an evil influence over their asso- ciates ; and, young as he was, he persisted in carrying out this principle, and in declining to take any additional pupils as long as he had under him any of such a character, whom yet he did not 46 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. feel himself justified in removing at once. And in answer to the request of his friends that he would raise his terms, " I am con- firmed in my resolution not to do so," he writes in 1827, " lest I should get the sons of very great people as my pupils whom it is almost impossible to sophronize." In reply to a friend in 1821, who had asked his advice in a difficult case of dealing with a pupil, " I have no doubt," he answers, " that you have acted perfectly right ; for lenity is seldom to be repented of; and besides, if you should find that it has been ill bestowed, you can have recourse to expulsion after all. But it is clearly right to try your chance of making an impression ; and if you can make any at all, it is at once your justification and encouragement to pro- ceed. It is very often like kicking a football up hill ; you kick it onwards twenty yards, and it rolls back nineteen ; still you have gained one yard, and thus in a good many kicks you make some progress. This, however, is on the supposition that the pupil's fault is axyaoia and not y.axia; for if he laughs behind your back at what you say to him, he will corrupt others, and then there is no help for it, but he must go. This is to me all the difference : I would be as patient as I possibly could with irresolution, unsteadiness, and fits of idleness; but if a pupil has set his mind to do nothing, but considers all the work as so much fudge, which he will evade if he can, I have made up my resolution that I will send him away without scruple ; for not to speak of the heartless trouble that such an animal would give to myself, he is a living principle of mischief in the house, being ready at all times to pervert his companions ; and this determination I have expressed publicly, and if I know myself I will act upon it, and I advise you most heartily to do the same. Thus, then, with Mr. , when he appeared penitent and made professions of amendment, you were clearly right to give him a longer trial. If he be sincere, however unsteady and backsliding, he will not hurt the principles of your other pupils ; for he will not glory in his own misconduct, which I suppose is the danger : but if you have reason to think that the impression you made on him was only temporary, and that it has since en- tirely gone away, and his own evil principles as well as evil practices are in vigour, then I would advise you to send him off without delay ; for then taking the mischief he will do to others into the account, the football rolls down twenty-five yards to your kick of twenty, and that is a losing game." u,E/&i.ntr] oSivt] nolJ.a yuoviovra ntg jirjdivoq y.garf'eiv " he writes, '' must be the feelings of many a working tutor who cannot open the eyes of his pupils to see what knowledge is, — I do not mean human knowledge only, but ' wisdom.' " " You could scarcely conceive the rare instances of ignorance that I have met with amongst them. One had no notion of what was meant by an angle'; another could not tell how many Gospels there are, nor could he, after mature deliberation, recollect any other names than Matthew, Mark, and Luke ; and a third holds the first concord in utter contempt, and makes the infinitive mood supply the place of the principal verb in the sen- tence without the least suspicion of any impropriety. My labour, therefore, is more irksome than I have ever known it ; but none of my pupils give me any uneasiness on the most serious points, and five of them staid the sacra- ment when it was last administered. I ought constantly to impress upon my mind how light an evil is the greatest ignorance or dulness when com- pared with habits of profligacy, or even of wilful irregularity and riotous- ness." " I regret in your son," he says, (in writing to a parent,) " a carelessness which does not allow him to think seriously of what he is living for, and to do what is right not merely as a matter of regularity, but because it is a duty. I trust you will not think that I am meaning any thing more than my LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 47 words convey, or that what I am regretting in your son is not to be found in nineteen out of every twenty young men of his age ; but I conceive that you would wish me to form my desire of what your son should be, not according to the common standard, but according to the highest, — to be satisfied with no less in him than I should have been anxious to find in a son of my own. He is capable of doing a great deal ; and I have not seen any thing in him which has called for reproof since he has been with me. I am only de- sirous that he should work more heartily, — just, in short, as he would work if he took an interest of himself in his own improvement. On this, of course, all distinction in Oxford must depend ; but much more than distinction de- pends on it ; for the difference between a useful education, and one which does not affect the future life, rests mainly on the greater or less activity which it has communicated to the pupil's mind, whether he has learned to think, or to act, and to gain knowledge by himself, or whether he has merely followed passively as long as there was some one to draw him." It is needless to anticipate the far more extended influence which he exercised over his Rugby scholars, by describing in detail the impression produced upon his pupils at Laleham. Yet the mere difference of the relation in which he stood towards them in itself gave a peculiar character to his earlier sphere of education, and as such may best be described in the words of one amongst those whom he most esteemed, Mr. Price, who afterwards became one of his assistant-masters at Rugby.1 " Nearly eighteen years have passed away since I resided at Laleham, and I had the misfortune of being but two months as a pupil there. I am unable, therefore, to give you a complete picture of the Laleham life of my iate revered tutor ; I can only impart to you such impressions as my brief sojourn there has indelibly fixed in my recollection. " The most remarkable thing which struck me at once on joining the Laleham circle was, the wonderful healthiness of tone and feeling which prevailed in it. Every thing about me I immediately found to be most real ; it was a place where a new comer at once felt that a great and earnest work was going forward. Dr. Arnold's great power as a private tutor resided in this, that he gave such an intense earnestness to life. Every pupil was made to feel that there was a work for him to do — that his happiness as well as his duty lay in doing that work well. Hence, an indescribable zest was communicated to a young man's feeling about life; a strange joy came over him on discovering that he had the means of being useful, and thus of being happy ; and a deep respect and ardent attachrhent sprang up towards him who had taught him thus to value life and his own self, and his work and mission in this world. All this was founded on the breadth and comprehen- siveness of Arnold's character, as well as its striking truth and reality ; on the unfeigned regard he had for work of all kinds, and the sense he had of its value both for the complex aggregate of society, and the growth and per- fection of the individual. Thus pupils of the most different natures were keenly stimulated ; none felt that he was left out, or that, because he was not endowed with large powers of mind, there was no sphere open to him in 1 I cannot allow Mr. Price's name to appear in these pages, without expressing how much I am indebted to him for the assistance which, amidst his many pressing duties, he has rendered to this work, not only here, but throughout, and which in many cases, from his long knowledge and complete understanding of Dr. Arnold's views and charac- ter, he alone could have rendered. Nothing, indeed, but the very fact of the perpetual recurrence of instances in which I have availed myself not only of his suggestions but of his words, would have prevented me from more frequently acknowledging obligations for which I here wish to return my thanks, however inadequately, once for all. 48 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. the honourable pursuit of usefulness. This wonderful power of making all his pupils respect themselves, and of awakening in them a consciousness oi the duties that God had assigned to them personally, and of the consequent reward each should have of his labours, was one of Arnold's most character- istic features as a trainer of youth ; he possessed it eminently at Rugby ; but, if I may trust my own vivid recollections, he had it quite as remarkably at Laleham. His hold over all his pupils I know perfectly astonished me. It was not so much an enthusiastic admiration for genius, or learning, or elo- quence which stirred within them ; it was a sympathetic thrill, caught from a spirit that was earnestly at work in the world — whose work was healthy, sustained, and constantly carried forward in the fear of God — a work that was founded on a deep sense of its duty and its value ; and was coupled with such a true humility, such an unaffected simplicity, that others could not help being invigorated by the same feeling, and with the belief that they too in their measure could go and do likewise. " In all this there was no excitement, no predilection for one class of work above another; no enthusiasm for any one-sided object; but an hum- ble, profound, and most religious consciousness that work is the appointed calling of man on earth, the end for which his various faculties were given, the element in which his nature is ordained to devolope itself, and in which his progressive advance towards heaven is to lie. Hence, each pupil felt assured of Arnold's sympathy in his own particular growth and character of talent ; in striving to cultivate his own gifts, in whatever direction they might lead him, he infallibly found Arnold not only approving, but positively and sincerely valuing for themselves the results he had arrived at ; and that approbation and esteem gave a dignity and a worth both to himself and his labour. " His humility was very deeply seated ; his respect for all knowledge sincere. A strange feeling passed over the pupil's mind when he found great, and often undue, credit given him for knowledge of which his tutor was ignorant. But this generated no conceit : the example before his eyes daily reminded him that it was only as a means of usefulness, as an improve- ment of talents for his own good and that of others, that knowledge was val- ued. He could not find comfort in the presence of such reality, in any shal- low knowledge. " There was then, as afterwards, great simplicity in his religious char- acter. It was no isolated part of his nature, it was a bright and genial light shining on every branch of his life. He took very great pains with the Di- vinity lessons of his pupils: and his lectures were admirable, and, I distinct- ly remember, very highly prized for their depth and originality. Neither generally in ordinary conversation, nor in his walks with his pupils, was his style of speaking directly or mainly religious : but he was ever very ready to discuss any religious question ; whilst the depth and truth of his nature, and the earnestness of his religious convictions and feelings, were ever bursting forth, so as to make it strongly felt that his life, both outward and inward, was rooted in God. " In the details of daily business, the quantity of time that he devoted to his pupils was very remarkable. Lessons began at seven, and with the in- terval of breakfast lasted till nearly three ; then he would walk with his pupils, and dine at half-past five. At seven he usually had some lesson on hand ; and it was only when we all were gathered up in the drawing-room after tea, amidst young men on all sides of him, that he would commence work for himself, in writing his Sermons or Roman History. " Who that ever had the happiness of being at Laleham, does not re- member the lightness and joyousness of heart, with which he would romp and play in the garden, or plunge with a boy's delight into the Thames ; or the merry fun with which he would battle with spears with his pupils ? Which of them does not recollect how the Tutor entered into his amuse- ments with scarcely less glee than himself? " But I must conclude : I do not pretend to touch on every point. I have LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 49 told you what struck me most, and I have tried to keep away all remem- brance of what he was when I knew him better. I have confined myself to the impression Laleham left upon me." B. Price. The studies which most occupied his spare time at Laleham were philology and history, and he employed himself chiefly on a Lexicon of Thucydides, and also on an edition of that author with Latin notes, subsequently exchanged for English ones, a short History of Greece, never finished or published, and on articles on Roman History from the times of the Gracchi to that of Tra- jan, written for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, between 1821 and 1827. It was in 1825 that, through the recommendation of Archdea- con Hare, he first became acquainted with Niebuhr's Hi-story of Rome. In the study of this work, which was the first German book he ever read, and for the sake of reading which he had learned that language, a new intellectual world dawned upon him, not only in the subject to which it related, but in the disclo- sure to him of the depth and research of German literature, which from that moment he learned more and more to ap- preciate, and, as far as his own occupations would allow him, to emulate. On his view of Roman History its effect was immediate : " It is a work (he writes on first perusing it) of such extraordinary ability and learning, that it opened wide before my eyes the extent of my own ignorance ;" and he at once resolved to delay any in- dependent work of his own till he had more completely studied the new field of inquiry suggested to him, in addition to the doubts he had himself already expressed as to the authenticity of much of the early Roman history in one of his first articles in the Ency- clopaedia Metropolitana. In an article in the Quarterly Review of 1825 he was (to use Niebuhr's own words of thanks to him in the second edition of his first volume, Note 1053 i. p. 451, Eng. Transl.) " the scholar who introduced the first edition of this history to the English public ;" and the feeling which had dictated this friendly notice of it grew with years. The reluctance which he had at first entertained to admit the whole of Niebuhr's conclusions, and which remained even to 1832, when in regard to his views of an- cient history he was inclined to "charge him with a. tendency to excessive skepticism," (Pref. to 1st ed. of 2nd vol. of Thucyd. p. xiv.,) settled by degrees into a determination " never to differ from him without a full consciousness of the probability that further in- quiry might prove him to be right ;" (Pref. to Hist, of Rome, vol. i. p. x. ;) and his admiration for him rose at last into a sentiment of personal veneration, which made him, as he used to say, " at once emulous and hopeless, rendering him jealous for Niebuhr's reputa- tion, as if for his own, and anxious, amidst the pressure of his other occupations, to undertake, or at least superintend, the translation of 50 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. the third volume when it was given up by Hare and Thirlwall, from a desire to have his name connected with the translation of that great work, which no one had studied more or admired more entirely." But yet more than by his mere reading, all these feel- ings towards Niebuhr, towards Germany, and towards Roman his- tory, were strengthened by his visit to Rome in 1827, and by the friendship which he there formed with Chevalier Bunsen, successor to Niebuhr as minister at the Papal court. He was at Rome only thirteen days, but the sight of the city and of the neighbourhood, to which he devoted himself to the almost entire exclusion of the works of art, gave him a living interest in Rome which he had before wanted and which he never lost. The Chevalier Bun- sen he saw no more till 1838 ; but the conversation which he had there enjoyed with him formed the ground of an unbroken inter- course by letters between them : by his encouragement he was principally induced in later years to resume the History of Rome, which he eventually dedicated to him ; whilst from the resem- blance in many points of their peculiar pursuits and general views, he used to turn with enthusiastic delight to seek for his sympathy from the isolation in which he often seemed to be placed in his own country. But now, as afterwards, he found himself most attracted to- wards the Interpretation of Scripture and the more practical aspect of Theology ; and he was only restrained from entering upon the study of them more directly, partly by diffidence in his own powers, partly by a sense that more time was needed for their investiga- tion than he had at his command. His early intimacy with the leading men of the then Oriel school, remarkable as it was for ex- hibiting a union of religious earnestness with intellectual activity, and distinct from any existing party amongst the English clergy, contributed to foster the independence which characterized his the- ological and ecclesiastical views from the first time that he took any real interest in serious matters. And he used to look back to a visit to Dr. Whately, then residing on his cure in Suffolk, as a marked era in the formation of his views, especialy as opening to his mind, or impressing upon it more strongly, some of the opinions on which he afterwards laid so much stress with regard to the Christian Priesthood. But although in the way of modification or confirmation his thoughts owed much to the influence of others, there was always, even at this less stirring period of his mind, an original spring within. The distinctness and force with which the words and acts recorded in the Gospel History came before him, seem to have impressed him early with a conviction that there was something in them very different from what was implied in the common mode of talking and acting on religious subjects. The recollections of his conversations which have been preserved from this period, abound with expressions of his strong sense of " the want of Chris- tian principle in the literature of the day," and an anxious fore- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 51 boding of the possible results which might thence ensue in the case of any change in existing notions and circumstances. " I fear," he said, " the approach of a greater struggle between good and evil than the world has yet seen, in which there may well happen the greatest trial to the faith of good men that can be imagined, if the greatest talent and ability are decidedly on the side of their adver- saries, and they will have nothing but faith and holiness to oppose to it." " Something of this kind," he said, " may have been the meaning or part of the meaning of the words, 'that by signs and wonders they should deceive even the elect.' What I should be afraid of would be, that good men, taking alarm at the prevailing spirit, would fear to yield even points they could not maintain, instead of wisely giving them up and holding on where they could." Hence one object of his early attempts at his Roman History was the hope, as he said, that its tone might be such " that the strictest of what is called the Evangelical party would not object to putting it into the hands of their children." Hence again, he earnestly desired to see some leading periodical taking a decidedly religious tone, unconnected with any party feeling : — " It would be a most happy event," he writes in 1822, " if a work which has so great a sale, and contains so much curious information, and has so much the tone of men of the world, [as the Quarterly Review,] could be disciplined to a uniformly Christian spirit, and appear to uphold good prin- ciples for their own sake, and not merely as tending to the maintenance of things as they are. It would be delightful to see a work sincerely Christian, which should be neither High Church, nor what is called Evangelical." Out of this general sense of the extreme contrast between the high standard of the Christian religion and the evils of the ex- isting state of Christendom, especially in his own age and country, arose one by one those views which, when afterwards formed into a collected whole, became the animating principle of his public life, but which it is not necessary to anticipate here, except by indica- ting how rapidly they were in the process of formation in his own mind. It was now that his political views began to free themselves alike from the mere childish Jacobinism of his boyhood, and from the hardly less stable Toryism which he had imbibed from the in- fluence of his early Oxford friends — a change which is best to be seen in his own words, in a letter to Mr. Justice Coleridge, many years afterwards (Jan. 26, 1840). And though his interest in pub- lic affairs was much less keen at this period than in the subsequent stages of his life, his letters contain, especially after 1826, indica- tions of the same lively sense of social evils, founded on his know- ledge of history, which became more and more a part of his habit- ual thoughts. " I think daily," he said, in speaking of the disturbances in 181 9, " of Thu- cydides, and the Corcyrean sedition, and of the story of the French Revolu- tion, and of the Cassandra-like fate of history, whose lessons are read in vain even to the very next generation." 52 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. " I cannot tell you," he writes in 1826, " how the present state of the country occupies my mind, and what a restless desire I feel that it were in my power to do any good. My chief fear is, that when the actual suffering is a little abated, people will go on as usual, and not probing to the bottom the deep disease which is to my mind ensuring no ordinary share of misery in the country before many years are over. But we know that it is our own fault if our greatest trials do not turn out to be our greatest anvantages." Iii ecclesiastical matters in like manner he had already begun to conceive the necessity of great alterations in the Church Estab- lishment, a feeling which at this period, when most persons seem- ed to acquiesce in its existing state, was naturally stronger than in the later years of his life, when the attacks to which it was ex- posed from without and from within, appeared at times to endanger its existence. " I hope to be allowed, before I die, to accomplish something on Educa- tion, and also with regard to the Church," he writes in 1826 ; " the last in- deed even more than the other, were not the task, humanly speaking, so hopeless. But the more I think of the matter, and the more I read of the Scriptures themselves, and of the history of the Church, the more intense is my wonder at the language of admiration with which some men speak of the Church of England, which certainly retains the foundation sure, as all other Christian societies do, except the Unitarians, but has overlaid it with a very sufficient quantity of hay and stubble, which I devoutly hope to see burnt one day in the fire. I know that other Churches have their faults also, but what have I to do with them ? It is idle to speculate in attend re- publicd, but to reform one's own is a business wAich nearly concerns us." His lively appreciation of the high standard of practical and social excellence, enjoined in the Christian dispensation, was also guiding him to those principles of interpretation of Scripture, which he applied so extensively in his later works. " The tendency," he writes to Dr. Hawkins in 1827, " which so many Christians have had and still have, to fancy that the goodness of the old Patriarchs was absolute rather than relative, and that men who are spoken of as having had personal communication with God, must have had as great knowledge of a future state as ourselves, is expressed in one of G. Herbert's poems, in which he seems to look upon the revelations of the patriarchal Church almost with envy, as if they had nearer communion with God than Christians have. All which seems to me to arise out of a forgetfulness or misapprehension of the privileges of Christians in their communion with the Holy Spirit, — and to originate partly in the tritheistic notions of the Trinity, which make men involuntarily consider iht Third Person as inferior in some degree to those who are called First and Second, whereas the Third relation of the Deity to man is rather the most perfect of all ; as it is that in which God communes with man, not ' as a man talketh with his friend,' but as a Spirit holding discourse invisibly and incomprehensibly, but more effec- tually than by any outward address, — with the spirits of his creatures. And therefore it was expedient for the disciples that God should be with their hearts as the Spirit, rather than speaking to their ears as the Son. This will give you the clue to my view of the Old Testament, which I never can look upon as addressed to men having a Faith in Christ such as Christians have, or looking forward to eternal life with any settled and uniform hope." Lastly, the following extracts give his approaches to his sub- sequent views on Church and State. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 53 " What say you," he writes in' 1827, to Dr. Whately, " to a work on 7Tohrty.r], in the old Greek sense of the word, in which I should try to apply the principles of the Gospel to the legislation and administration of a state ? It would begin with a simple statement of the t*'Ao<; of man according to Christi- anity, and then would go on to show how the knowledge of this xi Ao? would affect all our views of national wealth, and the whole question of political economy ; and also our practice witli regard to wars, oaths, and various other relics of the aroix{ia *0*> xoa/ioy." A nd to Mr. Blackstone in the same year : — " I have long had in my mind a work on Christian Politics, or the appli- cation of the Gospel to the state of man as a citizen, in which the whole question of a religious establishment and of the education proper for Chris- tian members of a Christian commonwealth would naturally find a place. It would embrace also an historical sketch of the pretended conversion of the kingdoms of the world to the kingdom of Christ in the fourth and fifth centuries, which I look upon as one of the greatest tours cfaddresse that Satan ever played, except his invention of Popery. I mean that by inducing kings and nations to conform nominally to Christianity, and thus to get into their hands the direction of Christian society, he has in a great measure succeeded in keeping out the peculiar principles of that society from any ex- tended sphere of operation, and in ensuring the ascendency of his own. One real conversion there seems to have been, that of the Anglo-Saxons ; but that he soon succeeded in corrupting ; and at the Norman Conquest we had little, I suppose, to lose even from the more direct introduction of Popery and worldly religion which came in with the conqueror." All these floating visions, which were not realized till long af- terwards, are best represented in the first volume of his Sermons, which were preached in the parish church at Laleham, and form by far the most characteristic record of this period. " My object," he said in his Preface, " has been to bring the great prin- ciples of the Gospel home to the hearts and practices of my own country- men in my own time — and particularly to those of my own station in society, with whose sentiments and language I am naturally most familiar. And for this purpose, I have tried to write in such a style as might be used in real life, in serious conversation with our friends, or with those who asked our advice ; in the language, in short, of common life, and applied to the cases of common life ; but ennobled and strengthened by those principles and feelings which are to be found only in the Gospel." This volume 'is not only in the time of its appearance, but also in its style and substance, the best introduction to all his later works ; the very absence of any application to particular classes or states of opinion, such as gives more interest to his subsequent sermons, is the more fitted to exhibit his fundamental views, often not developed in his own mind, in their naked simplicity. And it is in itself worthy of notice, as being the first or nearly the first attempt, since followed in many other quarters, at breaking through the conventional phraseology with which English preaching had been so long encumbered, and at uniting the language of reality and practical sense with names and words which, in the minds of so many of the educated classes, had become closely associated with notions of sectarianism or extravagance. 54 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. It was published in 1828, immediately after his removal to Rugby, and had a rapid circulation. Many, both then and long afterwards, who most differed from some of his more peculiar opin- ions, rejoiced in the possession of a volume which contained so much in which they agreed, and so little from which they differed. The objections to its style or substance may best be gathered from the following extracts of his own letters : 1. " If the sermons are read, I do not care one farthing if the readers think me the most unclassical writer in the English language. It will only remove me to a greater distance from the men of elegant minds with whom I shall most loathe to be associated. But, however, I have looked at the ser- mons again, with a view to correcting the baldness which you complain of, and in some places, I have endeavoured to correct it. And I again assure you, that I will not knowingly leave unaltered any thing violent, harsh, or dogmatical. I am not conscious of the ex cathedra, tone of my sermons — at least not beyond what appears to me proper in the pulpit, where one does in a manner speak ex cathedra. But I think my decided tone is gen- erally employed in putting forward the sentiments of Scripture, not in draw- ing my own conclusions from it." 2. In answer to a complaint that " they carry the standard so high as to unchristianize half the community," he says, " I do not see how the standard can be carried higher than Christ or his Apostles carry it, and I do not think that we ought to put it lower. I am sure that the habitually fixing it so much lower, especially in all our institutions and public practice, has been most mischievous." 3. " I am very mnch gratified by what you say of my sermons ; yet pained to find that their tone is generally felt to be so hard and severe. I believe the reason is, that I mostly thought of my pupils in preaching, and almost always of the higher classes, who I cannot but think have commonly very little of the ' bruised reed ' about them. You must remember that I never had the regular care of a parish, and therefore have seen compara- tively little of those cases of a troubled spirit, and of a fearful and anxious conscience, which require comfort far more than warning. But still, after all, I fear that the intense mercy of the Gospel has not been so prominently represented as it should have been, while I have been labouring to express its purity." Meanwhile, his friends had frequently represented to him the desirableness of a situation which would secure a more certain provision, and a greator sphere of usefulness than that which he occupied at Laleham ; and he had been urged, more than once, to stand for the Mastership at Winchester, which he had declined first from a distrust of his own fitness or inclination for. the office, and afterwards from more general reasons. But the expense of the neighbourhood of Laleham had already determined him to leave it, and he was framing plans for a change of life, when, in August, 1827, the head-mastership of Rugby became vacant by the resignation of Dr. Wool, who had held it for twenty-one years. It was not till late in the contest for the situation that he finally resolved to offer himself as a candidate. When, therefore, his testimonials were sent in to the twelve trustees, noblemen and gen- tlemen of Warwickshire, in whom the appointment rests, the can- vass for the office had advanced so far as to leave him, in the opinion of himself and many of his friends, but little hope of sue- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 55 cess. On the day of the decision, the testimonials of the several candidates were read over in the order in which they had been sent in ; his own were therefore among the last ; and whilst none of the trustees were personally acquainted with him, few if any of them, owing to the lateness of his appearance, had heard his name before. His testimonials were few in number, and most of them couched in general language, but all speaking strongly of his qual- ifications. Amongst them was a letter from Dr. Hawkins, now Provost of Oriel, in which it was predicted that, if Mr. Arnold were elected to the head-mastership of Rugby, he would change the face of education all through the public schools of England. The trustees had determined to be guided entirely by the merits of the candidates, and the impression produced upon them by this letter, and by the general confidence in him expressed in all the testimo- nials, was such, that he was elected at once, in December, 1827. In June, 1828, he received Priest's orders from Dr. Howley, then Bishop of London ; in April and November of the same year took degree of B.D. and D.D. ; and in August entered on his new office. The following letters and extracts have been selected, not so much as important in themselves, but rather as illustrating the course of his thoughts and general views at this period. LETTERS FROM 1817 TO 1828. I. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Oxford, May 28, 1817. . . . . I thank you very heartily for the kindness which all your •letter displays, and I cannot better show my sense of it, than by telling you without reserve my feelings and arguments on both sides of the question. The study of the law, in many respects, I think I should like, and certainly it holds out better encouragement to any ambitious particles which I may have in my nature than the church does. But I do not think, if I know myself, which perhaps is begging an important question, that my sober inclinations would lead me to the law so much as to the church. I am sure the church would be the best for me, for as I hope never to enter it with light views, so the forming of my mind to a proper sense of the clerical duties, and then an occasion and call for the practice of them immediately succeed- ing, would I trust be most beneficial to me. To effect this, I have great advantages in the advice and example of many of my friends here in Oxford, and whether I know myself or not is another question, but I most sincerely feel that I could with most pleasure devote myself to the employments of a clergyman : and that I never should for a moment put any prospects of ambition or worldly honour in competition with the safe happiness which I think a clergyman's life would grant me. Seriously, I am afraid of the law : I know how much even here I am led away by various occupations from those studies and feelings which are essential to every man ; and I dare not risk the consequences of such a necessary diversion of mind from all religious subjects as would be caused by my attending to a study so engrossing as that of law. To this I am sure in your eyes nothing need be added ; but besides I doubt whether my health would support so much reading and 56 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. confinement to the house : and after all, knowing who are at this moment contending for the prizes of the law, it would I think be folly to stake much on the chance of my success. Again, my present way of life enables me to be a great deal at home with my mother, aunt, and sister, who are all so circumstanced, that I should not think myself justified in lightly choosing any occupation that would separate me greatly from them. On the other hand, if I find that I cannot conscientiously subscribe to the articles of the church, be assured I never will go into orders, but even then I should doubt whether I could support either the expense or labour of the law. I hope you have overrated my " ambitious disputations and democratical " propen- sities ; if, indeed, I have not more of the two first than of the last, I think I should not hesitate about my fitness for the church, as far as they are con- cerned. I think you have not quite a correct notion of my political faith; perhaps I have not myself, but I do not think I am democratically inclined, and God forbid I should ever be such a clergyman as Home Tooke. II. TO REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Laleham, September 20, 1819. Poor dear old Oxford ! if I live till I am eighty, and were to enjoy all the happiness that the warmest wish could desire, I should never forget, or cease to lookback with something of a painful feeling on the years we were together there, and on all the delights that we have lost ; and 1 look foward with extreme delight to my intended journey, down to the audit in October, when I shall take a long and last farewell of my old haunts, and will,- if I possibly can, yet take one more look at Bagley Wood, and the pretty field, and the wild stream that flows down between Bullington and Cowley Marsh, not forgetting even your old friend, the Lower London Road. Well, I must endeavour to get some such associations to combine with Laleham and its neighbourhood ; but at present all is harsh and ruffled, like woods in a high wind, only I am beginning to love my own little study, where I have a sofa full of books, as of old, and the two verse books lying about on it, and a volume of Herodotus ; and where I sit up and read or write till twelve or one o'clock. III. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE. (On a proposal of a Mastership at Winchester.) Laleham, October 28, 1819. I might defer any discussion of the prospects which you recommend to me till we meet, were it a subject on whicl^ I could feel any hesitation in making up my mind. But, thanking you as I do very sincerely for the kindness of your suggestion, the situation which you advise me to try for, is one which nothing but the most positive call of duty would ever induce me to accept, were it even offered to me. It is one which, in the first place, I know myself very ill qualified to fill; and it would besides completely upset every scheme which I have formed for my future comfort in life. I know that success in my present undertaking is of course doubtful ; still my chance is, I think, tolerably fair, not indeed of making my fortune, but of earning such an income as shall enable me to live with economy as a married man; and, as far as I can now foresee, I should wish to continue for many years at Laleham, and the house, which I have got on a long lease, is one which I already feel very well inclined to regard as my settled and permanent home in this world. My present way of life I have tried, and am perfectly contented LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 57 with it : and I know pretty well what the life of a master of Winchester would be. and feel equally certain that it would be to me excessively disa- greeable. I do not think you could say any thing to shake me for an instant on this head ; still believe me that I am very much obliged to you for the friendliness of your recommendation, which I decline for reasons that in all probability many people would think very empty and ridiculous. IV. TO REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, November 20, 1 d19. This day eight years, about this time, we were assembled in the Junior Common Room, to celebrate the first foundation of the room, and had been amused by hearing Bartholomew's song about " Musical George," and ;' Political Tommy," and now, of the party then assembled, you are the only one still left in Oxford, and the rest of us are scattered over the face of the earth to our several abodes. There is a " souvenir interessant " for you, as a Frenchman would say, and one full well fitted for a November evening.^ But do you know that I am half disposed to quarrel with you, instead of giving you " Souvenirs " — for did you not covenant to write to me first ? .... Indeed, in the pictures that I have to form of my future life, my friends have always held a part ; and it has been a great delight to me to think, that Mary will feel doubly and naturally bound to so many of them, that she will have little trouble in learning to love them, and the benefits which I have received from my Oxford friendships have been so invaluable, as relating to points of the very highest importance, that it is impossible for me ever to forget them, or to cease to look on them as the greatest blessings I have ever yet enjoyed in life, and for which I have the deepest reason to be most thankful. Being then separated from you all, I am most anxious that absence should not be allowed to weaken the regard we bear each other ; and besides, I cannot forgo that advice and assistance which I have so long been accustomed to rely on, and with which I cannot as yet at least safely dispense : for the management of my own mind is a thing so difficult, and brings me into contact with much that is so strangely mysterious, that I stand at times quite bewildered, in a chaos where I can see no light either before or behind. How much of all this is constitutional and physical I cannot tell, perhaps a great deal of it : yet it is surely dangerous to look upon all the struggles of the mind as arising from the state of the body or the weather, and so resolved to bestow no attention upon them. Indeed I think I have far more reason to be annoyed at the extraordinary apathy and abstraction from every thing good, which the routine of the world's business brings with it ; there are whole days in which all the feelings of principles of belief, or of Religion altogether, are in utter abeyance : when one goes on very comfortably, pleased with external and worldly comforts, and yet would find it difficult, if told to inquire, to find a particle of Christian princi- ple in one's whole mind. It seems all quite moved out bodily, and one retains no consciousness of a belief in any one religious truth, but is living a life of virtual Atheism. I suppose these things are equalized somehow, but I am often inclined to wonder at and to envy those who seem never to know what mental trouble is, and who seem to have nothing else to disturb them than the common petty annoyances of life, and when these let them alone, then they are iv ivnad-eirjai. But I would compound for all this, if I could but find that I had any liking for what I ought to like ; but there is the Sunday School here, for instance, which I never visit without the strongest reluctance, and really the thought of having this to do makes me quite dread the return of the Sunday. I have got it now entirely into my own hands, so attend it I must and will, if I can answer for my perseverance, but it goe# sadly against me. 5 58 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. V. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Laleham, November 29, 1819. At last I am going to redeem the promise which I made so long ago, and to give you some account of our summa rerum. I have had lately the additional work of a sermon every week to write, and this has interfered very much with my correspondence ; and I fear I have not yet acquired that careful economy of time which men in your profession often so well practice, and do not make the most of all the odd five and ten minutes' spaces which I get in the course of the day. However, I have at last begun my letter, and will first tell you that I still like my business very well, and what is very comfortable, I feel far more confidence in myself than I did at first, and should not now dread having the sole management of pupils, which at one time I should have shrunk from. (After giving an account of the joint arrangement of the school and the pupils with his brother-in-law ;) Buckland is naturally fonder of the school, and is inclined to give it. the greatest part of his attention ; and I, from my Oxford habits, as naturally like the other part of the business best; and thus I have extended my time of reading with our four pupils in the morning before breakfast, from one hour to two. Not that I dislike being in the school, but quite the contrary ; still, however, I have not the experience in that sort of work, nor the perfect familiarity with my grammar requisite to make a good master, and I cannot teach Homer as well as my friends Herodotus and Livy, whom I am now reading, I suppose, for about the fiftieth time. Nov. 30th. — I was interrupted last night in the middle of my letter, and as the evening is my only time for such occupations, it cannot now go till to-morrow. You shall derive this benefit, however, from the interruption, that I will trouble you with no more details about the trade ; a subject which I find growing upon me daily, from the retired life we are leading, and from my being so much engrossed by it. There are some very pleasant families settled in this place besides ourselves ; they have been very civil to us, and in the holidays I dare say we shall see much of them, but at present I do not feel I have sufficient time to make an acquaintance, and cannot readily submit to the needful sacrifice of formal visits, &c, which must be the pre- lude to a more familiar knowledge of any one. As it is, my garden claims a good portion of my spare time in the middle of the day, when I am not engaged at home or taking a walk ; there is always something to interest me even in the very sight of the weeds and litter, for then I think how much improved the place will be when they are removed ; and it is very delightful to watch the progress of any work of this sort, and observe the gradual change from disorder and neglect to neatness and finish. In the course of the autumn I have done much in planting and altering, but these labours are now over, and I have now only to hope for a mild winter as far as the ahrubs are concerned, that they may not all be dead when the spring comes. Of the country about us, especially on the "Surrey side, I have explored much ; but not nearly so much as I could wish. It is very beautiful, and some of the scenes at the junction of the heath country with the rich valley of the Thames are very striking. Or if I do not venture so far from home, I have always a resource at hand in the bank of the river up to Staines ; which, though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness, there being not a house any where near it ; and the river here has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it, which makes it in many places as public as the high road Of what is going on in the world, or any where indeed out of Laleham, I know little or nothing. I can get no letters from Oxford, the common complaint I think of all who leave it ; and if Penrose did not bring us sometimes a little news from Eton, and Hull from London, I should really, when the holidays begin, find myself six months behind the rest of the world LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 59 Don Juan has been with me some weeks, but I am determined not to read it, for I was so annoyed by some specimens that I saw in glancing over the leaves, that I will not worry myself with any more of it. I have read enough of the debates since parliament has met to make me marvel at the non- sense talked on both sides, though I am afraid the opposition have the palm out and out. The folly or the mischievous obstinacy with which they per- sist in palliating the excesses of the Jacobins is really scandalous, though I own I do not wish to see Carlton House trimming up the constitution as if it was an huzzar's uniform. ... I feel, however, growing less and less political. VI. TO REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Fledborough, January 3, 182\ I conclude that Tucker is with you, so I will begin by sending you both my heartiest wishes for a happy new year ; and for you and yours, that you may long go on as you have begun, and enjoy every succeeding New Year's Day better and better, and have more solid grounds for the enjoyment of it ; and for Tucker, that he may taste equal happiness even if it should not be precisely in the same way. Well, here we are, almost at the extremities of the kingdom ; Tucker and you at Sidmouth, and Trevenen and I at Fledborough We are snowed up all round, and shall be drowned with the flood when it begins to thaw ; and as for cold, at nine a. m. on Saturday, the thermometer stood at 0. Alas ! for my fin- gers. Good night " to both on ye," as the poor crazy man used to say in Oxford I saw Coleridge when I passed through town on the 22nd, and also his little girl, one of the nicest little children I ever saw. It would have formed a strange contrast with past times, to have seen us stand- ing together in his drawing-room, he nursing the baby in his arms, and dandling it very skilfully, and the little animal in high spirits playing with my hair and clawing me, and laughing very amusingly. I found them all very well, and quite alone ; and since that time I have not stirred beyond these parishes, and except on Sundays have hardly gone further than the garden and the great meadows on the Trent banks. These vast meadows were flooded and frozen before the snow came, and being now covered with snow, afford a very exact picture of those snowy regions which Thalaba passed over, on his way to consult the great Simorg at Kaf. I never before saw so uninterrupted and level a space covered with snow, and the effect of it, when the sun is playing over it, is something remarkably beautiful. The river, too, as I saw it in the intense frost of Saturday morn- ing, was uncommonly striking. It had subsided to its natural bed before the 6now came ; but the frost had set in so rapidly, that the water had been arrested in the willows and thick bushes that overhang the stream, and was forming on them icicles, and as it were fruits of crystal innumerable on every spray, while the snow formed besides a wintry foliage exactly in character with such wintry fruit. The river itself rolled dark and black between these glittering banks, full of floating masses of ice, which from time to time dash- ed against each other, and as you looked up it in the direction of the sun, it smoked like a furnace. So much for description ! Well, now, I will tell you a marvel. I wanted to bring down some presents for each of the sisters here ; and for Mary I brought no other than George Herbert's Divine Songs, which I really bought out of my own head, which I like very much, which I endeavour to interpret — no easy matter in the hard parts — and which I mean to get for myself. Now do you not think I shall become quite a right think- ing sort of person in good time ? You need not despair of hearing that I am a violent admirer of Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, and have given up the Lord Protector. I owe Tucker many thanks for his letter altogether, and (30 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. congratulate him on the Water-Eaton altar piece, as I condole with him on his abandonment of his ancient walks. He ought to bind himself by vow to visit once a term each of our old haunts, in mournful pilgrimage: and as the spring comes on, if the combined influence of wood-anemones, and souvenirs, and nightingales, does not draw him to Bagley Wood, I think the case must be desperate. I know I shall myself cry once or twice in the course of the next half year, lw O ubi Campi." VII. TO REV GEORGE CORNISH. Laleham, February 21, 1820. You must know that you are one of three persons in the world to whom I hold it wrong to write short letters ; that is to say, you are one of three on whom I can find it in my heart to bestow all my tediousness ; and therefore, though February 23rd stands at the top of the page, I do not expect that this sheet will be finished for some time to come. The first thing I must say is to congratulate you on Charles's appointment. If this letter reaches you amid the pain of parting, congratulation will indeed seem a strange word ; yet it is, I think, a matter of real joy after all; it is just what Charles seems best fitted for ; his principles and character you may fully depend on, and India is of all fields of honourable ambition that this world offers, to my mind the fairest. You know I always had a sort of han- kering after it myself, and but that I prefer teaching Greek to learning Hindoostanee, and fear that there is no immediate hope of the conquest of China, I should have liked to have seen the Ganges well. To your family India must seem natural ground ; and for the separation, painful as it must be, yet do we not all in reality part almost as decisively with our friends when we once settle in life, even though the ocean should not divide us ! How little intercourse may I dare to anticipate in after days with those who for so many years have been almost my constant companions ; and how little have I seen for several years past of my own brother ! But this is prosing. If Charles be still with you, give him my kindest remembrances, with every wish for his future happiness ; it already seems a dream to look back on the time when he used to come to my rooms to read Herodotus. Tell him I retain some of his scribbling on the pages of my Hederic's Lexicon, which may many a time remind me of him, when he is skirmishing perhaps with Mahrattas or Chinese, and I am still going over the old ground of loroyltjs a.n6$i£i% yd*. You talk to me of "cutting blocks with a razor;" indeed it does me no good to lead my mind to such notions ; for to tell you a secret, I am quite enough inclined of myself to feel above my work, which is very wrong and very foolish. I believe I am usefully employed, and I am sure I am employed more safely for myself than if I had more time for higher studies ; it does my mind a marvellous deal of good, or ought to do, to be kept upon bread and water. But be this as it may, and be the price that I am paying much or little, I cannot forget for what I am paying it. (After speaking of his future prospects.) Here, indeed, I sympathize with you in the fear that this earthly happiness may interest me too deeply. The hold which a man's affections have on him is the more dangerous because the less suspected ; and one may become an idolater almost before one feels the least sense of danger. Then comes the fear of losing the treasure, which one may love too fondly ; and that fear is indeed terrible. The thought of the instability of one's happiness comes in well to interrupt its full indul- gence ; and if often entertained must make a man either an Epicurian or a Christian in good earnest. Thank eleven o'clock for stopping my prosing ! Good night, and God bless you ! LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 61 VIII. TO THE SAME. (On the Death of his Brother ) Laleham, December 6, 18Q0. It is really quite an alarming time since I wrote to yon in February ; for I cannot count as any thing the two brief letters that passed between us at the time of my marriage. I had intended, however, to have written to you a good long one, so soon as the holidays came ; but, hearing from , ;i few days ago, that you had been expressing a wish to hear from me, T thought. I would try to anticipate my intention, and dispatch an epistle to you forth- with. It has been an eventful period for me in many ways, since February last, — more so, both for good and for evil, than I ever remember before. The loss which we all sustained in May, was the first great affliction that ever befell me ; and it has been indeed a heavy one. At first it came so suddenly that I could not feel it so keenly ; and I had other thoughts besides upon me, which would not then allow me to dwell so much upon it. But time has rather made the loss more painful than less so ; and now that I am married, and living here calmly and quietly. I often think how he would have enjoyed to have come to Laleham ; and all the circumstances of his death recur to me like a frightful dream. It is very extraordinary how often I dream that, he is alive, and always with the consciousness that he is alive, after having been supposed dead ; and this sometimes has gone so far, that I have in my dream questioned the reality of his being alive, and doubted whether it were not a dream, and have been convinced that it was not. so strongly, that I could hardly shake off the impression on waking. I have since that lost an- other relation, my uncle Delafield. who died quite suddenly at Hastings, in September; his death fell less severely on my mother and aunt, from follow- ing so near upon a loss still more distressing to them : but there was in both the same circumstance, which for the time made the shock tenfold greater, that my mother was expecting to see both my brother and my uncle within a few days at Laleham, when she heard of their respective deaths. I attended my uncle's funeral at Kensington, and never did I see greater affliction than that of his children, who were all present. I ought not, however, to dwell only on the painful events that have befallen us, when I have so much of a different kind to be thankful for. My mother is settled, with my aunt, and Susannah, in a more comfortable situation than they have ever been in since we left the Isle of Wight. My mother has got a very good garden, which is an amusement to her in many ways, but chiefly as it enables her to send lit- tle presents, &c, to her children ; and Susannah's crib lying in a room open- ing to the garden, she too can enjoy it ; and she has been buying some flow- ering shrubs this autumn, and planting them where they will show them- selves to her to the best advantage. My aunt is better, I think, than she commonly is ; and she too enjoys her new dwelling, and amuses herself in showing Martha pictures and telling her stories, just as she used to do to me. Going on from my mother's house to Buckland's, you would find Fran- ces, with two children more than you are acquainted with From about a quarter before nine till ten o'clock every evening, I am at liberty, and enjoy my wife's company fully ; during this time I read out to her, (I am now reading to her Herodotus, translating it as I go on.) or write my Sermons, when it is my fortnight to preach ; or write letters, as I am doing at this moment. And though the space of time that I can thus enjoy be but short, yet perhaps I relish it more keenly even on this very account ; and when I am engaged, I ought to think how very many situations in life might have separated me from my wife's society, not for hours only, but for months, or even years ; whereas now I have not slept from home once since I have been married; nor am I likely for the greatest part of the year to do so. The garden is a constant source of amusement to us both ; there are (J2 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. always some little alterations to be made, some few spots where an additional shrub or two would be ornamental, something coming into blossom, or some crop for the more vulgar use of the table coming into season ; so that I can always delight to go round and see how things are going on. Our snow- drops are now just thrusting their heads out of the ground, and I to-day gathered a pink primrose. Trevenen comes over generally about twice a week to see us, and often stays to dine with us ; Whately and Blackstone have also at different times paid us visits, and Mary was very much pleased with them both We set off for Fledborough so soon as the holidays begin, which will be next Wednesday week, and think of stay- ing there almost to the end of them ; only allowing time for a visit to dear old Oxford, when I will try hard to get Mary to Bagley Wood, and show her the tree wdiere you and Tucker and I were once perched all together. . . I am now far better off than I formerly was in point of lectures ; for I have one in Thucydides, and another in Aristotle's Ethics ; if you dive in the for- mer of these, as I suppose you do, it will be worth your while to get Poppo's " Observationes Critical in Thucydidem," a small pamphlet published at Leipzig, in 1815, and by far the best thing — indeed one may say the only srood one — that has ever yet been written on the subject. I have been very highly delighted with it, and so I think would any one be, who has as much interest in Thucydides as we have, who have been acquainted with him so lono-. Another point concerning my trade has puzzled me a good deal. It has been my wish to avoid giving my pupils any Greek to do on a Sunday, so that we do Greek Testament on other days ; but on the Sunday always do some English book ; and they read so much, and then I ask them questions in it. But I find it almost impossible to make them read a mere English book with sufficient attention to be able to answer questions out of it ; or if they do cram themselves for the time, they are sure to forget it directly after. I have been thinking, therefore, of making them take notes of the Sermon, after our Oriel fashion; but this does not quite satisfy me; and as you are a man of experience, I should like to know what your plan is, and whether you have found the same difficulty which I complain of. I have a great deal to hear about you all, and I shall be very glad to have tidings of you, and especially to know how Charles is going on, if you have yet heard from him ; and also how Hubert is faring, to whom I beg you will give my love. It is idle to lay schemes for a time six months distant, — but I do hope to see you in Devonshire in the summer, if you are at home, as we have something of a plan for going into Cornwall to see my innumerable relations there. I heard from Tucker about a week since, — perhaps his last letter from Oxford ; it quite disturbs me to think of it. And so he will set up at Mail- ing after all, and by and by perhaps we shall see the problem solved, whether he has lost his heart or no. I cannot make out when we are all to see one another, if we all take pupils, and all leave home in the vacations. I think we must fix some inn on some great road, as the place where we may meet en-passant once a year. How goes on j)oetry ? With me it is gone, I suppose for ever, and prose too, as far as writing is concerned ; for I do nothing now in that way, save sermons and letters. But this matters little. Have you seen or heard of Cramer's book about Hannibal's passage of the Alps ? It is, I think, exceedingly good, and I rejoice for the little club's sake. I have been this day to Egham, to sign my name to a loyal address to the king from the gentlemen and householders of this neighbourhood, ex- pressing our confidence in the wisdom and vigour of the constituted authori- ties. I hope this would please Dyson. I must now leave off scribbling. Adieu, my dear Cornish: Mary be^s to join me in all kind wishes and re- gards to you and yours; and so would all at the other two houses, if they were at hand. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD gj IX. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.. (In answer to criticisms on a review of Poppo's Observationes Criticae.) Laleham Garden, April 25, 1S2I. Now for your remarks on my Poppo. All clumsiness in the sentences, and want of connexion between the parts, I will do my best to amend ; and the censure on verbal criticism I will either soften or scratch out entirely, for J. Keble objected to the same part. The translations also I will try to improve, and indeed I am aware of their baldness. The additions which you propose I can make readily; but as to the general plainness of the style, I do not think I clearly see the fault which you allude to, and to say the truth, the plainness, i. e. the absence of ornament and long words, is the result of deliberate intention. At any rate, in my own case, I am sure an attempt at ornament would make my style so absurd that you would your- self laugh at it. I could not do it naturally, for I have now so habituated myself to that unambitious and plain way of writing, and absence of Latin words as much as possible, that I could not write otherwise without manifest affectation. Of course I do not mean to justify awkwardness and clumsy sentences, of which I am afraid my writings are too full, and all which I will do my best to alter wherever you have marked them ; but any thing like puff, or verbal ornament, I cannot bring myself to. Richness of style I ad- mire heartily, but this I cannot attain to for lack of power. All I could do would be to produce a bad imitation of it, which seems to me very ridicu- lous. For the same reason, I know not how to make the review more strik- ing ; I cannot make it so by its own real weight and eloquence, and there- fore I think I should only make it offensive by trying to make it fine. Do consider, what you recommend is anion; ccqiotov, but I must do what is agiatov l[i 01. You know you always told me I should never be a poet, and in like manner I never could be really eloquent, for I have not the imagina- tion or fullness of mind needful to make me so X. TO REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, October 21, 1822. • I have not much to say in the way of news ■ so I will notice that part of your letter which speaks of my not employing myself on something theological. You must remember that- what I am doing in Greek and Roman History is only my amusement during the single hour of the day that I can employ on any occupation of my own, namely, between nine and ten in the evening. With such limited time it would be ridiculous to attempt any work which required much labour, and which could not be pro- moted by my common occupations with my pupils. The Grecian History ie just one of the things I can do most easily; my knowledge of it beforehand is pretty full, and my lectures are continually keeping the subject before my mind ; so that to write about it is really my recreation ; and the Roman His- tory is the same to me, though in a less degree. I could not name any other subject equally familiar, or which, in my present circumstances, would be practicable, and certainly if I can complete plain and popular Histories of Greece and Rome, of a moderate size, cleared of nonsense and unchristian principles, I do not think I shall be amusing myself ill : for as I now am, I could not do any thing besides my proper work that was not an amusement. For the last fortnight, during which I have had two sermons to write, I have not been able to do a word of my History ; and it will be the same this week, if 1 write some letters which I wish to write ; so that you see I am in no condition to undertake any thing of real labour. Be assured there is nothing 64 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. I would so gladly do as set about a complete Ecclesiastical History ; and I love to fancy myself so engaged at some future time if I live : but to begin such a thing now would be utterly desperate. The want of books alone, and my inability to consult libraries, would be a sufficient hindrance. I have read a new book lately, which is rather an event for me, Jowett's Christian Researches in the Mediterranean. You know it, of course, and I doubt not like it as much as I do, which is very much indeed. It is a very wonderful and a very beautiful thing to see the efforts made on so large a scale, and with motives so pure, to diffuse all good, both temporal and spiritual ; and I suppose that the world is gradually dividing more and more into two divided parties of good and evil, — the lukewarm and the formal Christians are, I imagine, daily becoming less numerous. I am puzzled beyond measure what to think about Ireland. What good can be done permanently with a people who literally do make man's life as cheap as beasts' ; and who are content to multiply in idleness and in such beggary that the first failure of a crop brings them to starvation ? I would venture to say that luxury never did half so much harm as the total indifference to comfort is doing in Ireland, by leading to a propagation of the human species in a state of brutality. I should think that no country in the world needs missionaries so much, and ia none would their success be so desperate. XI. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, E3Q. Laleham, March 3, 1823. I do not know whether you have ever seen John Keble's Hymns. He has written a great number for most of the holidays and seve- ral of the Sundays in the year, and I believe intends to complete the series. I live in hopes that he will be induced to publish them ; and it is my firm opinion that nothing equal to them exists in our language : the wonderful knowledge of Scripture, the purity of heart, and the richness of poetry which they exhibit, I never saw paralleled. If they are not published, it will be a orreat neglect of doing good. I wish you could see them ; the contemplation of them would be a delightful employment for your walks between Hadlow Street and the Temple Have you heard any thing more about 's Roman History ? I am really anxious to know what sort of a man he is, and whether he will write like a Christian or no ; if he will, I have not a wish to interfere with him ; if not, I would labour very hard indeed to anticipate him, and prevent an additional disgrace from being heaped upon the historical part of our literature. XII. TO THE REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, February 22, 1824. My pupils all come up into the drawing-room a little be- fore tea, and stay for some time, some reading, others talking, playing chess or backgammon, looking at pictures, &c, — a great improvement if it lasts ; and if this fair beginning continues, I care not a straw for the labour of the half year, for it is not labour but vexation which hurts a man, and I find my comfort depends more and more on their good and bad conduct. They are an awful charge, but still to me a very interesting one, and one which I could cheerfully pursue till my health or faculties fail me. Moreover, I have now taken up the care of the Workhouse, i. e. as far as going there once a week, to read prayers, and give a sortof lecture upon some part of the Bible. I wanted to see more of the poor people, and I found that, unless I devoted a regular time to it, I should never do it, for the hunger for exercise on the LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 65 part of myself and my horses, used to send me out riding as soon as my work was done ; whereas noAV I give up Thursday to the village, and it will be my own fault if it does not do me more good than the exercise would. You have heard, I suppose, of Trevenen's tour with me to Scotland. Inde- pendent of the bodily good which it. did me, and which I really wanted, I have derived from it the benefit of getting rid of some prejudices, for I find myself often thinking of Edinburgh quite affectionately, so great was the kindness which we met with there, and so pleasant and friendly were most of the people with whom we became acquainted. As to the scenery, it far surpassed all my expectations : I shall never forget the effect of the setting sun on the whole line of the Grampians, covered with snow, as we saw them from the steamboat on the Forth between Alloa and Stirling. It was so delightful also to renew my acquaintance with the English Lakes, and with Wordsworth I could lucubrate largely de omni scibili, but paper happily runs short. I am very much delighted with the aspect of the Ses- sion of Parliament, and see with hearty gratitude the real reforms and the purer spirit of government which this happy rest from war is every year, I trust, gradually encouraging. The West India question is thorny ; but I suppose the Government may entrench upon individual property for a great national benefit, giving a fair compensation to the parties, just as is done in every Canal Bill. Nay, I cannot see why the rights of the planters are more sacred than those of the old despotic kings and feudal aristocracies who were made to part with many good things which they had inherited from their ancestors because the original tenure was founded on wrong ; and so is all slavery; all West Indian slavery at least, most certainly. X11I. TO W. W. HULL, ESft. Laleham, Septeml.er 30, 1824. . . . . I am now working at German in good earnest, and have got a master who comes down here to me once a week. I have read a good deal of Julius Hare's friend Niebuhr, and have found it abundantly overpay the labour of learning a new language, to say nothing of some other very val- uable German books with which I am becoming acquainted, all preparatory to my Roman History. I am going to set to work at the " Coke upon Littleton" of Roman law. to make myself acquainted, if possible, with the tenure of property; and I think I shall apply to you for the loan of some of your books touching the civil law, and especially Justinian's Institutes. As my knowledge increases, I only get a clearer insight into my ignorance ; and this excites me to do my best to remove it before I descend to the Aver- nus of the press. But I am twice the man for labour that I have been lately, for the last year or two, because the pupils, I thank God, are going on well ; I have at this moment the pleasure of seeing three of them sitting at the round table in the drawing-room, all busily engaged about their themes ; and the general good effect of their sitting with us all the evening is really very surprising. XIV. TO REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, April 5, 1815. . . . . I am getting pretty well to understand the history of the Ro- man kings, and to be ready to commence writing. One of my most useful books is dear old Tottle's (Aristotle's) Politics; which give one so full a notion of the state of society and opinions in old times, that by their aid one can pick out the wheat from the chaff in Livy with great success. Mr. Penrose has lately mentioned a work by a Mr. Cooper, in which he applies QQ LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. the prophecies in the eleventh chapter of Daniel to Bonaparte. — Have you read the work yourself? My own notion is, that people try to make out from prophecy too much of a detailed history, and thus I have never seen a single commentator who has not perverted the truth of history to make it fit the prophecy. I think that, with the exception of those prophecies which relate to our Lord, the object of prophecy is rather to delineate principles and states of opinion which shall come, than external events. I grant that Daniel seems to furnish an exception, and I do not know how Mr. Cooper has done his work ; hut in general commentaries or expositions of the proph- ecies give me a painful sense of unfairness in their authors, in straining the facts to agree with the imagined prediction of them. Have you seen Cob- bett's " History of the Protestant Reformation," which he is publishing month- ly in threepenny numbers ? It is a queer compound of wickedness and igno- rance with strong sense and the mention of divers truths which have been too much disguised or kept in the background, but which ought to be generally known. Its object is to represent the Reformation in England as a great national evil, accomplished by all kinds of robbery and cruelty, and tending to the impoverishment and misery of the poor, and to the introduction of a careless clergy and a spirit of ignorance and covetousness amongst every body. It made me groan, while reading it, to think that the real history and effects of the Reformation are so little known, and the evils of the worldly policy of Somerset's and Elizabeth's government so little appreciated. As it is, Cobbett's book can do nothing but harm, so bad is its spirit, and so evi- dent its unfairness. XV. TO REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Florence, July 15, 1826. I wish I could tell you something about the people, — but how is it possi- ble, travelling at the rate that we are obliged to do ? We see, of course, the very worst specimens — innkeepers, postillions, and beggars; and one is thus in danger of getting an unfavourable impression of the inhabitants in epite of one's judgment. A matter of more serious thought, and on which I am vainly trying to procure information, is the condition of the lower orders. I have long had a suspicion that Cobbett's complaints of the degradation and sufferings in the poor of England contained much truth, though uttered by him in the worst possible spirit. It is certain that the peasantry here are much more generally proprietors of their own land than with us; and I should be- lieve them to be much more independent and in easier circumstances. This is, I believe, the grand reason why so many of the attempts at revolution have failed in these countries. A revolution would benefit the lawyers, the savans, the merchants, bankers, and shopkeepers, but I do not see what the labouring classes would gain by it. For them the work has been done already, in the destruction of the feudal tyranny of the nobility and great men ; and in my opinion this blessing is enough to compensate the evils of the French Revolution ; for the good endures, while the effects of the mas- sacres and devastations are fast passing away. It is my delight every where to see the feudal castles in ruins, never, I trust, to be rebuilt or reoccupied ; and in this respect the watchword " Guerre aux chateaux, Paix aux Chau- mieres," was prophetic of the actual result of the French Revolution. I am sure that we have too much of the oligarchical spirit in England, both in church and state ; and I think that those one-eyed men, the political econ- omists, encourage this by their language about national wealth, &c. Tou- tefois, there is much good in the oligarchical spirit as it exists in Eng- land LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 67 XVI. TO REV. J. TUCKER. Laleham, August 22, 1805. .... I got no books of any consequence, nor did I learn any thing except that general notion of the climate, scenery, and manners of the coun- try, which can only be gained by actual observation. We crossed the Tiber a little beyond Perugia, where it was a most miserable ditch with hardly water enough to turn a mill; indeed most of the streams which flow from the Apennines were altogether dried up, and the dry and thirsty ap- pearance of every thing was truly oriental. The flowers were a great delight to me, and it was very beautiful to see the hedges full of the pome- granate in full flower ; the bright scarlet blossom is so exceedingly orna- mental, to say nothing of one's associations with the fruit. What we call the Spanish broom of our gardens is the common wild broom of the Apennines, but I do not think it so beautiful as our own. ' The fig trees were most lux- uriant, but not more so than in the Isle of Wight, and I got tired of the con- tinual occurrence of fruit trees, chiefly olives, instead of large forest trees. The vale of Florence looks quite poor and dull in comparison of our rich valleys, from the total want of timber, and in Florence itself there is not a tree. How miserably inferior to Oxford is Florence altogether, both within and as seen from a distance ; in short, I never was so disappointed in any place in my life. My favourite towns were Genoa, Milan and Verona. The situation of the latter just at the foot of the Alps, and almost encircled, like Durham, by a full and rapid river, the Adige, was very delightful. Tell me any news you can think of, remembering that two months in the summer are a gap in my knowledge, as I never saw a single newspaper during my absence. Specially send me'a full account of yourself and your sisters, and the Keblesif you know aught of them. How pure and beautiful was J. Keble's article on Sacred Poetry in the Quarterly, and how glad am I that he was prevailed on to write it. It seemed to me to sanctify in a manner the whole Number. Mine on the early Roman History was slightly altered by Coleridge here and there, so that I am not quite responsible for all of it. XVII. T,0 THE REV. G. CORNISH. Laleham, October, 18, 1825. .... I have also seen some sermons preached before the University of Cambridge, by a Mr. Rose, directed against the German Theologians, in the advertisement to which he attacks my article in the Quarterly with great vehemence. .... He is apparently a good man, and his book is likely, I think, to do good ; but it does grieve me to find persons of his stamp quar- relling with their friends, when there are more than enough of enemies in the world for every Christian to strive against. I met five Englishmen at the public table at our inn at Milan, who gave me great matter for cogita- tion. One was a clergyman, and just returned from Egypt ; the rest were young men, i. e. between twenty-five and thirty, and apparently of no pro- fession. I may safely say, that since I was an under-graduate, I never heard any conversation so profligate as that which they all indulged in, the clergy- man particularly ; indeed, it was not merely gross, but avowed principles of wickedness, such as I do not remember ever to have heard in Oxford. But what struck me most was, that with this sensuality there was united some intellectual activity, — they were not ignorant, but seemed bent on gaining a great variety of solid information from their travels. Now this union of vice and intellectual power and knowledge seems to me rather a sign of the age, and if it goes on, it threatens to produce one of the most fearful forms of Antichrist which has yet appeared. I am sure that the great prevalence gg LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. of travelling fosters this spirit, not that men learn mischief from the French or Italians, but because they are removed from the check of public opinion, and are, in fact, self-constituted outlaws, neither belonging to the society which they have left, nor taking a place in that of the countries where they are travelling. What I saw also of the Pope's religion in his own territories excited my attention a good deal. Monkery seems flourishing there in great force, and the abominations of their systematic falsehoods seem as gross as ever. In France, on the contrary, the Catholics seemed to me to be Chris tians, and daily becoming more and more so. In Italy they seem to me to have no more title to the name than if the statues of Venus and Juno occu- pied the place of those of the Virgin. It is just the old Heathenism, and, as I should think, with a worse system of deceit. .... XVIII. TO REV. J. TUCKER. Laleham, 1 26. . . . . It delighted me to hear speak decidedly of the great need of reform in the Church, and from what I have heard in other quar- ters, I am in hopes that these sentiments are gaining ground. But the diffi- culty will always be practically, who is to reform it? For the clergy have a horror of the House of Commons, and Parliament and the country will never trust the matter to the clergy. If we had our General Assembly, there might be some chance, but as it is, I know no more hopeless prospect, and every year I live, this is to me more painful. If half the energy and re- sources which have been turned to Bible societies and missions, had steadily been applied to the reform of our own institutions, and the enforcing the prin- ciples of the Gospel among ourselves, I cannot but think that we should have been fulfilling a higher duty, and with the blessing of God might have pro- duced more satisfactory fruit. " These things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone."1 Of the German divines, if Mr. Rose is^ to be trusted, there can be but one opinion ; they exemplify the evils of knowledge without a Christian watchfulness over the heart and practice: but I greatly fear that there are some here who would abuse this example to the discouragement of impartial investigation and independent thought ; as If ignorance and blind following the opinions of others were the habits that best become Christians. " He that is spiritual judge th all things," — if cleared from fanaticism and presumption, and taken in connexion with " But yet I show unto you a more excellent way," — is at once, I think, our privilege and our duty. XIX. TO REV. E. HAWKINS. Laleham, October 22, 1826. You know, I believe, that I am at work upon Thucydides, and that it ought to be ready, if possible, by the beginning of Lent term. I wish much to get the judgments of several men of different qualifications as to what I have already completed. I should like to have the opinion of a professed scholar as to the critical part; of a man deeply versed in Greek history and law as to the historical and antiquarian part, and particulary to tell me whether there are any points connected with Thucydides which require a par- ticular discussion, and which I may have omitted in pure ignorance ; and thirdly, I want the judgment of a man of plain sense, to tell me what he thinks superfluous, and what deficient, in the notes which I have given. Do The words of the English version are here substituted for the quotations from the Greek. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 69 you think thai you could do any thing for me on these points, if I were to send you down the MS. of the first two books; and remember that I want to have full and free censures, reserving to myself, of course, the privilege of following them or not, as I shall see cause, but promising to give them the fullest attention. I think I might rely on the Provost's being kind enough to give me his criticisms, as he has already done it to some of the earlier chap- ters, and almost all his suggestions are such as I shall thankfully follow. I am a little anxious that our Oxford edition of Thucydides should be as good as any which they are publishing in Germany. XX. TO REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, March 4, 1827. I meant to have written almost immediately upon my return home from Kent ; for delightful as is the recollection of my short visit to you on every other ground, I was, and have been ever since, a good deal annoyed by some part of our conversation, i. e. by observing the impression produced on your mind by some of the opinions which I expressed. It is to me personally a very great pain that I should have excited feelings of disapprobation in the mind of a man whom I so entirely approve and love, and yet that I cannot feel the disapprobation to be deserved, and therefore cannot remove the cause of it. And on more general grounds it makes me fear, that those en- gaged in the same great cause will never heartily sink their little differences of opinion, when I find that you, who have known me so long, cannot hear them without thinking them not merely erroneous, but morally wrong, and 6uch, therefore, as give you pain when uttered. I am not in the least going to renew the argument ; it is very likely that I was wrong in it ; and I am sure it would not annoy me that you should think me so, just as I may think you wrong in any point, or as I think J. Keble wrong in half a hundred, yet without being grieved that he should hold them, that is, grieved as at a fault. You may say that a great many erroneous opinions imply no moral fault at all, but that mine did, namely, the fault of an unsubmissive understanding. But it seems to me that, of all faults, this is the most difficult to define or to discern: for who shall say where the understanding ought to submit itself, unless where it is inclined to advocate any thing immoral ? We know that what in one age has been called the spirit of rebellious reason, has in another been allowed by all good men to have been nothing but a sound judgment exempt from superstition. We know that the Catholics look with as great horror on the consequences of denying the infallibility of the Church as you can do on those of denying the entire inspiration of the Scriptures; and that, to come nearer to the point, the inspiration of the Scriptures in points of physical science was once insisted on as stoutly as it is now maintained with regard to matter oi* history. Now it may be correct to deny their inspiration in one and not in the other ; but I think it is hard to ascribe the one opinion to any thing morally faulty more than the other. I am far from thinking myself so good a man by many degrees as you are. I am not so advanced a Christian. But I am sure that my love for the Gospel is as sincere, and my desire to bring every thought into the obedience of Christ is one which 1 think I do not deceive myself in believing that I honestly feel. It is very painful, therefore, to be suspected of paying them only a divided homage, or to be deficient in reverence to Him whom every year that I live my whole soul and spirit own with a more entire certainty and love. Let me again say, that I am neither defending the truth of the particular opin- ions which I expressed to you, nor yet disavowing them. I only think that it is a pity that they should shock you ; as I think we ought to know one another's principles well enough by this time, not certainly to make us acquiesce in all each other's opinions, but to be satisfied that they may be 70 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. entertained innocently, and that therefore we may differ from each other without pain. But enough of this ; only it has annoyed me a great deal, and has made me doubt where I can find a person to whom I may speak freely if I cannot do so even to you. LETTERS RELATING TO THE ELECTION AT RUGBY. XXI. TO REV. E. HAWKINS. Laleliam, October 21, 1827. I feel most sincerely obliged to you and my other friends in Oxford for the kind interest which you show in my behalf, in wishing to procure for me the head-mastership at Rugby. Of its being a great deal more lucrative than my present employment I have no doubt ; nor of its being in itself a situation of more extensive usefulness ; but I do doubt whether it would be so in my hands, and how far I am fitted for the place of head-master of a large school I confess that I should very much object to undertake a charge in which I was not invested with pretty full discretion. According to my notions of what large schools are, founded on all I know and all I have ever heard of them, expulsion should be practised much oftener than it is. Now, I know that trustees, in general, are averse to this plan, because it has a tendency to lessen^ the numbers of the school, and they regard quantity more than quality. In fact, my opinions on this point might, perhaps, generally be considered as disqualifying me for the situation of master of a great school ; yet I could not consent to tolerate much that I know is tolerated generally, and, therefore, I should not like to enter on an office which I could not discharge according to my own views of what is right. I do not believe myself, that my system would be. in fact, a cruel or a harsh one, and I believe that with much care on the part of the masters, it would be seldom necessary to proceed to the ratio ultima ; only I would have it clearly understood, that I would most unscrupulously resort to it, at what- ever inconvenience, where there was a perseverance in any habit inconsistent with a boy's duties. XXII. TO REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Laleliam, November 30, 1827. You have often wanted me to be master at Winchester, so I think you will be glad to hear that I am actually a candidate for Rugby. I was strongly urged to stand, and money tempted me, but I cannot in my heart be sorry to stay where both Mary and myself are so entirely happy. If I do get it, I feel as if I could set to work very heartily, and, with God's blessing, I should like to try whether my notions of Christian education are really impracticable, whether our system of public schools has not in it some noble elements which, under the blessing of the Spirit of all holiness and wisdom, might produce fruit even to life eternal. When I think about it thus, I really long to take rod in hand ; but when I think of the tt^o? to t*'Ao?, the perfect vileness which I must daily contemplate, the certainty that this can at best be only partially remedied, the irksomeness of " fortemque Gyan fortemque Cloanthum," and the greater form and publicity of the life which we should there lead, when I could no more bathe daily in the clear Thames, nor wear old coats and Russia duck trousers, nor hang on a gallows,' nor climb a pole, I grieve to think of the possibility of a change ; but as there are about thirty candidates, [and I only applied very late, I think I need not disquiet myself. I send you this brief notice, because you ought to hear 1 His gymnastic exercises. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD 71 of my plans from myself rather than from others ; but I have no time to write more. Thucydides prospers. XXIII. TO REV. J. TUCKER. December 28, 1827. Our united warmest thanks to you and to your sisters for the joy you have felt about Rugby. For the labour I care nothing, if God gives me health and strength as he has for the last eight years. But whether I shall be able to make the school what I wish to make it. — I do not mean wholly or perfectly, but in some degree, — that is, an instrument of God's glory, and of the everlasting good of those who come to it, — that indeed is an awful anxiety. XXIV. TO REV. E. HAWKINS. Laleham, December 28, J827. Your kind little note ought not to have remained thus long unanswered, especially as you have a most particular claim on my thanks for your active kindness in the whole business, and for your character of me to Sir H. Hal- ford, that I was likely to improve generally the system of public education, a statement which Sir H. Halford told me had weighed most strongly in my favour. You would not, I am sure, have recommended me, if you had supposed that I should alter things violently or for the pleasure of altering ; but. as I have at different times expressed in conversation my disapprobation of much of the existing system, I find that some people expect that I am going to sweep away root and branch, quod absit ! I need not tell you how wholly unexpected this result has been to us, and I hope I need not say also what a solemn and almost overwhelming responsibility I feel is imposed on me. I would hope to have the prayers of my friends, together with my own, for a supply of that true wisdom which is required for such a business. To be sure, how small in comparison is the importance of my teaching the boys to read Greek, and how light would be a schoolmaster's duty if that were all of it. Yet, if my health and strength continue as they have been for the last eight years, I do not fear the labour, and really enjoy the prospect of it. I am so glad that we are likely to meet soon in Oxford. XXV. TO REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, March 2. With regard to reforms at Rugby, give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make ; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the human race. But I be- lieve that a great deal may be done, and I should be most unwilling to undertake the business, if I did not trust that much might be done. Our impressions of the exterior of every thing that we saw during our visit to Dr. Wooll in January, were very favourable ; at the same time that I antici- pate a great many difficulties in the management of affairs, before they can / 72 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. be brought into good train. But both Mary and myself, I think, are well inclined=to commence our work, and if my health and strength be spared me, I certainly feel that in no situation could I have the prospect of employ- ment so congenial to my taste and qualifications ; that is, supposing always that I find that 1 can manage the change from older pupils to a school. Your account of yourself was most delightful : my life for some years has been one of great happiness, but I fear not of happiness so safe and permitted. I am hurried on too fast in the round of duties and of domestic enjoyments, and I greatly feel the need, and shall do so even more at Rugby, unless I take heed in time, of stopping to consider my ways, and to recognize my own infi- nite weakness and unworthiness. I have read the " Letters on the Church," and reviewed them in the Edinburgh Review for September. 1826, if you care to know what I think of them. I think that any discussion on church matters must do good, if it is likely to lead to any reform ; for any change, such as is within any human calculation, would be an improvement. What might not do, if he would set himself to work in the House of Lords, not to patch up this hole or that, but to recast the whole corrupt system, which in many points stands just as it did in the worst times of popery, only reading " King" or " Aristocracy," in the place of " Pope." XXVI. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE. Laleham, March 14, 1828. We are resigning private pupils, I imagine, with very different feelings ; you looking forward to a life of less distraction, and I to one of far greater, insomuch that all here seems quietness itself in comparison with what I shall meet with at Rugby. There will be a great deal to do, I sus- pect, in every way, when I first enter on my situation ; but still, if my health continues, I do not at all dread it, but on the contrary look forward to it with much pleasure. I have long since looked upon education as my business in life ; and just before I stood for Rugby, I had offered myself as a candidate for the historical professorship at the London University ; and had indulged in various dreams of attaching myself to that institution, and trying as far as possible to influence it. In Rugby there is a fairer field," because I start with greater advantages. You know that I never ran down public schools in the lump, but grieved that their exceeding capabilities were not turned to better account; and if I find myself unable in time to mend what I con- eider faulty in them, it will at any rate be a practical lesson to teach me to judge charitably of others, who do not reform public institutions as much as is desirable. I suppose that you have not regarded all the public events of the last few months without some interest. My views of things certainly become daily more reforming ; and what I above all other things wish to see is, a close union between Christian reformers and those who are often, as I think, falsely charged with being enemies of-Christianity. It is apart of the perfection of the Gospel that it is attractive to all those who love truth and goodness, as soon as it is known in its true nature, whilst it tends to clear away those erroneous views and evil passions with which philanthropy and philosophy, so long as they stand aloof from it, are ever in some degree cor- rupted. My feeling towards men whom I believe to be sincere lovers of truth and the happiness of their fellow creatures, while they seek these ends otherwise than through the medium of the Gospel, is rather that they are not 1'ar from the kingdom of God, and might be brought into it altogether, than that they are enemies whose views are directly opposed to our own. That they are not brought into it is, I think to a considerable degree, chargeable upon the professors of Christianity ; the high Church party seeming to think that the establishment in Church and State is all in all, and that the Gospel principles must be accommodated to our existing institu- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 73 tions, instead of offering a pattern by which, those institutions should be pu- rified ; and the Evangelicals, by their ignorance and narrow-mindedness, and their seeming wish to keep the world and the Church ever distinct, instead of labouring to destroy the one by increasing the influence of the other, and making the kingdoms of the world indeed the kingdoms of Christ. XXVII. TO AUGUSTUS HARE, ESQ. Laleham, March 7, 1828. I trust that you have recovered your accident at Perugia, and that you are enabled to enjoy your stay at that glorious Rome. I think that I have never written to you since my return from it last spring, when I was so completely overpowered with admiration and delight at the match- less beauty and solemnity of Rome and its neighbourhood. But I think my greatest delight after all was in the society of Bunsen, the Prussian min- ister at Rome. . . . He reminded me continually of you more than of any other man whom I know, and chiefly by his entire and enthusiastic admira- tion of every thing great and excellent and beautiful, not stopping to see or care for minute faults ; and though I cannot rid myself of that critical pro- pensity, yet I can heartily admire and almost envy those who are without it I have derived great benefit from sources of information that your brother has at different times recommended to me, and the perusal of some of his articles in the " Guesses at Truth" has made me exceedingly desirous of becoming better acquainted with him, as I am sure that hia conversation would be really profitable to me, in the highest sense of the word, as well as delightful. And I have a double pleasure in saying this, because I did not do him justice formerly in my estimate of him, and am anxious to do myself justice now by saying that I have learnt to judge more truly. You will have heard of my changed prospects in consequence of my election at Rugby. It will be a severe pang to me to leave Laleham ; but otherwise I rejoice in my appointment, and hope to be useful, if life and health are spared me I think of going to Leipsic, Dresden, and Prague, to worship the Elbe and the country of John Huss and Ziska. All here unite in kindest remembrances to you, and I wish you could con- vey to the very stones and air of Rome the expression of my fond recollec- tion for them. XXVIII. TO REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, May 25, 1823 (After speaking of Mr. Tucker's proposed intention of going as a mis- sionary to India.) If you should go to India before we have an opportunity of meeting again, I would earnestly beg of you not to go away with the notion, which I sometimes fear that my oldest friends are getting of me, that I am become a hard man, given up to literary and scholastic pursuits, and full of worldly and political views of things. It has given me very great pain to think that some of those whom I most love, and with whom I would most fain be one in spirit, regard my views of things as jarring with their own, and are losing towards me that feeling of Christian brotherhood which I think they once entertained. I am not in the slightest degree speaking of any offence given or received, or any personal decay of regard, but I fancy they look upon me as not quite one with themselves, and as having my affections fixed upon lower objects. Assuredly I have no right to regret that I should be thought deficient in points in which I know I am deficient ; but I would most earnestly protest against being thought wilfully and contentedly defi- cient in them, and not caring to be otherwise. And I cannot help fearing 6 74 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. that my conversation with you last winter twelvemonth led you to some- thing, at least, of a similar impression. XXIX. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Laleham, April 24, 1S28. It seems an age since I have seen you or written to you ; and I hear that you are now again returned to London, and that your eldest boy, I am grieved to find, is not so well and strong as you could wish. I could really be half romantic, yet I do not know that I ought to use any such equivocal epithet. When I think how little intercourse I hold with my most valued friends, it is almost awful to feel the tendencies of life to pare down one's affections and feelings to the minimum compatible with any thing like hu- manity. There is one's trade and one's family, and beyond it seems as if the great demon of worldly-mindedness would hardly allow one to be- stow a thought or care. But, if it please God, I will not sink into this state without some struggles, at least, against it. I saw Dyson the other day in Oxford, where I went to take my degree of B.D., and he and his wife were enough to freshen one's spirit for some time to come. I wish that you and I could meet oftener, and, instead of that, I fear that when I am at Rugby we shall meet even sel- domer ; but I trust that we shall meet sometimes still. You know, perhaps, and yet how should you ? that my sixth child, and fourth son, was born on the 7th of April, and that his dear mother has been again preserved to me. All the rest of my children are quite well, and they are also tolerably well at the other houses, though the coming parting is a sad cloud both to them and to us. Still, without any affectation, I believe that John Keble is right and that it is good for us to leave Laleham, because I feel that we are daily getting to regard it as too much of a home. I cannot tell you how we both love it, and its perfect peace seems at times an appalling contrast to the publicity of Rugby. I am sure that nothing could stifle this regret, were it not for my full consciousness that I have nothing to do with rest here, but with labour ; and then I can and do look forward to the labour with nothing but satisfaction, if my health and faculties be still spared to me. I went down to Rugby, a fortnight since, to meet the trustees. The terms of the school, which were far too low, have been raised on my representa- tion ; and there is some possibility of my being put into the situation of the head masters of Eton and Westminster, that is, to have nothing to do with any boarders I have got six maps for Thucydides, all entire- ly original, and I have nearly finished half of the last book j so that I hope I may almost say " Italiam ! Italiam !" XXX. TO THE REV. P. C. BLACKSTONE. Laleham, July 11, 1828, .... It would be foolish to talk of the deep love that I bear to Laleham, and the wrench which it will be to part from it ; but this is quite consistent with a lively interest in Rugby ; and when I strolled with in the mea- dows there, during our visit of last week, I thought that I already began to feel it as my home. . . . There will be enough to do, I imagine, without any addition ; though I really feel very sanguine as to my own relish for the work, and think that it will come more naturally to me than I at first imagined. May God grant that I may labour with an entire confidence in Him, and with none in myself without Him. LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 75 XXXI. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. Laleham, July 29, 1828. I never would publish1 without a considerable revision of them. I well know their incompleteness, and suspect much worse faults in them. Do not imagine that I neglect your remarks; far from it: I would attend to them earnestly, and would soften gladly any thing that .was too harsh, or that might give offence, and would alter the mere inadvertencies of my hasty writing in point of style. But certainly the character of the style I could not alter, because no other would be natural to me ; and though I am far from wishing other people to write as I do, yet for myself I hold it best to follow my own fashion 1 owe it to Rugby not to excite needless scandal by an isolated and un- called-for publication. I shall never be Mr. Dean, nor do I wish it ; but having undertaken the office of Dr. Wooll, with double I or single /, as best suits your fancy, I do wish to do my utmost in it, and not to throw difficulties in my own way by any imprudence. This, of course, would apply either to minor points, or to those on which I distrusted my own competent know- ledge. Where I am fully decided, on a matter of consequence, I would speak out as plainly and boldly as your heart could wish. We are all in the midst of confusion ; the books all packed, and half the furniture ; and on Tuesday, if God will, we shall leave this dear place, this nine years' home of such exceeding happiness. But it boots not to look backwards. Forwards, forwards, forwards, — should be one's motto. I trust you will see us in our new dwelling ere long ; I shall want to see my old friends there, to wear off the gloss of its newness. XXXII. TO THE REV. JOHN TUCKER. Laleham, August, 1828. I am inclined to write to you once again before we leave Laleham, as a sort of farewell from this dear place ; and you shall answer it with a welcome to Rugby. You fancy us already at Rugby, and so does J. Keble, from whom I received a very kind letter some time since, directed to me there. But we do not move till Tuesday, when we go, fourteen souls, to Oxford, having taken the whole coach ; and on Wednesday we hope to reach Rugby, having, in like manner, secured the whole Leicester coach from Oxford to Rugby. Our goods and chattels, under convoy of our gardener, are at this time somewhere on the Grand Junction Canal, and will reach Rugby I hope this evening. The poor-house here is sadly desolate ; all the carpets up, half the furniture gone, and signs of removal every where visible. And so ends the first act of my life since I arrived at manhood. For the last eight years it has been a period of as unruffled happiness as I should think could ever be experienced by man. Mary's illness, in 1821, is almost its only dark spot ; — and how was that softened and comforted ! It is almost a fearful consideration ; and yet there is a superstitious notion, and an unbelieving one, too, which cannot receive God's mercies as his free gift, but will always be looking out for something wherewith to purchase them. An humbling consideration much rather it is and ought to be ; yet all life is humbling, if we think upon it, and our greatest mercies, which we sometimes least think of, are the most humbling of all. . . . The Rugby prospect I contem- plate with a very strong interest ; the work I am not afraid of, if I can get my proper exercise ; but I want absolute play, like a boy, and neither riding 1 In allusion to the first volume of his Sermons, which was now in the process of publication. 76 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. nor walking will make up for my leaping-pole and gallows, and bathing, when the youths used to go with me, and I felt completely for the time a boy, a8 they were. It is this entire relaxation, I think, at intervals, such again as my foreign tours have afforded, that gives me so keen an appetite for my work at other times, and has enabled me to go through it not only with no fatigue, but with a sense of absolute pleasure. I believe that I am going to publish a volume of Sermons. You will think me crazed perhaps ; but I have two reasons for it : chiefly, the repeated exhortations of several indi- viduals for the last three or four years ; but these would not alone have urged me to it, did I not wish to state, for my own sake, what my opinions really are, on points where I know they have been grievously misrepresented. Whilst I lived here in Laleham, my opinions mattered to nobody ; but I know that while I was a candidate for Rugby, it was said in Oxford that I did not preach the Gospel, nor even touch upon the great doctrines of Chris- tianity in my sermons ; and if this same impression be prevalent now, it will be mischievous to the school in a high degree. Now, if what I really do preach be to any man's notions not the Gospel, I cannot help it, and must be content to abide by the consequences of his opinion ; but I do not want to be misunderstood, and accused of omitting things which I do not omit. XXXIII. TO THE REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Rugby, August J6, 1828. . . . If I can do my work as I ought to do it, we shall have every reason to be thankful for the change. I must not, it is true, think of dear old Laleham, and all that we have left there, or the perfect peace of our eight years of wedded life passed there together. It is odd that both you and I should now for the first time in our lives be moving from our parents' neigh- bourhood ; but in this respect our happiness was very uncommon, and to me altogether Laleham was so like a place of premature rest, that I believe I ought to be sincerely thankful that I am called to a scene of harder and more anxious labour The boys comeback next Saturday week. So here begins the second act of our lives. May God bless it to us, and make it help forward the great end of all. CHAPTER III. SCHOOL LIFE AT RUGBY* It would be useless to give any chronological details of a life so necessarily monotonous as that of the Head-master of a public school ; and it is accordingly only intended to describe the general system which Dr. Arnold pursued during the fourteen years he was at Rugby. Yet some apology may seem to be due for the length of a chapter, which to the general reader must be comparatively deficient in interest. Something must, indeed, be forgiven to the natural inclination to dwell on those recollections of his life, which to his pupils are the most lively and the most recent — something to the almost unconscious tendency to magnify those scenes which are most nearly connected with what is most endeared to one's self. But independently of any local or personal considerations, it has been felt that if any part of Dr. Arnold's work deserved special mention, it was his work at Rugby ; and that if it was to be of any use to those of his own profession who would take any interest in it, it could only be made so by a full and minute account. Those who look back upon the state of English education in the year 1827, must remember how the feeling of dissatisfaction with existing institutions which had begun in many quarters to display itself had already directed considerable attention to the condition of public schools. The range of classical reading, in itself confined, and with no admixture of other information, had been subject to vehement attacks from the liberal party generally, on the ground of its alleged narrowness and inutility. And the more un- doubted evil of the absence of systematic attempts to give a more directly Christian character to what constituted the education of the whole English gentry, was becoming more and more a scandal in the eyes of religious men, who at the close of the last century and the beginning of this — -Wilberforce for example, and Bowdler — had lifted up their voices against it. A complete reformation, or a com- plete destruction of the whole system, seemed, to many persons, sooner or later to be inevitable. The difficulty, however, of making the first step, where the alleged objection to alteration was its im- 78 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. practicability, was not to be easily surmounted. The mere resist- ance to change which clings to old institutions, was in itself a considerable obstacle, and in the case of some of the public schools, from the nature of their constitution, in the first instance almost in- superable ; and whether amongst those who were engaged in the existing system, or those who were most vehemently opposed to it, for opposite, but obvious reasons, it must have been extremely difficult to find a man who would attempt, or if he attempted, carry through, any extensive improvement. It was at this juncture that Dr. Arnold was elected head -master of a school which, whilst it presented a fair average specimen of the public schools at that time, yet by its constitution imposed fewer shackles on its head, and offered a more open field for alteration than was the case at least with Eton or Winchester. The post itself, in spite of the publicity, and to a certain degree formality, which it entailed upon him, was in many respects remarkably suited to his natural tastes ; — to his love of tuition, which had now grown so strongly upon him, that he declared sometimes, that he could hardly live without such employment ; to the vigour and spirits which fitted him rather to deal with the young than the old ; to the desire of carrying out his favourite ideas of uniting things secular with things spiritual, and of introducing the highest principles of action into regions comparatively uncongenial to their reception. Even his general interest in public matters was not without its use in his new station. Many, indeed, both of his admirers and of his opponents, used to lament that a man with such views and pursuits should be placed in such a situation. " What a pity," it was said on the one hand, " that a man fit to be a statesman should be employed in teaching school-boys." " What a shame," it was said on the other hand, " that the head-master of Rugby should be employed in writing essays and pamphlets." But, even had there been no connexion between the two spheres of his interest, and had the inconvenience resulting from his public prominence been far greater than it was, it would have been the necessary price of hav- ing him at all in that place. He would not have been himself, had he not felt and written as he did ; and he could not have endured to live under the grievance of remaining silent on subjects, on which he believed it to be his most sacred duty to speak what he thought. As it was, however, the one sphere played into the other. Whatever labour he bestowed on his literary works was only part of that constant progress of self-education which he thought essen- tial to the right discharge of his duties as a teacher. Whatever interest he felt in the struggles of the political and ecclesiastical world, reacted on his interest in the school, and invested it in his eyes with a new importance. When he thought of the social evils of the country, it awakened a corresponding desire to check the thoughtless waste and selfishness of school-boys ; a corresponding LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 79 sense of the aggravation of those evils by the insolence and want of sympathy too frequently shown by the children of the wealthier classes towards the lower orders ; a corresponding desire that they should there imbibe the first principles of reverence to law and regard for the poor, which the spirit of the age seemed to him so little to encourage. When he thought of the evils of the Church, he would " turn from the thought of the general temple in ruins, and see whether they could not, within the walls of their own little particular congregation," endeavour to realize what he believed to be its true idea ; " what use they could make of the vestiges of it still left amongst themselves — common reading of the Scriptures, common prayer, and the communion." (Serm. vol. iv. pp. 266, 316.) Thus, " whatever of striking good or evil happened in any part of the wide range of English dominion," — "declared on what important scenes some of his own scholars might be called upon to enter," " whatever new and important things took place in the world of thought." suggested the hope " that they, when they went forth amidst the strifes of tongues and of minds, might be endowed with the spirit of wisdom and power." (Serm. vol. v. p. 405.) And even in the details of the school, it would be curious to trace how he recognized in the peculiar vices of boys the same evils which, when full grown, became the source of so much social mis- chief; how he governed the school precisely on the same principles as he would have governed a great empire ; how constantly, to his own mind or to his scholars, he exemplified the highest truths of theology and philosophy in the simplest relations of the boys towards each other, or towards him. In entering upon his office he met with difficulties, many of which have since passed away, but which must be borne in mind, if points are here dwelt upon, that have now ceased to be important, but were by no means insignificant or obvious when he came to Rugby. Nor did his system at once attain its full maturity. He was a long time feeling his way amongst the various institutions which he formed or invented: — he was constantly striving after an ideal standard of perfection which he was conscious that he had never attained ; to the improvements which, in a short time, began to take place in other schools — to those at Harrow, under his friend Dr. Longley, and to those at Winchester, under Dr. Moberly, to which he alluded in one of his later sermons, (vol. v. p. 150,) he often looked as models for himself; — to suggestions from persons very much younger than himself, not un frequently from his former pupils, with regard to the course of reading, or to alterations in his manner of preaching, or to points of discipline, he would often listen with the greatest deference. His own mind was constantly devising new measures for carrying out his several views. " The school," he said on first coming, " is quite enough to employ any man's love of reform ; and it is much pleasanter to think of evils, which you may yourself hope to relieve, than "those with regard to 80 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. which you can give nothing but vain wishes and opinions." " There is enough of Toryism in my nature," he said, on evils being mentioned to him in the place, " to make me very apt to sleep con- tentedly over things as they are, and therefore I hold it to be most true kindness when any one directs my attention to points in the school which are alleged to be going on ill." The perpetual succession of changes which resulted from this, was by many objected to as excessive, and calculated to endanger the stability of his whole system. " He wakes every morning," it was said of him, " with the impression that every thing is an open question." But rapid as might be the alterations to which the de- tails of his system were subjected, his general principles remained fixed. The unwillingness which he had, even in common life, to act in any individual case without some general law to which he might refer it, ran through every thing ; and at times it would almost seem as if he invented universal rules with the express ob- ject of meeting particular cases. Still, if in smaller matters this gave an occasional impression of fancifulness or inconsistency, it was, in greater matters, one chief cause of the confidence which he inspired. Amidst all the plans that came before him, he felt, and he made others feel, that whatever might be the merits of the par- ticular question at issue, there were principles behind which lay far mor ' deeply seated than any mere question of school government, which he was ready to carry through at whatever cost, and from which no argument or menace could move him. Of the mere external administration of the school, little need here be said. Many difficulties which he encountered were alike provoked and subdued by the peculiarities of his own character. The vehemence with which he threw himself into a contest against evil, and the confidence with which he assailed it, though it carried him through perplexities to which a more cautious man would have yielded, led him to disregard interests and opinions which a less earnest or a less sanguine reformer would have treated with greater consideration. His consciousness of his own integrity, and his contempt for worldly advantage, sometimes led him to require from others more than might be reasonably expected from them, and to adopt measures which the world at large was sure to misinterpret ; yet these very qualities, in proportion as they became more appre- ciated, ultimately secured for him a confidence beyond what could have been gained by the most deliberate circumspection. But whatever were the temporary exasperations and excitements thus produced in his dealings with others, they were gradually removed by the increasing control over himself and his work which he ac- quired in later years. The readiness which he showed to acknow- ledge a fault when once convinced of it, as well as to persevere in kindness even when he thought himself injured, succeeded in heal- ing breaches which, wish a less forgiving or less honest temper, would have been irreparable. His union of firmness with tender- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 81 ness had the same effect in the settlement of some of the perplexi- ties of his office, which in others would have resulted from art and management ; and even his work as a schoolmaster cannot be properly appreciated without remembering how, in the end of his career, he rallied round him the public feeling, which in its begin- ning and middle, as will appear further on, had been so widely- estranged from him. With regard to the trustees of the school, entirely amicable as were his usual relations with them, and grateful as he felt to them for their active support and personal friendliness, he from the first maintained that in the actual working of the school he must be completely independent, and that their remedy, if they were dissat- isfied, was not interference, but dismissal. On this condition he took the post, and any attempt to control either his administration of the school, or his own private occupations, he felt bound to resist " as a duty," he said on one occasion, " not only to himself, but to the master of every foundation school in England." Of his intercourse with the assistant masters it is for obvious reasons impossible to speak in any detail. Yet it would be injus- tice alike to them and to him not to bear in mind how earnestly he dwelt on their co-operation as an essential part of his own govern- ment of the school. It was one of his main objects to increase in all possible ways their importance. By raising their salaries he obviated the necessity of their taking any parochial duty which should divert their attention from the school, and procured from the Bishop of the diocese the acknowledgment of their situations as titles for orders. A system of weekly councils was established, in which all school matters were discussed, and he seldom or never acted in any important point of school discipline without consult- ing them. It was his endeavour, partly by placing the boarding- houses under their care, partly by an elaborate system of private tuition, which was introduced with this express purpose, to encour- age a pastoral and friendly relation between them and the several classes of boys intrusted to them. What he was in his department, in short, he wished every one of them to be in theirs, and nothing rejoiced him more than to hear of instances in which he thought that boys were sent to the school for the sake of his colleagues' instructions rather than of his own. It was his labour to inspire them with the views of education and of life, by which he was possessed himself ; and the bond, thus gradually formed, especially when in his later time several of those who had been his pupils became his colleagues, grew deeper and stronger with each succes- sive year that they passed in the place. Out of his own family, there was no circle of which he was so completely the animating principle, as amongst those who co-operated with him in the great practical work of his life ; none in which his loss was so keenly felt to be irreparable, or his example so instinctively regarded in the light of a living spring of action, and a source of solemn re- sponsibility, as amongst those who were^ called to continue their 82 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. labours in the sphere and on the scene which had been enno- bled to them by his counsels and his presence.1 But whatever interest attaches to the more external circumstan- ces of his administration, and to his relations with others, who were concerned in it, is of course centered in his own personal gov- ernment of the boys. The natural effect of his concentration of interest on what he used to call " our great self," the school, was that the separate existence of the school was in return almost merged in him. This was not indeed his own intention, but it was precisely because he thought so much of the institution and so lit- tle of himself, that in spite of his efforts to make it work independ- ently of any personal influence of his own, it became so thoroughly dependent upon him, and so thoroughly penetrated with his spirit. From one end of it to the other, whatever defects it had were his defects ; whatever excellences it had were his excellences. It was not the master who was beloved or disliked for the sake of the school, but the school which was beloved or disliked for the sake of the master. Whatever peculiarity of character was impressed on the scholars whom it sent forth, was derived not from the genius of the place, but from the genius of the man. Throughout, whether in the school itself, or in its after effects, the one image that we have before us is not Rugby, but Arnold. 1 His views will perhaps be best explained by the two following letters : LETTER OF INQUIRY FOR A MASTER. What I want is a man who is a Christian and a gentleman, an active man, and one who has common sense, and understands boys. I do not so much care about scholarship, as he will have immediately under him the lowest forms in the school ; but yet, on second thoughts, I do care about it very much, because his pupils may be in the highest forms ; and besides, I think that even the elements are best taught by a man who has a thorough knowledge of the matter. However, if one must give way, I prefer activity of mind and an interest in his work to high scholarship : for the one may be acquired far more easily than the other. I should wish it also to be understood that the new master may be called upon to take boarders in his house, it being my intention for the future to require this of all masters as I see occasion, that so in time the boarding- houses may die a natural death With this to offer, I think I have a right to look rather high for the man whom I fix upon, and it is my great object to get here a society of intelligent, gentlemanly, and active men, who may permanently keep up the character of the school, and make it " vile damnum," if I were to break my neck to- morrow. LETTER TO A MASTER ON HIS APPOINTMENT. The qualifications which I deem essential to the due performance ot a master's duties here, may in brief be expressed as the spirit of a Christian and a gentleman, — that a man should enter his business not U napipyov, but as a substantive and most important duty ; that he should devote himself to it as the especial branch of the ministerial calling which he has chosen to follow — that belonging to a great public institution, and standing in a public and conspicuous situation, he should study things " lovely and of good report," that is, that he should be public spirited, liberal, and entering heartily into the interest, honour, and general respectability and distinc- tion of the society which he has joined ; and that he should have sufficient vigour of mind and thirst for knowledge to persist in adding to his own stores without neglect- ing the full improvement of those whom he is teaching. I think our masterships here offer a noble field of duty, and I would not bestow them on any one whom I thought would undertake them without entering into the spirit of our system heart and hand. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 83 What was his great object has already appeared from his let- ters ; namely, the hope of making the school a place of really Christian education ; words which in his mouth meant something very different from the general professions which every good teach- er must be supposed to make, and which no teacher even in the worst times of English education could have openly ventured to disclaim ; but which it is exceedingly difficult so to explain, as that they shall not seem to exceed or fall short of the truth. It was not an attempt merely to give more theological instruc- tion, or to introduce sacred words into school admonitions ; there may have been some occasions for religious advice that might have been turned to more advantage, some religious practices which might have been more constantly or effectually encouraged. His design arose out of the very nature of his office : the relation of an instructor to his pupils was to him, like all the other relations of human life, only in a healthy state, when subordinate to their com- mon relation to God. " The business of a schoolmaster," he used to say, " no less than that of a parish minister, is the cure of souls." The idea of a Christian school, again, was to him the na- tural result, so to speak, of the very idea of a school in itself ; ex actly as the idea of a Christian State seemed to him to be involv- ed in the very idea of a state itself. The intellectual training was not for a moment underrated, and the machinery of the school was left to have its own way. But he looked upon the whole as bear- ing on the advancement of the one end of all instruction and edu- cation ; the boys were still treated as schoolboys, but as school- boys who must grow up to be Christian men ; whose age did not prevent their faults from being sins, or their excellences from being noble and Christian virtues ; whose situation did not of itself make the application of Christian principles to their daily lives an impracticable vision. His education, in short, it was once observed amidst the vehe- ment outcry by which he. used to be assailed, was not (according to the popular phrase) based upon religion, but was itself religious. It was this chiefly which gave a oneness to his work amidst a great variety of means and occupations, and a steadiness to the general system amidst its almost unceasing change. It was this which makes it difficult to separate one part of his work from another, and which often made it impossible for his pupils to say, in after life, of much that had influenced them, whether they had derived it from what was spoken in school, in the pulpit, or in pri- vate. And, therefore, when either in direct religious teaching, or on particular occasions, Christian principles were expressly intro- duced by him, they had not the appearance of a rhetorical flourish, or of a temporary appeal to the feelings; they were looked upon as the natural expression of what was constantly implied : it was felt that he had the power, in which so many teachers have been deficient, of saying what he did mean, and of hot saying what he did not mean, — the power of doing what was right, and speaking 84 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. what was true, and thinking what was good, independently of any- professional or conventional notions that so to act, speak, or think, was becoming or expedient. It was not merely an abstract school, but an English public school, which he looked upon as the sphere in which this was to be effected. There was something to him, at the very outset, full of interest in a great place of national education, such as he con- sidered a public school to be. " There is," he said, " or there ought to be, something very ennobling in being connected with an establishment at once ancient and magnificent, where all about us, and all the associations belonging the objects around us, should be great, splendid, and elevating. What an individual ought and often does derive from the feeling that he is born of an old and illustrious race, from being familiar from his childhood with the walls and trees which speak of the past no less than of the present, and make both full of images of greatness ; this, in an inferior degree, belongs to every member of an an- cient and celebrated place of education. In this respect every one of us has a responsibility imposed upon him, which I wish that we more considered. (Serm. vol. hi. p. 210.) ' This feeling of itself dictated the preservation of the old school constitution as far as it was possible, and he was very careful not to break through any customs which connected the institution, however slightly, with the past. But in this constitution there were peculiarities of far greater importance in his eyes for good or evil, than any mere imaginative associations ; the peculiarities which distinguish the English public school system from almost every other system of education in Europe, and which are all found- ed on the fact that a large number of boys are left for a large por- tion of their time to form an independent society of their own, in which the influence, that they exercise over each other, is far great- er than can possibly be exercised by the masters, even if multi- plied beyond their present number. How keenly he felt the evils resulting from this system, and the difficulty of communicating to it a really Christian character, will 1 It was one of his most cherished wishes at Rugby, to be enabled to leave to the school some permanent rank or dignity, which should in some measure compensate for its total barrenness of all historical associations, which he always felt painfully in con- trast with his own early school, Winchester. Thus, anTongst other schemes, he exerted himself to procure a medal or some similar favour from the Crown. " I can truly say," he wrote in 1840, " that nothing which could have been given me in the way of prefer- ment would have been so gratifying to me as to have been the means in any degree of obtaining what I think would be not more an honour than a real and lasting benefit to the school." The general grounds on which he thought this desirable, may best be stated in his own words: " I think that it would be well on public grounds to confer what may be considered as analogous to a peerage conferred on some of the wealthiest commoners, or to a silk gown bestowed on distinguished lawyers ; that is, that when schools had risen from a very humble origin to a considerable place in the country, and had continued so for some time, some royal gift, however small, should be bestowed upon them, merely as a sort of recognition or confirmation, on the part of the Crown, of the courtesy rank which they had acquired already. I have always believed that one of the simplest and most effectual means of improving the foundation schools throughout the country, would be to hold out the hope of some mark of encouragement from the Crown, as they might happen to deserve it." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 85 be evident to any one who knows the twelfth Sermon in his se- cond volume, in which he unfolded, at the beginning of his ca- reer, the causes which had led good men to declare that " public schools are the seats and nurseries of vice ;" or the three Sermons on " Christian Schools" in his fifth volume, in which, with the added experience of ten years, he analyzed the six evils by which he " supposed that great schools were likely to be corrupted, and to be changed from the likeness of God's temple to that of a den of thieves." (Vol. v. p. 74.) Sometimes he would be led to doubt whether it were really compatible with the highest principles of education ; sometimes he would seem to have an earnest and almost impatient desire to free himself from it. Still, on the whole, it was always on a re- formation, not on an overthrow, of the existing constitution of the school that he endeavoured to act. " Another system," he said, "may be better in itself, but I am placed in this system, and am bound to try what I can make of it." With his usual undoubting confidence in what he believed to be a general law of Providence, he based his whole management of the school on his early formed and yearly increasing conviction that what he had to look for, both intellectually and morally, was not performance but promise ; that the very freedom and independ- ence of school life, which in itself he thought so dangerous, might be made the best preparation for Christian manhood ; and he did not hesitate to apply to his scholars the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself.1 He shrunk from pressing on the conscience of boys rules of action which he felt they were not yet able to bear, and from enforcing actions which, though right in themselves, would in boys be performed from wrong motives. Keenly as he felt the risk and fatal consequences of the failure of this trial, still it was his great, sometimes his only support, to be- lieve that " the character is braced amid such scenes to a greater beauty and firmness, than it ever can attain without enduring and witnessing them. Our work here would be absolutely unendurable if we did not bear in mind that we should look forward as well as backward — if we did not remember that the victory of fallen man lies not in innocence but in tried virtue." (Serm. vol. iv. p. 7.) " I hold fast," he said, " to the great truth, that ' blessed is he that over- cometh ;' " and he writes in 1837 — " Of all the painful things connected with my employment, nothing is equal to the grief of seeing a boy come to school innocent and promising, and tracing the corruption of his character from the influence of the tempta- tions around him, in the very place which ought to have strength- ened and improved it. But in most cases those who come with a character of positive good are benefited ; it is the neutral and 1 Sermons, vol. ii. p. 440. 86 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. indecisive characters which are apt to be decided for evil by schools, as they would be in fact by any other temptation." But this very feeling led him with the greater eagerness to catch at every means, by which the trial might be shortened or alleviated. " Can the change from childhood to manhood be hastened, without prematurely exhausting the faculties of body or mind?" (Serm. vol. iv. p. 19,) was one of the chief questions on which his mind was constantly at work, and which in the judg- ment of some he was disposed to answer too readily in the affirma- tive. It was with the elder boys, of course, that he chiefly acted on this principle, but with all above the very young ones he trusted to it more or less. Firmly as he believed that a time of trial was inevitable, he believed no less firmly that it might be passed at public schools sooner than under other circumstances ; and, in proportion as he disliked the assumption of a false manli- ness, in boys, was his desire to cultivate in them true manliness, as the only step to something higher, and to dwell on earnest princi- ple and moral thoughtfulness, as the great and distinguishing mark between good and evil.1 Hence his wish that as much as possible should be done by the boys, and nothing/or them ; hence arose his practice, in which his own delicacy of feeling and up- rightness of purpose powerfully assisted him, of treating the boys as gentlemen and reasonable beings, of making them respect them- selves by the mere respect he showed to them ; of showing that he appealed and trusted to their own common sense and con- science. Lying, for example, to the masters, he made a great moral offence ; placing implicit confidence in a boy's assertion, and then, if a falsehood was discovered, punishing it severely, — in the upper part of the school, when persisted in, with expulsion. Even with the lower forms he never seemed to be on the watch for boys ; and in the higher forms any attempt at further proof of an assertion was immediately checked : — "If you say so, that is quite enough — of course I believe your word ;" and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that " it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie — he always believes one." Perhaps the liveliest representation of this general spirit, as distinguished from its exemplification in particular parts of the discipline and instruction, would be formed by recalling his man- ner, as he appeared in the great school, where the boys used to meet when the whole school was assembled collectively, and not in its different forms or classes. Then, whether on his usual en- trance every morning to prayers before the first lesson, or. on the more special emergencies which might require his presence, he seemed to stand before them, not merely as the head-master, but as the representative of the school. There he spoke to them as members together with himself of the same great institution, whose character and reputation they had to sustain as well as he. He 1 See Sermons, vol. iv. p. 99. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. q-j would dwell on the satisfaction he had in being head of a society, where noble and honourable feelings were encouraged, or on the disgrace which he felt in hearing of acts of disorder or violence, such as in the humbler ranks of life would render them amenable to the laws of their country ; or again, on the trust which he placed in their honour as gentlemen, and the baseness of any in- stance in which it was abused. " Is this a Christian school ? " he indignantly asked at the end of one of those addresses, in which he had spoken of an extensive display of bad feeling amongst the boys, and then added, — " I cannot remain here if all is to be carried on by constraint and force ; if I am to be here as a gaoler, I will resign my office at once." And few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than on one of these occasions, when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when, in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school, and said, " It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys ; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen." The means of carrying out these principles were of course various ; they may, however, for the sake of convenience, be viewed under the divisions of the general discipline of the school, the system of instruction, the chapel services, and his own personal intercourse and influence. I. In considering his general management of the discipline of the school, it will only be possible to touch on its leading features. 1. He at once made a great alteration in the whole system of punishments in the higher part of the school, " keeping it as much as possible in the back-ground, and by kindness and encourage- ment attracting the good and noble feelings of those with whom he had to deal." ' As this appears more distinctly elsewhere, it is needless to enlarge upon it here ; but a few words may be ne- cessary to explain the view with which, for the younger part of the school, he made a point of maintaining, to a certain extent, the old discipline of public schools. " The beau ideal of school discipline with regard to young boys would seem to be this, that, whilst corporal punishment was retained on principle, as fitly answering to and marking the naturally inferior state of boyhood, and therefore as conveying no peculiar degradation to persons in such a state, we should cherish and encourage to the utmost all attempts made by the several boys, as individuals, to escape from the natural punishment of their age, by rising above its naturally low tone of principle." Flogging, therefore, for the younger part, he retained, but it was confined to moral offences, such as lying, drinking, and habitual idleness, while his aversion to inflicting it rendered it still less fre- quent in practice than it would have been according to the rule he had laid down for it. But in answer to the argument used in a 1 Sermons, vol. iv. p. 106. The whole sermon is a full exposition of his view. 88 LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. liberal journal, that it was even for these offences and for this age degrading, he replied with characteristic emphasis — " I know well of what feeling this is the expression ; it originates in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian — but essentially barbarian. It visited Europe with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of Jacobinism. At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encourag- ing a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction ? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornament of youth, and the best promise of a noble manhood ?"2 2. But his object was pf course far higher than to check par- ticular vices. " What I want to see in the school," he said, " and what I cannot find, is an abhorrence of evil : I always think of the Psalm, l Neither doth he abhor any thing that is evil.' " Amongst all the causes which in his judgment contributed to the absence of this feeling, and to the moral childishness, which he considered the great curse of public schools, the chief seemed to him to lie in the spirit which was there encouraged of combination, of companionship, of excessive deference to the public opinion prevalent in the school. Peculiarly repugnant as this spirit was at once to his own reverence for lawful authority, and to his dis- like of servile submission to unlawful authority ; fatal as he deemed it to all approach to sympathy between himself and his scholars — to all free and manly feeling in individual boys — to all real and permanent improvement of the institution itself— it gave him more pain when brought prominently before him, than any other evil in the school. At the very sight of a knot of vicious or careless boys gathered together around the great school-house fire, " It makes me think," he would say, " that I see the Devil in the midst of them." From first to last, it was the great subject to which all his anxiety converged. No half year ever passed with- out his preaching upon it — he turned it over and over in every possible point of view — he dwelt on it as the one master-fault of all. " If the spirit of Elijah were to stand in the midst of us, and we were to ask him, ' What shall we do then ? ' his answer would be, ' Fear not, nor heed one another's voices, but fear and heed the voice of God only.' " (MS. Serm. on Luke, iii. 10. 1833.) Against this evil he felt that no efforts of good individual exam- ple, or of personal sympathy with individual masters, could act effectually, unless there were something to counteract it constantly amongst the boys themselves. " He, therefore, who wishes" (to use his own words) "really to improve public education would do well to direct his attention to this point, and to consider how there can be infused into a society of boys such elements as, without being too dissimilar to coalesce thoroughly with the rest, shall vet be so superior as to raise the character of the whole. It would be absurd to 1 Journ. Educ. vol. ix. pp. 281, 284. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. gg say that any school has as yet fully solved this problem. I am convinced, however, that in the peculiar relation of the highest form to the rest of the boys, such as it exists in our great public schools, there is to be found the best means of answering it. This relation requires in many respects to be improved in its character, some of its features should be softened, others ele- vated ; but here, and here only, is the engine which can effect the end de- sired." (Journ. Ed. p. 292.) In other words, he determined to use, and to improve to the utmost, the existing machinery of the Sixth Form, and of fagging ; understanding by the Sixth Form the thirty boys who composed the highest class — " those who having risen to the highest form in the school, will probably be at once the oldest and the strongest, and the cleverest ; and if the school be well ordered, the most respectable in application and general character :" and by fagging, " the power given by the supreme authorities of the school to the Sixth Form, to be exercised by them over the lower boys, for the sake of securing a regular government amongst the boys them- selves, and avoiding the evils of anarchy, in other words, of the lawless tyranny of physical strength." (Jour. Ed. p. 286, 287.)' In many points he took the institution as he found it, and as he remembered it at Winchester. The responsibility of checking bad practices without the intervention of the masters, the occasional settlement of difficult cases of school government, the subjection of brute force to some kind of order, involved in the maintenance of such an authority, had been more or less produced under the old system both at Rugby and elsewhere. But his zeal in its defence, and his confident reliance upon it as the keystone of his whole government, were eminently characteristic of himself. It was a point moreover on which the spirit of the age set strongly and increasingly against him, on which there was a general tendency to yield to the popular outcry, and on which the clamour, that at one time assailed him, was ready to fasten as a subject where all parties could concur in their condemnation.- But he was immove- able ; and, though on his first coming he had felt himself called upon rather to restrain the authority of the Sixth Form from abuses, than to guard it from encroachments, yet now that the whole system was denounced as cruel and absurd, he delighted to stand forth as its champion. The power, which was most strongly condemned, of personal chastisement vested in the Praepostors over those who resisted their authority, he firmly maintained as essential to the general support of the good order of the place ; and there was no obloquy which he would not undergo in the protection of a boy, who had by due exercise of this discipline made himself obnoxious to the school, the parents, or the public. But the importance, which he attached to it, arose from his ' It has not been thought necessary here to enter at length into his defence of the general system of fagging, especially as it may be seen by those who are interested ir> the subject in the article in the ninth volume of the Quarterly Journal of Education, from which the above extracts have been taken, and to which an answer was made by the Editor in the ensuing number. 7 go LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. regarding it not only as an efficient engine of discipline, but as the chief means of creating a respect for moral and intellectual excel- lence, and of diffusing his own influence through the mass of the school. Whilst he made the Praepostors rely upon his support in all just use of their authority, as well as on his severe judgment of all abuse of it, he endeavoured also to make them feel that they were actually fellow-workers with him for the highest good of the school, upon the highest principles and motives — that they had, with him, a moral responsibility and a deep interest in the real welfare of the place. Occasionally during his whole stay, and regularly at the beginning or end of every half-year during his later years, he used to make short addresses to them on their duties, or on the general state of the school, one of which, as an illustration of his general mode of speaking and acting with them, it has been thought worth while to give, as nearly as his pupils could remember it, in the very words he used. After making a few remarks to them on their work in the lessons: "I will now," he proceeded, " say a few words to you, as I promised. Speaking to you, as to young men who can enter into what I say, I wish you to feel that you have another duty to perform, holding the situation that you do in the school ; of the importance of this I wish you all to feel sensible, and of the enormous influence you possess, in ways in which we cannot, for good or for evil, on all below you ; and I wish you to see fully how many and great are the opportunities offered to you here of doing good — good, too, of lasting benefit to yourselves as well as to others ; there is no place, where you will find better opportunities for some time to come, and you will then have reason to look back to your life here with the greatest pleasure. You will soon find, when you change your life here for that at the Universities, how very few in comparison they are there, however willing you may then be, — at any rate during the first part of your life there. That there is good, working in the school, I most fully believe, and we cannot feel too thankful for it ; in many individual instances, in different parts of the school, I have seen the change from evil to good — to mention instances would of course be wrong. The state of the school is a subject of congratulation to us all, but only so far as to encourage us to in- creased exertions ; and I am sure we ought all to feel it a subject of most sincere thankfulness to God ; but we must not stop here ; we must exert ourselves with earnest prayer to God for its continu- ance. And what I have often said before, I repeat now : what we must look for here is, 1st, religious and moral principles ; 2ndly, gentlemanly conduct ; 3rdly, intellectual ability." Nothing, accordingly, so shook his hopes of doing good, as weakness or misconduct in the Sixth. " You should feel," he said, " like officers in the army or navy, whose want of moral courage would, indeed, be thought cowardice." " When I have confidence in the Sixth," was the end of one of his farewell addresses, "there is no post in England which I would exchange for this ; but if they do not support me, I must go." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 9^ It may well be imagined how important this was as an instru- ment of education, independently of the weight of his own personal qualities. Exactly at the age when boys begin to acquire some degree of self-respect, and some desire for the respect of others, they were treated with confidence by one, whose confidence they could not but regard as worth having ; and found themselves in a station, where their own dignity could not be maintained, except by con- sistent good conduct. And exactly at a time when manly aspira- tions begin to expand, they found themselves invested with func- tions of government, great beyond their age, yet naturally growing out of their position ; whilst the ground of solemn responsibility, on which they were constantly taught that their authority rested, had a general, though of course not universal, tendency to counter- act any notions of mere personal self-importance. " I cannot deny that you have an anxious duty — a duty which some might suppose was too heavy for your years. But it seems to me, the no- bler as well as the truer way of stating the case to say, that it is the great privilege of this and other such institutions, to anticipate the common time of manhood ; that by their whole training they fit the character for manly duties at an age when, under another system, such duties would be imprac- ticable ; that there is not imposed upon you too heavy a burden ; but that you are capable of bearing, without injury, what to others might be a bur- den, and therefore to diminish your duties and lessen your responsibility would be no kindness, but a degradation — an affront to you and to the school." (Serm. vol. v. p. 59.) 3. Whilst he looked to the Sixth Form, as the o:dinary correct- ive for the ordinary evils of a public school, he still felt that these evils from time to time developed themselves in a shape which de- manded peculiar methods to meet them, and which may best be explained by one of his letters. " My own school experience has taught me the monstrous evil of a state of low principle^prevailing amongst those who set,the tone to the rest. I can neither theoretically nor practically defend our public school system, where the boys are left so very much alone to form a distinct society of their own, unless you assume that the upper class shall be capable of being in a man- ner utaiTcu between the masters and the mass of the boys, that is, shall be ca- pable of receiving and transmitting to the rest, through their example and influence, right principles of conduct, instead of those extremely low ones which are natural to a society of boys left wholly to form their own standard of right and wrong. Now, when I get any in this part of the school who are not to be influenced — who have neither the will nor the power to influ- ence others — not from being intentionally bad, but from very low wit, and extreme childishness or coarseness of character — the evil is so great, not only negatively but positively, (for their low and false views are greedily caught up by those below them,) that I know not how to proceed, or how to hinder the school from becoming a place of education for evil rather than for good, except by getting rid of such persons. And then comes the difficulty, that the parents who see their sons only at home — that is just, where the points of character, which are so injurious here, are not calJed into action — can scarcely be brought to understand why they should remove them ; and having, as most people, have, only the most vague ideas as to the real nature of a public school, they cannot understand what harm they are receiving or doing to others, if they do not get into some palpable scrape, 92 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. which very likely they never would do. More puzzling still is it, when you have many boys of this description, so that the evil influence is really very great, and yet there is not one of the. set whom you would set down as a really bad fellow, if taken alone ; but most of them would really do very well if they were not together and in a situation where, unluckily, their age and size leads them, unavoidably, to form the laws and guide the opin- ion of their society : whereas, they are wholly unfit to lead others, and are so slow at receiving good influences themselves, that they want to be almost exclusively with older persons, instead of being principally with younger ones." The evil undoubtedly was great, and the difficulty, which he describes in the way of its removal, tended to aggravate the evil. When first he entered on his post at Rugby, there was a general feeling in the country, that so long as a boy kept himself from of- fences sufficiently enormous to justify expulsion, he had a kind of right to remain in a public school ; that the worse and more trouble- some to parents were their sons, the more did a public school seem the precise remedy for them ; that the great end of a public school, in short, was to flog the vices out of bad boys. Hence much in- dignation was excited when boys were sent away for lesser offences : an unfailing supply of vicious sons was secured, and scrupulous parents were naturally reluctant to expose their boys to the influ- ence of such associates. His own determination had been fixed long before he came to Rugby, and it was only after ascertaining that his power in this respect would be absolute, that he consented to become a candidate for the post.1 The retention of boys who were clearly incapable of deriving good from the system, or whose influence on others was decidedly and extensively pernicious, seemed to him not a ne- cessary part of the trials of school, but an inexcusable and intol- erable aggravation of them. " Till a man learns that the first, second, and third duty of a schoolmaster is to get rid of unpromis- ing subjects, a great public school," he said, " will never be what it might be, and what it ought to be." The remonstrances which he encountered, both on public and private grounds, were vehement and numerous. But on these terms alone had he taken his office : and he solemnly and repeatedly declared, that on no other terms could he hold it, or justify the existence of the public school system in a Christian country. The cases which fell under this rule included all shades of character from the hopelessly bad. up to the really good, who yet from their peculiar circumstances might be receiving great injury from the system of a public school ; grave moral offences frequently repeated ; boys banded together in sets to the great harm of indi- viduals or of the school at large ; overgrown boys, whose age and size gave them influence over others, and made them unfit subjects for corporal punishment, whilst the low place which, either from idleness or dulness, they held in the school, encouraged all the 1 See Letter to Dr. Hawkins, in 1827. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 93 childish and low habits to which they were naturally tempted.1 He would retain boys after offences which, considered in themselves would seem to many almost deserving of expulsion ; he would re- quest the removal of others for offences which to many would seem venial. In short, he was decided by the ultimate result on the whole character of the individual, or on the general state of the school. It was on every account essential to the carrying out of his principle, that he should mark in every way the broad distinction between this kind of removal, and what in the strict sense of the word used to be called expulsion. The latter was intended by him as a punishment and lasting disgrace, was inflicted publicly and with extreme solemnity, was of very rare occurrence, and only for gross and overt offences. But he took pains to show that removal, such as is here spoken of, whether temporary or final, was not disgraceful or penal, but intended chiefly, if not solely, for a pro- tection of the boy himself or his schoolfellows. Often it would be wholly unknown who were thus dismissed or why ; latterly he gen- erally allowed such cases to remain till the end of the half-year, that their removal might pass altogether unnoticed ; the subjoined let- ters also to the head of a college and a private tutor, introducing such boys to their attention, are samples of the spirit in which he acted on these occasions.2 ' The admission of very young boys, e. g. under the age of ten, he earnestly depre- cated, as considering them incapable of profiting by the discipline of the place. * 1. To the Head of a college. — " With regard to , if you had asked me about him half a year ago, I should have spoken of him in the highest terms in point of conduct and steady attention to his work ; there has been nothing in all that has passed beyond a great deal of party and schoolboy feeling, wrong, as I think, and exceedingly mischiev- ous to a school, but from its peculiar character not likely to recur at college or in after life, and not reflecting permanently on a boy's principles or disposition. I think you will have in a steady and gentlemanly man, who will read fairly and give no disturb- ance, and one who would well repay any interest taken in him by his tutor to direct him either in his work or conduct. He was one of those wh6 would do a great deal better at college than at school ; and of this sort there are many ; as long as they are among boys, and with no closer personal intercourse with older persons than a public school affords, they are often wrong-headed and troublesome ; but older society and the habits of more advanced life set them to rights again." 2. . . . " Their conduct till they wentaway was as good as possible, and 1 feel bound to speak strongly in their favour with regard to their prospects at college ; for there was more of foolishness than of vice in the whole matter, and it was their peculiar situa- tion in the school, and the peculiar danger of their fault among us, that made us wish them to be removed. was very much improved in his work, and did some of his business very well: since he has left us he has been with a private tutor, and I shall be disappointed if he has not behaved there so as to obtain from him a very favourable cha- racter." 3 " was not a bad fellow at all, but had overgrown school in his body before he had outgrown it in wit ; he was therefore the hero of the younger boys for his strength and prowess ; and this sort of distinction was doing him harm, so that I advised his father to take him away, and to get him entered at the University as soon as possible." 4. To a private tutor. — " I am glad that you continue to like , nor am I sur- prised at it, for I always thought that school brought out the bad in his character, and repressed the good. There are some others in the same way whom you would find, I think, very satisfactory pupils, but who are not improving here." 94 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. This system was not pursued without difficulty: the incon- venience attendant upon such removals was occasionally very great ; sometimes the character of the boy may have been mis- taken, the difficulty of explaining the true nature of the transac- tion to parents was considerable ; an exaggerated notion was entertained of the extent to which this view was carried. To administer such a system required higher qualifications in a head-master than mere scholarship or mere zeal. What enabled him to do so successfully was, the force of his character, his determination to carry out his principles through a host of par- ticular obstacles ; his largeness of view, which endeavoured to catch the distinctive features of every case ; the consciousness which he felt, and made others feel, of the uprightness and purity of his intentions. The predictions that boys who failed at school would turn out well with private tutors, were often acknowledged to be verified in cases where the removal had been most complain- ed of; the diminution of corporal punishment in the school was necessarily much facilitated ; a salutary effect was produced on the boys by impressing upon them, that even slight offences, which came under the head-master's eye, were swelling the sum of mis- conduct which might end in removal ; whilst many parents were displeased by the system, others were induced to send ''as many boys," he said, " and more than he sent away ;" lastly, he succeed- ed in shaking the old notion of the conditions under which boys must be 'allowed to remain at school, and in impressing on others the standard of moral progress which he endeavoured himself to enforce. The following letter to one of the assistant-masters expresses his mode of meeting the attacks to which he was exposed on the two subjects last mentioned. " I do not choose to discuss the thickness of Praepostors' sticks, or the greater or less blackness of a boy's bruises, for the amusement of all the readers of the newspapers ; nor do I care in the slightest degree about the attacks, if the masters themselves treat them with indifference. If they ap- pear to mind them, or to fear their effect on the school, the apprehension in this, as in many other instances, will be likely to verify itself. For my own part, I confess that I will not condescend to justify the school against attacks, when I believe that it is going on not only not ill, but positively well. Were it really otherwise, I think I should be as sensitive as any one, and very soon give up the concern. But these attacks are merely what I bargained for, so far as they relate to my conduct in the school, because they are direct- ed against points on which my ' ideas' were fixed before I came to Rugby, and are only more fixed now : e. g. that the authority of the Sixth Form is essential to the good of the school, and is to be upheld through all obstacles from within and from without, and that sending away boys is a necessary and 5. " It is a good thing, I have no doubt, that has left us ; his is just one of those characters which cannot bear a public school, and may be saved and turned to great good by the humanities of private tuition." " Ah!" he would say of a case of this kind, " if the Peninsular war were going on now, one would know what to do with him — a few years' hardship would bring a very nice fellow out of him." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 95 regular part of a good system, not as a punishment to one, but as a protection to others. Undoubtedly it would be a better system if there was no evil ; but evil being unavoidable we are not a jail to keep it in, but a place of education where we must cast it out, to prevent its taint from spreading. Meanwhile let us mind our own work, and try to perfect the execution of our own ' ideas,' and we shall have enough to do, and enough always to hinder us from being satisfied with ourselves ; but when we are attacked we have some right to answer with Scipio, who, scorning to reply to a charge of cor- ruption, said, c Hoc die cum Hannibale bene et feliciter pugnavi :' — we have done enough good and undone enough evil, to allow us to hold our assailants cheap." II. The spirit in which he entered on the instruction of the school, constituting as it did the main business of the place, may perhaps best be understood from a particular exemplification of it in the circumstances under which he introduced a prayer before the first lesson in the Sixth Form, over and above the general prayers read before the whole school. On the morning on which he first used it he said, that he had been much troubled to find that the change from attendance on the death-bed of one of the boys in his house to his school- work had been very great : he thought that there ought not to be such a contrast, and that it was probably owing to the school-work not being sufficiently sanctified to God's glory ; that if it was made really a religious work, the transition to it from a death-bed would be slight : he therefore in- tended for the future to offer a prayer before the first lesson, that the day's work might be undertaken and carried on solely to the glory of God and their improvement, — that he might be the better enabled to do his work.' Under this feeling, all the lessons, in his eyes, and not only those which were more directly religious, were invested with a moral character ; and his desire to raise the gftieral standard of knowledge and application in the school was as great as if it had been his sole object. He introduced, with this view, a variety of new regulations ; contributed liberally himself to the foundation of prizes and scholarships, as incentives to study, and gave up much of his leisure to the extra labour of new examinations for the various forms, and of a yearly examination for the whole school. The spirit of industry which his method excited in his betler scholars, and more or less in the school at large, was considerable ; and it was often complained that their minds and constitutions were overworked by premature exertion. Whether this was the case more at Rugby than in other schools, since the greater exertions generally required in all parts of education, it is difficult to deter- mine. He himself would never allow the truth of it, (hough maintaining that it would be a very great evil if it were so. The Greek union of the aQszrj yvfxvaarmi] with the aQsr?] povotxrj, he thought invaluable in education, and he held that the freedom of the sports of public schools was particularly favourable to it : and whenever 1 See Appendix A. 96 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. he saw that boys were reading too much, he always remonstrated with them, relaxed their work, and if they were in the upper part of the school, would invite them to his house in the half year or the holidays to refresh them. He had a strong belief in the general union of moral and intellectual excellence. " I have now had some years' experience," he once said in preaching at Rugby, "I have known but too many of those who in their utter folly have said in their heart, there was no God ; but the sad sight — for assuredly none can be more sad — of a powerful, an earnest, and an inquiring mind seeking truth, yet not finding it — the horrible sight of good deliberately rejected, and evil deliberately chosen — the grievous wreck of earthly wisdom united with spiritual folly — I believe that it has been, that it is, that it may be — Scripture speaks of it, the experience of others has witnessed it ; but I thank God that in my own experience 1 have never witnessed it yet ; I have still found that folly and thought- lessness have gone to evil ; that thought and manliness have been united with faith and goodness." And in the case of boys his experi- ence led him, he said, " more and more to believe in this connexion, for which divers reasons may be given. One, and a very im- portant one, is, that ability puts a boy in sympathy with his teachers in the matter of his work, and in their delight in the works of great minds ; whereas a dull boy has much more sym- pathy with the uneducated, and others to whom animal enjoy- ments are all in all." "I am sure," he used to say, "that in the case of boys the temptations of intellect are not comparable to the temptations of dulness ;" and he often dwelt on " the fruit which I above all things long for, — moral thoughtfulness, — the inquiring love of truth going along with the devoted love of goodness." But for mere cleverness, whether in boys or men, he had no regard. " Mere intellectual acuteness," he used to say, in speaking (for example) of lawyers, " divested as it is, in too many cases, of all that is comprehensive and great and good, is to me more revolt- ing than the most helpless imbecility, seeming to be almost like the spirit of Mephistophiles." Often when seen in union with moral depravity, he would be inclined to deny its existence alto- gether; the generation of his scholars, to which he Rooked back with the greatest pleasure, was not that which contained most in- stances of individual talent^ but that which had altogether worked steadily and industriously. The university honours which his pupils obtained were very considerable, and at one time unrivalled by any school in England, and he was unfeignedly delighted whenever they occurred. But he never laid any stress upon them, and strongly deprecated any system which would encourage the notion of their being the chief end to be answered by school edu- cation. He would often dwell on the curious alternations of cleverness or dulness in school generations, which seemed to baffle all human calculation or exertion. " What we ought to do is to send up boys who will not be plucked." A mere plodding boy was LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 97 above all others encouraged by him. At Laleham he had once got out of patience, and spoken sharply to a pupil of this kind, when the pupil looked up in his face and said, " Why do you speak angrily, sir? — indeed I am doing the best that I can." Years afterwards he used to tell the story to his children, and said, " 1 never felt so much ashamed in my life — that look and that speech I have never forgotten." And though it would of course happen that clever boys, from a greater sympathy with his understanding, would be brought into closer intercourse with him, this did not affect his feeling, not only of respect, but of reverence to those who, without ability, were distinguished for high principle and industry. " If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated." In speaking of a pupil of this character, he once said, " I would stand to that man hat in hand ;" and it was his feeling after the depart- ure of such an one that drew from him the most personal, perhaps the only personal praise, which he ever bestowed on any boy in his Sermons. (See Sermons, vol. hi. pp. 352, 353.) ' 1 The subjoined letters will best show the feeling with which he regarded the acade- mical successes or failures of his pupils: — 1. To a pupil who had failed in his examination at the University : — " I hardly know whether you would like my writing to you ; yet I feel strongly disposed so far to presume on the old relation which existed between us, as to express my earnest hope that you will not attach too much importance to your disap- pointment, whatever it may have been, at the recent examination. I believe that I attach quite as much value as is reasonable to university distinctions ; but it would be a grievous evil if the good of a man's reading for three years were all to depend on the result of a single examination, affected as that result must ever in some degree be by causes inde- pendent of a man's intellectual excellence. I am saying nothing but what you know quite well already ; still the momentary feeling of disappointment may tempt a man to do himself great injustice, and to think that his efforts have been attended by no pro- portionate fruit. I can only say, for one, that as far as the real honour of Rugby is con- cerned, it is the effort, an hundred times more than the issue of the effort, that is in my judgment a credit to the school ; inasmuch as it shows that the men who go from here to the University do their duty there ; and that is the real -point which alone to my mind reflects honour either on individuals or on societies ; and if such a fruit is in any way trace- able to the influence of Rugby, then I am proud and thankful to have had such a man as my pupil. I am almost afraid that you will think me impertinent in writing to you ; but I must be allowed to feel more than a passing interest in those whom I have known and valued here ; and in your case this interest was renewed by having had the pleasure of seeing you in Westmoreland more lately. I should be extremely glad if you can find an opportunity of paying us a visit ere long at Rugby." 2. To a pupil just before his examination at Oxford : — " I have no other object in writing to you, than merely to assure you of my hearty interest about you at this time, when I suppose that the prospect of your examination is rising up closely before you. Yet I hope that-you know me better than to think that my interest arises merely from the credit which the school may gain from your success, or that I should be in a manner personally disappointed if our men were not to gain what they are trying for. On this score I am very hard, and I know too well the uncertainties of examinations to be much surprised at any result. I am much more anxious, however, that you should not overwork yourself, nor unnerve your mind for after exertion. And I wish to say that if you would like change of air or scene for a single day, I should urge you to come down here, and if I can be of any use to you, when here, in examining you, that you may not think that you would be utterly losing your time in leaving Oxford, I shall be very glad to do it. lama great believer in the virtues of a journey for fifty miles, for giving tone to the system where it has been overworked." 93 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. This being his general view, it remains to unfold his ideas of school-instruction in detail. 1. That classical studies should be the basis of intellectual teaching, he maintained from the first. " The study of language," he said, " seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth ; and the Greek and Latin lan- guages, in themselves so perfect, and at the same time freed from the insuperable difficulty which must attend any attempt to teach boys philology through the medium of their own spoken language, seem the very instruments, by which this is to be effected." But a comparison of his earlier and later letters will show how much this opinion was strengthened in later years, and how, in some respects, he returned to parts of the old system, which on his first arrival at Rugby he had altered or discarded. To the use of Latin verse, which he had been accustomed to regard as " one of the most con- temptible prettines>es of the understanding," "I am becoming," he said, " in my old age more and more a convert." Greek and Latin grammars in English, which he introduced soon after he came, he found were attended with a disadvantage, because the rules which in Latin fixed themselves in the boys' memories, when learned in English, were forgotten. The changes in his views resulted on the whole from his increasing conviction, that " it was not know- ledge, but the means of gaining knowledge which he had to teach ;" as well as by his increasing sense of the value of the ancient au- thors, as belonging really to a period of modern civilization like our own : the feeling that in them, " with a perfect abstraction from those particular names and associations, which are for ever bias- ing our judgment in modern and domestic instances, the great principles of all political questions, whether civil or ecclesiastical, are perfectly discussed and illustrated with entire freedom, with most attractive eloquence, and with profoundest wisdom." (Serm. vol. iii. Pref. p. xiii.) From time to time, therefore, as in the Journal of Education, (vol. vii. p. 240,) where his reasons are stated at length, he raised his voice against the popular outcry, by which classical instruction was at that time assailed. And it was, perhaps, not without a 3. To a pupil who had been unsuccessful in an examination for the Ireland schol- arship : — " I am more than satisfied with what you have done in the Ireland ; as to getting it, I certainly never should have got it myself, so I have no right to be surprised if my pupils do not." 4. To a pupil who had gained a first class at Oxford: — " Your letter has given all your friends here great joy, and most heartily do I con- gratulate you upon it. Depend upon it, it is a gift of God, not to be gloried in, but deeply and thankfully to be prized, for it may be made to minister to His glory and to the good of His Church, which never more needed the aid of the Spirit of wisdom, as well as of the Spirit of love." 5. To another on the same: — " I must write you in one line my heartiest congratulations, for I should not like not to write on an occasion which I verily believe is to no one more welcome than it is lo me. You, I know, will look onwards and upwards — and will feel that God's gifts and blessings bind us more closely to His service." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 99 share in producing the subsequent reaction in its favour, that the one Head-master, who, from his political connexions and opinions, would have been supposed most likely to yield to the clamour, was the one who made the most deliberate and decided protest against it.' 2. But what was true of his union of new with old elements in the moral government of the school, applies no less to its intellec- tual management. He was the first Englishman who drew atten- tion in our public schools to the historical, political, and philosophi- cal value of philology and of the ancient writers, as distinguished from the mere verbal criticism and elegant scholarship of the last century. And besides the general impulse which he gave to miscellaneous reading, both in the regular examinations and by encouraging the tastes of particular boys for geology or other like pursuits, he incorporated the study of Modern History, Modern Languages, and Mathematics into the work of the school, which attempt, as it was the first of its kind, so it was at one time the chief topic of blame and praise in his sys.tem of instruction. The reading of a considerable portion of modern history was effected without difficulty ; but the endeavour to teach mathematics and modern languages, especially the latter, not as an optional append- age, but as a regular part of the school business, was beset with obstacles which rendered his plan less successful than he had an- ticipated ; though his wishes, especially for boys who were unable to reap the full advantage of classical studies, were, to a great ex- tent, answered.1 1 The instruction in modern languages passed through various stages, of which the final result was that the several forms were taught by their regular masters, French and German in the three higher forms, and French in the forms below. How fully he was himself awake to the objections to this plan will appear from the subjoined letter in 1840 ; but still he felt that it yet remained to be shown how, for a continuance, all the boys of a large public school can be taught modern languages, except by English masters, and those the masters of their respective classical forms. Extract from a letter to the Earl of Denbigh : — " I assume it certainly, as the foundation of all my view of the case, that boys at a public school never will learn to speak or pronounce French well under any circumstances. But to most of our boys, to read it will be of far more use than to speak it ; and if they learn it grammatically as a dead language, I am sure that whenever they have any occa- sion to speak it, as in going abroad, for instance, they will be able to do it very rapidly. 1 think that if we can enable the boys to read French with facility, and to know the grammar well, we shall do as much as can be done at a public school, and should teach the boys something valuable. And in point of fact, I have heard men, who have left Rugby, speak with gratitude of what they have learnt with us in French and German. " It is very true that our general practice here, as in other matters, does not come up to our theory ; and I know too well that most of the boys would pass a very poor examina- tion even in French Grammar. But so it is with their mathematics ; and so it will be with any branch of knowledge that is taught but seldom, and is felt to be quite subordinate to the boy's main study. Only I am quite sure that if the boy's regular masters fail in this, a foreigner, be he who he may, would fail much more. " T do not therefore see any way out of the difficulties of the question, and I believe sincerely that our present plan is the least bad, I will not say the best, that can be adopted ; discipline is not injured, as it is with foreign masters, and I think that something is taught, though but little. With regard to German, I can speak more confidently ; and I am sure that there we do facilitate a boy's after study of the language considerably, and enable XOO L1F£ °F DR- ARNOLD. What has been said, relates rather to his system of instruction, than to the instruction itself. His personal share in the teaching of the younger boys was confined to the general examinations, in which ne took an active part, and to two lessons which he de- voted in every week to the hearing in succession every form in the school. These visits were too transient for the boys to become familiar with him ; but great interest was always excited, and though the chief impression was of extreme fear, they were also struck by the way in which his examinations elicited from them whatever they knew, as well as by the instruction which they received merely from hearing his questions, or from seeing the effect produced upon him by their answers. But the chief source of his intellectual as of his moral influence over the school, was through the Sixth Form. To the rest of the boys he appeared almost exclusively as a master, to them he appeared almost exclu- sively as an instructor ; it was in the library tower, where he heard their lessons, that his pupils became first really acquainted with him, and that his power of teaching, in which he found at once his main business and pleasure, had its full scope. It has been attempted hitherto to represent his principles of education as distinct from himself, but in proportion as we approach his individual teaching, this becomes impracticable — the system is lost in the man — the recollections of the Head-master of Rugby are inseparable from the recollections of the personal guide and friend of his scholars. They will at once recall those little traits which, however minute in themselves, will to them suggest a lively image of his whole manner. They will remember the glance, with which he looked round in the few moments of silence before the lesson be- gan, and which seemed to speak his sense of his own position and of theirs also, as the heads of a great school ; the attitude in which he stood, turning over the pages of Facciolati's Lexicon or Pole's Synopsis, with his eye fixed upon the boy who was pausing to give an answer ; the well known changes of his voice and manner, so faithfully representing the feeling within. They will recollect the pleased look and the cheerful " Thank you," which followed upon a successful answer or translation ; the fall of his countenance with its deepening severity, the stern elqyation of the eyebrows, the sudden " Sit down " which followed upon the reverse ; the courtesy and almost deference to the boys, as to his equals in soci- ety, so long as there was nothing to disturb the friendliness of their relation; the startling earnestness with which he would check in a moment the slightest approach to levity or impertinence ; the confidence, with which he addressed them in his half-yearly ex- hortations ; the expressions of delight with which, when they had been doing well, he would say that it was a constant pleasure to him to come into the library. His whole method was founded on the principle of awakening him with much less trouble, to read those many German books which are so essential to his classical studies at the university." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 101 the intellect of every individual boy. Hence it was his practice to teach by questioning. As a general rule, he never gave informa- tion, except as a kind of reward for an answer, and often withheld it altogether, or checked himself in the very act of uttering it, from a sense that those whom he was addressing had not sufficient inte- rest or sympathy to entitle them to receive it. His explanations were as short as possible — enough to dispose of the difficulty and no more ; and his questions were of a kind to call the attention of the boys to the real point of every subject, to disclose to them the exact boundaries of what they knew or did not know, and to culti- vate a habit not only of collecting facts, but of expressing them- selves with facility, and of understanding the principles on which their facts rested. " You come here," he said, " not to read, but to learn how to read ;" and thus the greater part of his instructions were interwoven with the process of their own minds ; there was a continual reference to their thoughts, an acknowledgment that, so far as their information and power of reasoning could lake them, they ought to have an opinion of their own. He was evidently working not for, but with the form, as if they were equally inte- rested with himself in making out the meaning of the passage before them. His object was to set them right, not by correcting them at once, but either by gradually helping them on to a true answer, or by making the answers of the more advanced part of the form serve as a medium, through which his instructions might be communicated to the less advanced. Such a system he thought valuable alike to both classes of boys. To those who by natural quickness or greater experience of his teaching were more able to follow his instructions, it confirmed the sense of the responsible position which they held in the school, intellectually as well as morally. To a boy less ready or less accustomed to it, it gave precisely what he conceived that such a character required. " He wants this," to use his mvn words, " and he wants it daily — not only to interest and excite him, but to dispel what is very apt to grow around a lonely reader not constantly questioned — a haze of indistinctness as to a consciousness of his own knowledge or igno- rance ; he takes a vague impression for a definite one, an imperfect notion for one that is full and complete, and in this way he is con- tinually deceiving himself." Hence, also, he not only laid great stress on original composi- tions, but endeavoured so to choose the subjects of exercises as to oblige therrt to read and lead them to think for themselves. He dealt at once a death blow to themes (as he expressed it) on " Vir- tus est bona res," and gave instead historical or geographical de- scriptions, imaginary speeches or letters, etymological accounts of words, or criticisms of books, or put religious and moral subjects in such a form as awakened a new and real interest in them ; ' as, for example, not simply " carpe diem," or, " procrastination is the thief of time ;" but, " carpere diem jubent Epicurei, jubet hoc idem Chris- 1 See Appendix B. ] 02 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. tus." So again, in selecting passages for translation from English into Greek or Latin, instead of taking them at random from the Spectator or other such works, he made a point of giving extracts, remarkable in themselves, from such English and foreign authors as he most admired, so as indelibly to impress on the minds of his pupils some of the most striking names and passages in modern literature. " Ha, very good !" was his well-known exclamation of pleasure when he met with some original thought ; " is that en- tirely your own, or do you remember any thing in your reading that suggested it to you?" Style, knowledge, correctness or incor- rectness of statement or expression, he always disregarded in com- parison with indication or promise of real thought. " I call that the best theme," he said, "which shows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best, which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he has read ; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book, and fol- lowed that without reflection." The interest in their work which this method excited in the boys was considerably enhanced by the respect which, even with- out regard to his general character, was inspired by the qualities brought out prominently in the ordinary course of lessons. They were conscious of (what was indeed implied in his method itself) the absence of display, which made it clear that what he said was to instruct them, not to exhibit his own powers ; they could not but be struck by his never concealing difficulties and always confessing ignorance ; acknowledging mistakes in his edition of Thucydides, and on Latin verses', mathematics, or foreign languages, appealing for help or information to boys whom he thought better qualified than himself to give it. Even as an example, it was not without its use, to witness daily the power of combination and concentration on his favourite subjects which had marked him even from a boy ; and which especially appeared in his illustrations of ancient by modern, and modern by ancient history. The wide discursiveness with which he brought the several parts of their work to bear on each other ; the readiness with which he referred them to the sources and authorities of information, when himself ignorant of it ; the eagerness with which he tracked them out when unknown — taught them how wide the field of knowledge really was. In poetry it was almost impossible not to catch something of the delight and almost fervour with which, as he came to any striking passage, he would hang over it, reading it over and over again, and dwelling upon it for the mere pleasure which every word seemed to give him. In history or philosophy, events, sayings, and authors would, from the mere fact that he had quoted them, become fixed in the memory of his pupils, and give birth to thoughts and inquiries long afterwards, which, had they been derived through another medium, would have been forgotten or remained unfruitful. The very scantiness with which he occasionally dealt out his knowledge, when not satisfied that the boys could enter into it, whilst it LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 103 often provoked a half-angry feeling of disappointment in those who eagerly treasured up all that he uttered, left an impression that the source from which they drew was unexhausted and unfathomed, and to all that he did say gave a double value. Intellectually, as well as morally, he felt that the teacher ought himself to be perpetually learning, and so constantly above the level of his scholars. " I am sure," he said, speaking of his pupils at Laleham, " that I do not judge of them or expect of them, as I should, if I were not taking pains to improve my own mind." For this reason, he maintained that no schoolmaster ought to remain at his post much more than fourteen or fifteen years, lest, by that time, he should have fallen behind the scholarship of the age ; and by his own reading and literary works he endeavoured constantly to act upon this principle himself. " For nineteen out of twenty boys," he said once to Archbishop Whately, in speaking of the importance not only of information, but real ability in assistant-masters, (and his remark of course applied still more to the station which he oc- cupied himself,) " ordinary men may be quite sufficient, but the twentieth, the boy of real talents, who is more important than the others, is liable even to suffer injury from not being early placed under the training of one whom he can, on close inspection, look up to as his superior in something besides mere knowledge. The dangers," he observed, " were of various kinds. One boy may ac- quire a contempt for the information itself, which he sees possessed by a man whom he feels nevertheless to be far below him. Another will fancy himself as much above nearly all the world as he feels he is above his own tutor ; and will become self-sufficient and scornful. A third will believe it to be his duty, as a point of hu- mility, to bring himself down intellectually to a level with one whom he feels bound to reverence, and thus there have been in- stances, where the veneration of a young man of ability for a teacher of small powers has been like a millstone round the neck of an eagle." His practical talent as a scholar consisted in his insight into the general structure of sentences and the general principles of language, and in his determination to discard all those unmeaning phrases and forms of expression, by which so many writers of the last genera- tion, and boys of all generations, endeavour to conceal their igno- rance. In Greek and Latin composition his exceeding indifference to mere excellence of style, when unattended by any thing better, made it difficult for him to bestow that praise which was necessary to its due encouragement as a part of the school work, and he never was able to overcome the deficiency, which he always felt in com- posing or correcting verse exercises, even after his increased con- viction of their use as a mental discipline. But to prose composition in both languages he had from the first attached considerable im- portance, not only as the best means of acquiring a sound knowledge of the ancient authors, but of attaining a mastery over the Fmglish language also, by the readiness and accuracy of expression which 104 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. it imparted. He retained to himself that happy facility for imitating the style of the Greek historians and philosophers, for which he was remarkable in youth, whilst his Latin prose was peculiar for combining the force of common Latinity with the vigour and sim- plicity of his own style — perfectly correct and idiomatic, yet not the language of Cicero or Livy, but of himself. In the common lessons, his scholarship was chiefly displayed in his power of extempore translation into English. This he had possessed in a remarkable degree from the time that he was a boy at Winchester, where the practice of reading the whole passage from Greek or Latin into good English, without construing each particular sentence word by word, had been much encouraged by Dr. Gabell, and in his youthful vacations during his Oxford course he used to enliven the sick-bed of his sister Susannah by the readiness with which in the evenings he would sit by her side, and translate book after book of the history of Herodotus. So essential did he consider this method to a sound study of the clas- sics, that he published an elaborate defence of it in the Quarterly Journal of Education ; and, when delivering his Modern History lectures at Oxford, where he much lamented the prevalence of the opposite system, he could not resist the temptation of protesting against it, with no other excuse for introducing the subject, than the mention of the Latin style of the middle age historians. In itself, he looked upon it as the only means of really entering into the spirit of the ancient authors ; and, requiring as he did besides, that the translation should be made into idiomatic English, and if possible, into that style of English which most corresponded to the period or the subject of the Greek or Latin writer in question, he considered it further as an excellent exercise in the principles of taste and in the knowledge and use of the English language, no less than of those of Greece and Rome. No one must suppose that these translations in the least resembled the paraphrases in his notes to Thucydides, which are avowedly not translations, but ex- planations ; he was constantly on the watch for any inadequacy or redundancy of expression — the version was to represent, and no more than represent, the exact words of the original ; and those who, either as his colleagues or his pupilsrwere present at his les- sons, well know the accuracy with which every shade of meaning would be reproduced in a different shape, and the rapidity with which he would pounce on any mistake of grammar or construc- tion, however dexterously concealed in the folds of a free trans- lation. In the subject of the lessons it was not only the language, but the author and the age which rose before him ; it was not merely a lesson to be got through and explained, but a work which was to be understood, to be condemned or to be admired. It was an old opinion of his, which, though much modified was never altogether abandoned, that the mass of boys had not a sufficient appreciation of poetry, to make it worth while for them to read so much of the LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. JQ5 ancient poets, in proportion to prose writers, as was usual when he came to Rugby. But for some of them he had besides a personal dis- taste. The Greek tragedians, though reading them constantly, and portions of them with the liveliest admiration, he thought on the whole greatly overrated ; and still more, the second-rate Latin poets, but whom he seldom used ; and some, such asTibullusandPropertius, never. <: I do really think," he said, speaking of these last as late as 1842, "that any examiners incur a serious responsibility who require or encourage the reading of these books for scholarships ; of all use- less reading, surely the reading of indifferent poets is most useless." And to some of them he had a yet deeper feeling of aversion. It was not till 1835 that he himself read the plays of Aristophanes, and though he was then much struck with the " Clouds," and ulti- mately introduced the partial use of his Comedies in the school, yet his strong moral disapprobation always interfered with his sense of the genius both of that poet and Juvenal. But of the classical lessons generally his enjoyment was com- plete. When asked once whether he did not find the repetition of the same lessons irksome to him, " No," he said, " there is a con- stant freshness in them ; I find something new in them every time that I go over them." The best proof of the pleasure which he took in them is the distinct impression which his scholars retained of the feeling, often rather implied than expressed, with which he entered into the several works; the enthusiasm with which, both in the public and private orations of Demosthenes, he would con- template piece by piece "the luminous clearness" of the sentences ; the affectionate familiarity which he used to show towards Thucy- dides, knowing as he did the substance of every single chapter by itself ; the revival of youthful interest with which he would recur to portions of the works of Aristotle ; the keen sense of a new world opening before him, with which in later years, with ever- increasing pleasure, he entered into the works of Plato ; — above all, his childlike enjoyment of Herodotus, and that " fountain of beauty and delight, which no man," he said, " can ever drain dry," the poetry of Homer. The simple language of that early age was ex- actly what he was most able to reproduce in his own simple and touching translations; and his eyes would fill with tears, when he came to the story which told how Cleobis and Bito, as a reward for. their filial piety, lay down in the temple, and fell asleep and died. To his pupils, perhaps, of ordinary lessons, the most attractive were the weekly ones on Modern History. He had always a dif- ficulty in finding any work which he could1 use with satisfaction as a text book. " Gibbon, which in many respects would answer the purpose so well, I dare not use." Accordingly, the. work, whatever it might be, was made the groundwork of his own ob- servations, and of other reading from such books as the school library contained. Russell's Modern Europe, for example, which he estimated very low, though perhaps from his own early acquaint- 8 106 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. ance with it at Winchester, with less dislike than might have been expected, served this purpose for several years. On a chapter of this he would engraft, or cause the boys to engraft, additional infor- mation from Hallam, Guizot, or any other historian who happened to treat of the same period, whilst he himself, with that familiar interest which belonged to his favourite study of history and of geography, which he always maintained could only be taught in connexion with it, would by his searching and significant ques- tions gather the thoughts of his scholars round the peculiar cha- racteristics of the age or the country on which he wished to fix their attention. Thus, for example, in the Seven Years' War, he would illustrate the general connexion of military history with geography, by the simple instance of the order of Hannibal's suc- cessive victories ; and then, chalking roughly on a board the chief points in the physical conformation of Germany, apply the same principle to the more complicated campaigns of Frederick the Great. Or again, in a more general examination, he would ask for the chief events which occurred, for instance, in the year 15 of two or three successive centuries, and by making the boys contrast or • compare them together, bring before their minds the differences and resemblances in the state of Europe in each of the periods in question. Before entering on his instructions in theology, which both for himself and his scholars had most peculiar interest, it is right to notice the religious character which more or less pervaded the rest of the lessons. When his pupils heard him in preaching recom- mend them " to note in any common work that they read, such judgments of men and things, and such a tone in speaking of them as are manifestly at variance with the spirit of Christ," (Serm. vol. iii. p. 116,) or when they heard him ask " whether the Christian .ever feels more keenly awake to the purity of the spirit of the Gospel, than when he reads the history of crimes related with no true sense of their evil," (Serm. vol. ii. p. 223,) instances would im- mediately occur to them from his own practice, to prove how truly he felt what he said. No direct instruction could leave on their minds a livelier image of his disgust at moral evil, than the black cloud of indignation which passed over his face when speaking of the crimes of Napoleon, or of Caesar, and^the dead pause which followed, as if the acts had just been committed in his very pre- sence. No expression of his reverence for a high standard of Christian excellence could have been more striking than the almost involuntary expressions of admiration which broke from him when- ever mention was made of St. Louis of France. No general teach- ing of the providential government of the world could have left a deeper impression, than the casual allusions to it, which occurred as they came to any of the critical moments in the history of Greece and Rome. No more forcible contrast could have been drawn be- tween the value of Christianity and of heathenism, than the manner with which, for example, after reading in the earlier part of the les- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 107 son one of the Scripture descriptions of the Gentile world, " Now," he said, as he opened the Satires of Horace, " we shall see what it was." Still it was in the Scripture1 lessons that this found most scope, In the lower forms it was rather that more prominence was given to them, and that they were placed under better regulations than that they were increased in amount. In the Sixth Form, besides the lectures on Sunday, he introduced two lectures on the Old or New Testament in the course of the week, so that a boy who remained there three years would often have read through a great part of the New Testament, much of the Old Testament, and especially of the Psalms in the Septuagint version, and also com- mitted much of them to memory ; whilst at times he would deliver lectures on the history of the early Church, or of the English Re- formation. In these lessons on the Scriptures he would insist much on the importance of familiarity with the very words of the sacred writers, and of the exact place where passages occurred ; on a thorough acquaintance with the different parts of the story con- tained in the several Gospels, that they might be referred to at once ; on the knowledge of the times when, and the persons to whom, the Epistles were written. In translating the New Testa- ment, while he encouraged his pupils to take the language of the authorized version as much as possible, he was very particular in not allowing them to use' words which fail to convey the meaning of the original, or which by frequent use have lost all definite meaning of their own, — such as " edification," or " the Gospel." Whatever dogmatical instruction he gave, was conveyed almost entirely in a practical or exegetical shape ; and it was very rarely indeed that he made any allusion to existing parties or controver- sies within the Church of England. His own peculiar views, which need not be noticed in this place, transpired more or less throughout ; but the great proportion of his interpretations were such as most of his pupils, of whatever opinions, eagerly collected and preserved for their own use in after life. But more important than any details was the union of rever- ence and reality in his whole manner of treating the Scriptures, which so distinguished these lessons from such as may in them- selves almost as little deserve the name of religious instruction as many lessons commonly called secular. The same searching ques- tions, the same vividness which marked his historical lessons, — the same anxiety to bring all that he said home to their own feelings, which made him, in preparing them for confirmation, endeavour to make them say, " Christ died for me," instead of the general phrase, " Christ died for us," — must often, when applied to the natu- rel vagueness of boys' notions on religious subjects, have dispelled it for ever. " He appeared to me," writes a pupil, whose intercourse with him never extended beyond these lessons, " to be remarkable 1 For his own feeling about them, see Sermons, vol. iv. pp. 317, 321. 108 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. ibr his habit of realizing every thing that we are told in Scripture. You know how frequently we can ourselves, and how constantly we hear others go prosing on in a sort of religious cant or slang, which is as easy to learn as any other technical jargon, without seeing as it were by that faculty which all possess, of picturing to the mind, and acting as if we really saw things unseen belonging to another world. Now he seemed to have the freshest view of our Lord's life and death that I ever knew a man to possess. His rich mind filled up the naked outline of the Gospel history ; — it was to him the most interesting fact that has ever happened, — as real, as exciting (if I may use the expression) as any recent event in modern history of which the actual effects are visible." And all his comments, on whatever view of inspiration they were given, were always made in a tone and manner that left an impression that from the book which lay before him he was really seeking to draw his rule of life ; and, that whilst he examined it in earnest to find what its meaning was, when he had found it he intended to abide by it. The effect of these instructions was naturally more permanent (speaking merely in an intellectual point of view) than the lessons themselves, and it was a frequent topic of censure that his pupils were led to take up his opinions before their minds were duly pre- pared for them. What was true of his method and intention in the simplest matters of instruction, was true of it as applied to the highest matters. Undoubtedly it was his belief that the minds of young men ought to be awakened to the greatness of things around them ; and it was his earnest endeavour to give them what he thought the best means of attaining a firm hold upon truth. But it was always his wish that his pupils should form their opinions for themselves, and not take them on trust from him. To his par- ticular political principles he carefully avoided allusion, and it was rarely that his subjects for school compositions touched on any topics that could have involved, even remotely, the disputed points of party politics. In theological matters, partly from the nature of the case, partly from the peculiar aspect under which for the last six years of his life he regarded the Oxford school, he both expressed his thoughts more openly, and was more anxious to impress them upon his pupils ; but this was almost entirely in the comparatively few sermons preached on what could be called controversial topics. In his intercourse indeed with his pupils after they had left the school, he naturally spoke with greater freedom on political or the- ological subjects, yet it was usually when invited by them, and, though he often deeply lamented their adoption of what he held to be erroneous views, he much disliked a merely unmeaning echo of his own opinions. " It would be a great mistake," he said, " if I were to try to make myself here into a Pope." It was, however, an almost inevitable consequence of coming into contact with his teaching, and with the new world which it opened, that his pupils would often, on their very entrance into LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 109 life, have acquired a familiarity and encountered a conflict with some of the most harassing questions of morals and religion. It would also often happen, that the increasing reverence which they felt for him, would not only incline them to receive with implicit trust all that he said in the lessons or in the pulpit, but also to include in their admiration of the man, all that they could gather of his general views either from report or from his published works ; whilst they would naturally look with distrust on the opposite no- tions in religion and politics brought before them, as would often be the case, in close connexion with vehement attacks on him. which in most cases they could hardly help regarding as unbounded or unfair. Still the greater part of his pupils, while at school, were, after the manner of English boys, altogether unaffected by his political opinions ; and of those who most revered him, none in after life could be found who followed his views implicitly, even on the subjects on which they were most disposed to listen to him. But though no particular school of opinion grew up amongst them, the end of his teaching would be answered far more truly, (and it may suggest to those who know ancient history, similar results of similar methods in the hands of other eminent teachers,) if his scho- lars learned to form an independent judgment for themselves, and to carry out their opinions to their legitimate consequences, — to appre- ciate moral agreement amidst much intellectual difference, not only in each other or in him, but in the world at large ; — and to adopt many, if not all of his principles, whilst differing widely in their application of them to existing persons and circumstances. III. If there is any one place at Rugby more than another which was especially the scene of Dr. Arnold's labours, both as a teacher and as a master, it is the School-chapel. Even its outward forms from " the very cross at the top of the building."1 on which he loved to dwell as a visible symbol of the Christian end of their education, to the vaults which he caused to be opened underneath for those who died in the school, must always be associated with his name. " I envy Winchester its antiquity," he said, " and am therefore anxious to do all that can be done to give us something of a venerable outside, if we have not the nobleness of old associa- tions to help us." The five painted windows in the chapel were put up in great part at his expense, altogether at his instigation. The subject of the first of these, the great east window, he de- lighted to regard as " strikingly appropriate to a place of educa- tion," being " the Wise Men's Offering," and the first time after its erection that the chapter describing the Adoration of the Magi was read in the church service, he took occasion to preach upon it one of his most remarkable sermons, that of " Christian Professions — Offering Christ our best." (Serm. vol. iii. p. 112.) And as this is connected with the energy and vigour of his life, so the subject of the last, which he chose himself a short time before his death, is 1 MS. Sermon. HO LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. the confession of St. Thomas, on which he dwelt with deep solem- nity in his last hours, as in his life he had dwelt upon it as the great consolation of doubting but faithful hearts, and as the great attestation of what was to him the central truth of Christianity, our Lord's divinity. Lastly, the monuments of those who died in the school during his government, and whose graves were the first ever made in the chapel ; above all, his own, the monument and grave of the only head-master of Rugby who is buried within its walls, gave a melancholy interest to the words with which he closed a sermon preached on the Founder's day, in 1833, whilst as yet the recently opened vaults had received no dead within them : " This roof under which we are now assembled, will hold, it is probable, our children and our children's children ; may they be enabled to think, as they shall kneel perhaps over the bones of some of us now here assembled, that they are praying where their fathers prayed ; and let them not, if they mock in their day the means of grace here offered to them, encourage them- selves with the thought that the place had long ago been profaned with equal guilt; that they are but infected with the spirit of our ungodliness."1 But of him especially it need hardly be said, that his chief in- terest in that place lay in the three hundred boys who, Sunday after Sunday, were collected, morning and afternoon, within its walls. " The veriest stranger," he said, " who ever attends divine service in this chapel, does well to feel something more than com- mon interest in the sight of the congregation here assembled. But if the sight so interests a mere stranger, what should it be to our- selves, both to you and to me ?" (Serm. vol. v. p. 403.) So he spoke within a month of his death, and to him, certainly, the in- terest was increased rather than lessened by its familiarity. There was the fixed expression of countenance, the earnest attention with which, after the service was over, he sat in his place looking at the boys as they filed out one by one, in the orderly and silent arrangement which succeeded, in the latter part of his stay, to the public calling over of their names in the chapel. There was the complete image of his union of dignity and simplicity, of man- liness and devotion, as he performed the chapel service, especially when at the communion table he would read or rather repeat almost by heart the Gospel or. Epistle of the day, with the impres- siveness of one who entered into it equally with his whole spirit and also with his whole understanding. There was the visible animation with which, by force of long association, he joined in the musical parts of the service, to which he was by nature whol- ly indifferent, as in the chanting of the Nicene Creed, which was adopted in accordance with his conviction that creeds in public woiship (Serm. vol. iii. p. 310) ought to be used as triumphant hymns of thanksgiving ; or still more in the Te Deum, which he loved so dearly, and when his whole countenance would be lit up at his favourite verse — " When Thou hadst overcome the sharp- • Sermons, vol. iii. p. 211. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. Ill ness of death, Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all be- lievers." From his own interest in the service naturally flowed his anx- iety to impart it to his scholars ; urging them in his later sermons, or in his more private addresses, to join in the responses, at times with such effect, that at least from all the older part of the school the responses were very general. The very course of the eccle- siastical year would often be associated in their minds with their remembrance of the peculiar feeling with which they saw that he regarded the greater festivals, and of the almost invariable connex- ion of his sermons with the services of the day. The touching recollections of those amongst the living or the dead, whom he loved or honoured, which passed through his mind as he spoke of All Saints' Day, and whenever it was possible, of its accompa- nying feast, now no longer observed, All Souls' Day ; — and the solemn thoughts of the advance of human life, and of the progress of the human race, and of the Church, which were awakened by the approach of Advent, — might have escaped a careless observer • but it must have been difficult for any one not to have been struck by the triumphant exultation of his whole manner on the recur- rence of Easter Day. Lent was marked during his last three years, but the putting up of boxes in the chapel and the boarding- houses, to receive money for the poor, a practice adopted not so much with the view of relieving any actual want, as of affording the boys an opportunity for self-denial and almsgiving.1 He was anxious to secure the administration of the rite of con- firmation, if possible, once every two years ; when the boys were prepared by himself and the other masters in their different board- ing-houses, who each brought up his own division of pupils on the day of the ceremony ; the interest of which was further en- hanced, during his earlier years, by the presence of the late Bishop Ryder,2 for whom he entertained a great respect, and latterly by 1 He feared, however, to introduce more religous services than he thought the boys would bear without a sense of tedium or formality, on which principle he dropped an existing practice of devoting all the lessons in Passion Week to the New Testament ; and always hesitated to have a chapel service on such festivals as did not fall on Sundays, though in the last year of his life he made an exception with regard to As- cension Day. 2 The following extract from a sermon preached in consequence of the delay of con- firmation, by Bishop Ryder's death, may serve to illustrate as well his general feeling on the subject, as his respect for the individual. " And while I say this, it is impossible not to remember to what cause this disappointment has been owing, namely to the long illness and death of the late ex- cellent Bishop of this diocese. This is neither the place nor the congregation for a fu- neral eulogy on that excellent person ; we knew him too little, and were too much re- moved out of the ordinary sphere of his ministry, to be able to bear the best witness to him Yet many here, I think, will remember the mariner in which he went through the rite of confirmation in this chapel three years ago ; the earnestness and kindness of his manner, the manifest interest which he felt in the service in which he was ministering. And though, as I said, we were comparatively strangers to him, yet we had heard enough of him to receive, without, one jarring feeling, the full impression of his words and manner ; we knew that as these were solemn and touching, so they were consistent and sin- cere ; they were not put on for the occasion, nor yet, which is a far more common 112 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. the presence of his intimate friend, Archbishop Whately. The Confirmation Hymn of Dr. Hinds, which was used on these occa- sions, became so endeared to his -recollections, that, when travel- ling abroad late at nigh., he would have it repeated or sung to him. One of the earliest public addresses to the school was that made before the first confirmation, and published in the second volume of his Sermons ; and he always had something of the kind (over and above the Bishop's charge) either before or after the regular Chapel service. The Communion was celebrated four times a year. At first, some of the Sixth Form boys alone were in the habit of attending ; but he took pains to invite to it boys in all parts of the school, who had any serious thoughts, so that the number, out of two hundred and ninety or three hundred boys, was occasionally a hundred, and never less than seventy. To individual boys he rarely spoke on the subject, from the fear of its becoming a matter of form or favour; but in his sermons he dwelt upon it much, and would afterwards speak with deep emotion of the pleasure and hope which a larger attendance than usual would give him. It was impossible to hear these exhortations or to see him administer it, without being struck by the strong and manifold interest which it awakened in him ; and at Rugby it was of course more than usually touching to him from its peculiar relation to the school. When he spoke of it in his sermons, it was evident that amongst all the feelings which it excited in himself, and which he wished to impart to others, none was so prominent as the sense that it was a communion not only with God, but with one another, and that the thoughts thus roused should act as a direct and especial counterpoise to that false communion and false companionship, which, as binding one another not to good but to evil, he believed to be the great source of mischief to the school at large. And when, — especially to the very young boys, who sometimes partook of the Communion, — he bent himself down with looks of fatherly tenderness, and glistening eyes and trembling voice, in the ad- ministration of the elements, it was felt, perhaps, more distinctly than at any other time, how great was the sympathy which he felt with the earliest advances to good in every individual boy. case, did they spring out of the occasion. It was not the mere natural and momentary feeling which might have arisen even in a careless mind, while engaged in a work so peculiarly striking; but it was truly the feeling not of the occasion, but of the man. He but showed himself to us as he was, and thus we might and may dwell with plea- sure on the recollection long after the immediate effect was over; and may think truly that, when he told us how momentous were the interests involved in the promises and prayers of that service, he told us no more than he himself most earnestly believed ; he urged us to no other faith, to no other course of living, than that which by God's grace he had long made his own. It is a great blessing to God's church when they who are called to the higher offices of the ministry in it, thus give to their ministry the weight, not of their words only, but of their lives. Still we must remember that the care of our souls is our own, — that God's means of grace and warnings furnished us by the ministry of his church, are no way dependent upon the personal character of the min- ister; that confirmation, with all its opportunities, is still the same point in our lives, by whomsoever it may be administered." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 113 That part of the Chapel service, however, which, at least to the world at large, is most connected with him, as being the most frequent and most personal of his ministrations, was his preaching. Sermons had occasionally been preached by the Head-master of this and other public schools to their scholars before his coming to Rugby ; but (in some cases from the peculiar constitution or arrangement of the school) it had never before been considered an essential part of the head-master's office. The first half-year he confined himself to delivering short addresses, of about five min- utes' length, to the boys of his own house. But from the second half-year he began to preach frequently ; and from the autumn of 1831, when he took the chaplaincy,1 which had then become vacant, he preached almost every Sunday of the school year to the end of his life. It may be allowable to dwell for a few moments on a practice which has since been followed, whenever it was practicable, in the other great public schools, and on sermons, which, as they were the first of their kind, will also be probably long looked upon as models of their kind, in English preaching. They were preached always in the afternoon, and lasted seldom more than twenty minutes, sometimes less ; a new one almost every time. "A man could hardly," he said, "preach on the same subject, without writing a better sermon than he had written a few years before." However much they may have occupied his previous thoughts, they were written almost invariably between the morning and afternoon service ; and though often under such stress of time that the ink of the last sentence was hardly dry when the chapel bell ceased to sound, they contain hardly a single erasure, and the manuscript volumes remain as accessible a trea- sure to their possessors as if they were printed. When he first began to preach, he felt that his chief duty was to lay bare, in the plainest language that he could use, the sources of the evils of schools, and to contrast them with the purity of the moral law of Christianity. " The spirit of Elijah," he said, "must 1 Extract from a letter to the Trustees, applying for the situation : — " I had no knowledge nor so much as the slightest suspicion of the vacancy," he writes, " till I was informed of it last night. But the importance of the point is so great that I most re- spectfully crave the indulgence of the Trustees to the request I venture to submit to them, namely, that if they see no objection to it I may myself be appointed to the chap- laincy, waiving, of course, altogether the salary attached to the office. Whoever is chap- lain, I must ever feel myself, as Head-master, the real and proper religious instructor of the boys. No one else can feel the same interest in them, and no one else (I am not speaking of myself personally, but merely by virtue of my situation) can speak to them with so much influence. In fact, it seems to me the natural and fitting thing, and the great advantage of having a separate chapel for the school — that the master of the boys should be officially as well as really their pastor, and that he should not devolve on an- other, however well qualified, one of his own most peculiar and solemn duties. This, however, is a general question, which I only venture so far to enter upon, in explaining my motives in urging and requesting, in this present instance, that the Trustees would present me to the Bishop to be licensed, allowing me altogether to decline the salary, be- cause 1 consider that I am paid for my services already; and that being Head-master and clergyman, I am bound to be the religious instructor of m y pupils by virtue of my situation." 114 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. ever precede the spirit of Christ." But as he advanced, there is a marked contrast between the severe tone of his early sermons in the Second volume, when all was yet knew to him, except the knowledge of the evil which he had to combat, and the gentler tone which could not but be inspired by his greater familiarity both with his work and his pupils — between the direct attack on particular faults which marks the course of Lent Sermons in 1830, and the wish to sink the mention of particular faults in the general principle of love to Christ and abhorrence of sin, which marks the summary of his whole school experience in the last sermon which he ever preached. When he became the constant preacher, he made a point of varying the more directly practical addresses with sermons on the interpretation of Scripture, on the general princi- ples and evidences of Christianity, or on the dangers of their after life, applicable chiefly to the elder boys. Amongst these last should be noticed those which contained more or less the expres- sion of his sentiments on the principles to which he conceived his pupils liable hereafter to be exposed at Oxford, and most of which, as being of a more general interest, he selected for publication in his third and fourth volumes. That their proportion to those that are published affords no measure of their proportion to those that are unpublished, may be seen at once by reference to the year's course in the fifth volume, which, out of thirty four, contains only four which could possibly be included in this class. That it was not his own intention to make them either personal or controver- sial, appears from an explanation to a friend of a statement, which, in 1839, appeared in the newspapers, that he "had been preaching a course of sermons against the Oxford errors." — " The origin of the paragraph was simply this : that I preached two in February, showing that the exercise of our own judgment was not incon- sistent with the instruction and authority of the Church, or with individual modesty and humility, [viz., the thirty-first and thirty- second in vol. iv.] They were not in the least controversial, and neither mentioned nor alluded to the Oxford writers. And I have preached only these two which could even be supposed to bear upon their doctrines. Indeed, I should not think it right, except under very different circumstances from "present ones, to occupy the boys' time or thoughts with such controversies." The general principles, accordingly, which form the groundwork of all these sermons, are such as are capable of a far wider application than to any particular school of English opinion, and often admit of direct application to the moral condition of the school. But the quick ears of boys no doubt were always ready to give such sermons a more personal character than he had intended, or perhaps had even in his mind at the moment ; and at times, when the fear of these opinions was more forcibly impressed upon him, the allusion and even mention of the writers in question is so direct, that no one could mistake it. But it was of course in their direct practical application to the LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 115 boys, that the chief novelty and excellence of his sermons consist- ed. Yet, though he spoke with almost conversational plainness on the peculiar condition of public schools, his language never left an impression of familiarity, rarely of personal allusion. In cases of notorious individual misconduct, he generally shrunk from any pointed mention of them, and on one occasion when he wished to address the boys on an instance of untruthfulness which had deeply grieved him, he had the sermon before the regular service, in order to be alone in the Chapel with the boys, without the pres- ence even of the other masters.1 Earnest and even impassioned as his appeals were, himself at times almost overcome with emo- tion, there was yet nothing in them of excitement. In speaking of the occasional deaths in the school, he would dwell on the general solemnity of the event, rather than on any individual or agitating details ; and the impression thus produced, instead of belonging to the feeling of the moment, has become part of an habitual rule for the whole conduct of life. Often he would speak with severity and bitter disappointment of the evils of the place ; yet there was hardly ever a sermon which did not contain some words of encour- agement. " I have never," he said in his last sermon, " wished to speak with exaggeration : it seems to me as unwise as it is wrong to do so. I think that it is quite right to observe what is hopeful in us, as well as what is threatening ; that general confessions of unmixed evil are deceiving and hardening, rather than arous- ing ; that our evil never looks so really dark as when we contrast it with any thing which there mav be in us of good." (Serm. vol. v. p. 460.) Accordingly, even from the first, and much more in after years, there was blended with his sterner tone a strain of affectionate en- treaty— an appeal to principles, which could be appreciated only by a few— exhortations to duties, such as self-denial, and visiting the poor, which some at least might practise, whilst none could deny their obligation. There also appeared most evidently — what in- deed pervaded his whole school life — the more than admiration with which he regarded those who struggled against the stream of school opinion, and the abiding comfort which they afforded him. In them he saw not merely good boys and obedient schol- ars, but the companions of every thing high and excellent, with which his strong historical imagination peopled, the past, or which his lively sense of things unseen realized in the invisible world. There were few present in the chapel who were not at 1 On another occasion, the practice of drinking having prevailed to a great extent in the school, lie addressed the boys at considerable lengih from his place in the great school, saying that he should have spoken to them from the pulpit, but that as there were others present in the chapel, he wished to hide their shame. And then, (saya one who was present,) " in a tone of the deepest feeling, as if it wrung his inmost heart to confess the existence of such an evil amongst us," he dwelt upon the sin and the folly of the habit, even where intoxication was not produced — its evil effects both on body and mind — the folly of fancying it to be manly — its geneial effect on the school. J IQ LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. least for the moment touched, when, in one of his earliest ser- mons, he closed one of these earnest appeals with the lines from Milton which always deeply moved him, — the blessing on Abdiel. But more than either matter or manner of his preaching, was the impression of himself. Even the mere readers of his sermons will derive from them the history of his whole mind, and of his whole management of the school. But to his hearers it was more than this. It was the man himself, there more than in any other place, concentrating all his various faculties and feelings on one sole object, combating face to face the evil with which, directly or indirectly, he was elsewhere perpetually struggling. He was not the preacher or the clergyman, who had left behind all his usual thoughts and occupations as soon as he had ascended the pulpit. He was still the scholar, the historian, and theologian, basing all that he said, not indeed ostensibly, but consciously, and often visi- bly, on the deepest principles of the past and present. He was still the instructor and the schoolmaster, only teaching and edu- cating with increased solemnity and energy. He was still the simple-hearted and earnest man, labouring to win others to share in his own personal feelings of disgust at sin, and love of goodness, and to trust to the same faith in which he hoped to live and die himself. It is difficult to describe, without seeming to exaggerate, the at- tention with which he was heard by all above the very young boys. Years have passed away, and many of his pupils can look back to hardly any greater interest than that with which, for those twenty minutes, Sunday after Sunday, they sat beneath that pul- pit, with their eyes fixed upon him, and their attention strained to the utmost to catch every word that he uttered. It is true, that, even to the best, there was much, and to the mass of boys, the greater part of what he said, that must have passed away from them as soon as they had heard it, without any corresponding fruits. But they were struck, as boys naturally would be, by the originality of his thoughts, and what always impressed them as the beauty of his language ; and in the substance of what he said, much that might have seemed useless, because for the most part impracticable to boys, was not without its effect in breaking com- pletely through the corrupt atmosphere of school opinion, and ex- hibiting before them once every week an image of high principle and feeling, which they felt was not put on for the occasion, but was constantly living amongst them. And to all it must have been an advantage, that, for once in their lives, they had listened to sermons, which none of them could associate with the thought of weariness, formality,, or exaggeration. On many there was left an impression to which, though unheeded at the time, they recurred in after life. Even the most careless boys would sometimes, during the course of the week, refer almost involuntarily to the sermon of the past Sunday, as a condemnation of what they were doing. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. J 17 Some, whilst they wonder how it was that so little practical ef- fect was produced upon themselves at the time, yet retain the recollection, (to give the words of one who so describes himself,) that, " I used to listen to them from first to last with a kind of awe, and over and over again could not join my friends at the chapel door, but would walk home to be alone ; and I remem- ber the same effects being produced by them, more or less, on others, whom I should have thought hard as stones, and on whom I should think Arnold looked as some of the worst boys in the school." IV. Although the Chapel was the only place in which, to the school at large, he necessarily appeared in a purely pastoral and personal relation — yet this relation extended in his view to his whole management of his scholars ; and he conceived it to be his duty and that of the other masters to throw themselves, as much as possible, into the way of understanding and entering into the feelings of the boys, not only in their official intercourse, but al- ways. When he was first appointed at Rugby, his friends had feared that the indifference which he felt towards characters and persons with whom he had no especial sympathy, would have in- terfered with his usefulness as Head-master. But in the case of boys, a sense of duty supplied the want of that interest in char- acter, as such, of which, in the case of men, he possessed but little. Much as there was in the peculiar humour of boys which his own impatience of moral thoughtlessness, or of treating serious or im- portant subjects with any thing like ridicule or irony, prevented him from fully appreciating, yet he truly felt, that the natural youthfulness and elasticity of his constitution gave him a great advantage in dealing with them. "When I find that I cannot ran up the library stairs," he said, " I shall know that it is time for me to go." Thus traits and actions of boys, which to a stranger would have told nothing, were to him highly significant. His quick and far-sighted eye became familiar with the face and manner of every boy in the school. " Do you see," he said to an assistant master who had recently come, " those two boys walking together : I never saw them together before ; you should make it an especial point of observing the company they keep : — nothing so tells the changes in a boy's character." The insight which he thus accuiired into the general characteristics of boyhood, will not be doubted by any reader of his sermons; and his scholars used sometimes to be startled by the knowledge of their own notions, which his speeches to them implied. " Often and often," says one of them, " have I said to myself, ' If it was one of ourselves who had just spoken, he could not more completely have known and understood our thoughts and ideas.' " And, though it might happen that his opin- ion of boys would, like his opinions of men, be too much influenced by his disposition to judge of the whole from some one prominent feature, and though his fixed adherence to general rules might |18 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. sometimes prevent him from making exceptions where the case required it ; yet few could have been long familiar with him without being struck by the distinctness, the vividness, and, in spite of great occasional mistakes, the very general truth and accuracy of his delineation of their individual characters, or the readiness with which, whilst speaking most severely of a mass of boys, he would make allowances, and speak hopefully in any particular instance that came before him. Often before any other eye had discerned it, he saw the germs of coming good or evil, and pro- nounced confident decisions, doubted at the time, but subsequently proved to be correct ; so that those who lived with him, de- scribed themselves as trusting to his opinions of boys as to divi- nations, and feeling as if by an unfavourable judgment their fate was sealed. His relation to the boarders in his own house (called by dis- tinction the School-house, and containing between sixty and seven- ty boys) naturally afforded more scope for communication than with the rest of the school. Besides the opportunities which he took of showing kindness and attention to them in his own family, in cases of distress or sickness, he also made use of the preparation for confirmation for private conversation with them ; and during the later years of his life was accustomed to devote an hour or more in the evening to seeing each of them alone by turns, and talking on such topics as presented themselves, leading them if pos- sible to more serious subjects. The general management of the house, both from his strong dislike to intruding on the privacy even of the youngest, and from the usual principles of trust on which he proceeded, he left as much as possible to the Praepostors. Still his presence and manner when he appeared officially, either on special calls, or on the stated occasions of calling over their names twice a day, was not without its effect. One of the scenes that most lives in the memory of his school-house pupils is their night muster in the rudely lighted hall — his tall figure at the head of the files of boys arranged on each side of the long tables, whPst the prayers were read by one of the Praepostors, and a portion of Scripture by himself. This last was a practice, which he introduced soon after his arrival, when, on one of those occasions, he spoke strongly to the boys on the necessity of each reading some part of "the Bible every day, and then added, that as he feared that many would not make the rule for themselves, he should for the future always read a passage every evening at this time. He usually brought in his Greek Tes- tament, and read about half a chapter in English, most frequently from the close of St. John's Gospel ; when from the Old Testament, especially his favourite Psalms, the 19th for example, and the 107th, and the others relating to the beauty of the natural world. He never made any comment ; but his manner of reading impress- ed the boys considerably, and it was observed by some of them, shortly after the practice was commenced, that they had never understood the Psalms before. On Sunday nights he read a prayer LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 119 of his own, and before he began to preach regularly in the chapel, delivered the short addresses which have been before mentioned, and which he resumed, in addition to his other work on Sundays, during the' last year and a half of his life. . With the boys in the Sixth Form his private intercourse was comparatively frequent, whether in the lessons, or in questions of school government, or in the more familiar relation in which they were brought to him in their calls before and after the holidays, their dinners with him during the half year, and the visits which one or more used by turns to pay to him in Westmoreland during part of the vacation. But with the greater part of the school it was almost entirely confined to such opportunities as arose out of the regular course of school discipline or instruction, and the occasional invitations to his house of such amongst the younger boys, as he could find any reason or excuse for asking. It would thus often happen in so large a number that a boy would leave Rugby without any personal communication with him at all ; and even in the higher part of the school, those who most respected him would sometimes complain, even with bitterness, that he did not give them greater opportunities of asking his ad- vice, or himself offer more frequently to direct their studies and guide their inquiries. Latterly, indeed, he communicated with them more frequently, and expressed himself more freely both in public and private on the highest subjects. But he was always re- strained from speaking much or often, both from the extreme diffi- culty which he felt in saying any thing without a real occasion for it, and also from his principle of leaving as much as possible to be filled up by the judgment of the boys themselves, and from his deep conviction that, in the most important matters of all, the move- ment must come not from without but from within. And it certain- ly was the case that, whenever he did make exceptions to this rule, and spoke rather as their friend than their master, the sim- plicity of his words, the rareness of their occurrence, and the stern back-ground of his ordinary administration, gave a double force to all that was said. Such, for example, would be the effect of his speaking of swear- ing to a boy, not so much in anger or reproof, as assuring him how every year he would learn to see more and more how foolish and disgusting such language was ; or again, the distinction he would point out to them between mere amusement and such as encroached on the next day's duties, when as he said, " it immediately becomes what St. Paul calls revelling.'''' Such also would be the impression of his severe rebukes for individual faults, showing by their very shortness and abruptness his loathing and abhorrence of evil. " Nowhere," he said, in speaking to some boys on bad behaviour during prayers at their boarding-house, — " Nowhere is Satan's work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridi- cule." Such also were the cases, in which, more than once, boys, who were tormented while at school with skeptical doubts, took ]20 LIFE °F DR. ARNOLD. courage at last to unfold them to him, and were almost startled to find the ready sympathy with which, instead of denouncing them as profane, he entered into their difficulties and applied his whole mind to assuage them. So again, when dealing with the worst class of boys, in whom he saw indications of improvement, he would grant indulgences, which on ordinary occasions he would have denied, with a view of encouraging them by signs of his con- fidence in them ; and at times, on discovering cases of vice, he would, instead of treating them with contempt or extreme severity, tenderly allow the force of the temptation, and urge it upon them as a proof brought home to their own minds, how surely they must look for help out of themselves. In his preparation of boys for Confirmation he followed the same principle. The printed questions which he issued for them were intended rather as guides to their thoughts than as necessary to be formally answered ; and his own interviews with them were very brief. But the few words which he then spoke — the simple repetition, for example, of the promise made to prayer, with his earnest assurance, that if that was not true, nothing was true ; if any thing in the Bible could be relied upon, it was that — have be- come the turning point of a boy's character, and graven on his memory as a law for life. But. independently of particular occasions of intercourse, there was a deep under current of sympathy which extended to almost all, and which from time to time broke through the reserve of his outward manner. In cases where it might have been thought that tenderness would have been extinguished by indignation, he was sometimes so deeply affected in pronouncing sentence of punish- ment on offenders, as to be hardly able to speak. "I felt," he said once of some great fault of which he had heard in one of the Sixth Form, and his eyes filled with tears as he spoke, " as if it had been one of my own children, and, till I had ascertained that it was really true, I mentioned it to no one, not even to any of the mas- ters." And this feeling began, before he could have had any per- sonal knowledge of them. " If he should turn out ill," he said of a young boy of promise to one of the assistant masters, and his voice trembled with emotion as he spoke, " I think it would break my heart." Nor were any thoughts so bitter to him, as those sug- gested by the innocent faces of little boys as they first came from home, — nor any expressions of his moral indignation deeper, than when he heard of their being tormented or tempted into evil by their companions. " It is a most touching thing to me," he said once in the hearing of one of his former pupils, on the mention of some new comers, " to receive a new fellow from his father — when I think what an influence there is in this place for evil, as well as for good. I do not know any thing which affects me more." His pupil, who had, on his own first coming, been impressed chiefly by the severitv of his manner, expressed some surprise, adding, that he should have expected this to wear away with the succession of LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 121 fresh arrivals. " No," he said, " if ever I could receive a new boy from his father without emotion, I should think it was high time to be off." What he felt thus on ordinary occasions, was heightened of course when any thing brought strongly before him any evil in the school. " If this goes on," he wrote to a former pupil on some such occasion, " it will end either my life at Rugby, or my life altogether." " How can I go on," he said, " with my Roman History? There all is noble and high-minded, and here I find nothing but the re- verse." The following extract from a letter to his friend, Sir T. Pasley, describes this feeling. " Since I began this letter, I have had some of the troubles of school- keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of boy-nature, which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a system of per- secution carried on by the bad against the good, and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very account ; and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and moral, when if left to themselves they would have rather shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys, who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's ' Shams') are sure on these occa- sions to swim with the stream, and take part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the Scripture says about the strait gate and the wide one, — a view of human nature, which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the nakedness of boy-nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in a whole city. And how to meet this evil I really do not know ; but to find it thus rife alter I have been [so many] years fighting against it, is so sickening, that it is very hard not to throw up the cards in despair, and upset the table. But then the stars of nobleness, which I see amidst the darkness, in the case of the few good, are so cheering, that one is inclined to stick to the ship again, and have another good try at getting her about." V. As, on the one hand, his interest and sympathy with the boys far exceeded any direct manifestation' of it towards them, so, on the other hand, the impression which he produced upon them was derived, not so much from any immediate intercourse or con- versation with him, as from the general influence of his whole character, displayed consistently whenever he appeared before them. This influence, with its consequent effects, was gradually on the increase during the whole of his stay. From the earliest period, indeed, the boys weye conscious of something unlike what they had been taught to imagine of a schoolmaster, and by many, a lasting regard was contracted for him ; but it was not till he had been in his post some years, that there arose that close bond of union which characterized his relation to his elder pupils ; and it was, again, not till later still that this feeling extended itself, more or less, through the mass of the school, so that, in the higher forms at least, it became the fashion (so to speak) to think and talk of him with pride and affection. The liveliness and simplicity of his whole behaviour must al- 9 122 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. ways have divested his earnestness of any appearance of morose- ness and affectation. " He calls us fellows" was the astonished expression of the boys when, soon after his first coming, they heard him speak of them by the familiar name in use amongst themselves ; and in his later years, they observed with pleasure the unaffected in- terest with which, in the long autumn afternoons, he would often stand in the school-field and watch the issue of their favourite games of football. But his ascendency was, generally speaking, not gained, at least in the first instance, by the effect of his outward manner. There was a shortness, at times, something of an awkwardness, in his address, occasioned partly by his natural shyness, partly by his dislike of wasting words on trivial occasions, which to boys must have been often repulsive rather than conciliating ; something also of extreme severity in his voice and countenance, beyond what he was himself at all aware of. With the very little boys, indeed, his man- ner partook of that playful kindness and tenderness, which always marked his intercourse with children ; in examining them in the lower forms, he would sometimes take them on his knee, and go through picture-books of the Bible or of English History, covering the text ,of the narrative with his hand, and making them explain to him the subject of* the several prints. But, in those above this early age, and yet below the rank in the school which brought them into closer contact with him, the sternness of his character was the first thing that impressed them. In many, no doubt, this feeling was one of mere dread, which, if not subsequently removed or modified, only served to repel those who felt it to a greater distance from him. But in many also, this was, even in the earlier period of their stay, mingled with an involuntary and, perhaps, an uncon- scious respect inspired by the sense of the manliness and straight- forwardness of his dealings, and still more, by the sense of the general force of his moral character ; by the belief (to use the words of different pupils) in " his extraordinary knack, for I can call it nothing else, of showing that his object in punishing or reproving, was not his own good or pleasure, but that of the boy," — " in a truthfulness — an eihxQiveia — a sort of moral transparency ;" in the fixedness of his purpose, and " the searchingness of his practical in- sight into boys," by a consciousness, almost amounting to solemnity, that " when his eye was upon you, he looked into your inmost heart ;" that there was something in his very tone and outward as- pect, before which any thing low, or false, or cruel, instinctively quailed and cowered. And the defect of occasional over-hastiness and vehemence of expression, which during the earlier period of his stay at times involved him in some trouble, did not materially interfere with their general notion of his character. However mistaken it might be in the individual case, it was evident to those who took any thought about it, that that ashy paleness and that awful frown were almost always the expression, not of personal resentment, but of deep, ineffable scorn and indignation at the sight of vice and LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 123 sin ; and it was not without its effect to observe, that it was a fault against which he himself was constantly on the watch — and which, in fact, was in later years so nearly subdued, that most of those who had only known him during that time can recall no instance of it during their stay. But as boys advanced in the school, out of this feeling of fear " grew up a deep admiration, partaking largely of the nature of awe, and this softened into a sort of loyalty, which remained even in the closer and more affectionate sympathy of later years." — " I am sure," writes a pupil who had no personal communications with him whilst at school, and but little afterwards, and who never was in the Sixth Form, " that I do not exaggerate my feelings when I say, that I felt a love and reverence for him as one of quite awful greatness and goodness, for whom I well remember that I used to think I would gladly lay down my life ;" adding, with reference to the thoughtless companions with whom he had associated, " I used to believe that I too had a Work to do for him in the school, and I did for his sake labour to raise the tone of the set I lived in, particularly as regarded himself." It was in boys immediately be- low the highest form that this new feeling would usually rise for the first time, and awaken a strong wish to know more of him. Then, as they came into personal contact with him, their general sense of his ability became fixed, in the proud belief that they were scholars of a man who would be not less remarkable to the world than he was to themselves ; and their increasing consciousness of his own sincerity of purpose, and of the interest which he took in them, often awakened, even in the careless and indifferent, an out- ward respect for goodness, and an animation in their work before unknown to them. And when they left school, they felt that they had been in an atmosphere unlike that of the world about them : some of those, who lamented not having made more use of his teaching whilst with him, felt that " a better thought than ordinary often reminded them how he first led to it ; and in matters of lite- rature almost invariably found, that when any. idea of seeming originality occurred to them, that its germ was first suggested by some remark of Arnold," — that " still, to this day, in reading the Scriptures, or other things, they could constantly trace back a line of thought that came originally from him, as from a great parent mind." And when they heard of his death, they became conscious — often for the first time — of the large place which he had occupied in their thoughts, if not in their affections. Such was the case with almost all who were in the Sixth Form with him during the last ten years of his life ; but with some who, from peculiar circumstances of greater sympathy with him, came into more permanent communication with him, there was a yet stronger bond of union. His interest in his elder pupils, unlike a mere professional interest, seemed to increase after they had left the school. No sermons were so full of feeling and instruction as those which he preached on the eve of their departure for the Uni- 124 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. versities. It was now that the intercourse which at school had been so broken, and as it were stolen by snatches, was at last enjoyed between them to its full extent. It was sometimes in the few part- ing words — the earnest blessing which he then bestowed upon them — that they became for the first time conscious of his real care and love for them. The same anxiety for their good which he had felt in their passage through school, he now showed, without the necessity of official caution and reserve, in their passage through life. To any pupil who ever showed any desire to continue his connexion with him, his house was always open, and his advice and sympathy ready. No half-year, after the four first years of his stay at Rugby, passed without a visit from his former scholars : some of them would come three or four times a year ; some would stay in his house for weeks. He would ofler to prepare them for their University examinations by previous examinations of his own ; he never shrunk from adding any of them to his already nu- merous correspondents, encouraging them to write to him in all perplexities. To any who were in narrow circumstances, not in one case but in several, he would at once offer assistance, sometimes making them large presents of books on their entrance at the Uni- versity, sometimes tendering them large pecuniary aid, and urging to them that his power of doing so was exactly one of those ad- vantages of his position which he was most bound to use. In writing for the world at large, they were in his thoughts, " in whose welfare," he said, " I naturally have the deepest interest, and in whom old impressions may be supposed to have still so much force, that I may claim from them at least a patient hearing." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. lv.) And when annoyed by distractions from within the school, or opposition from without, he turned, he used to say, to their visits as " to one of the freshest springs of his life." They on their side now learned to admire those parts of his character which, whilst at school, they had either not known or only imperfectly understood. Pupils with characters most differ- ent from each other's, and from his own — often with opinions di- verging more and more widely from his as they advanced in life — looked upon him with a love and reverence which made his grati- fication one of the brightest rewards of their academical studies — his good or evil fame, a constant source of interest and anxiety to them — his approbation and censure, amongst their most practical motives of action — his example, one of their most habitual rules of life. To him they turned for advice in every emergency of life, not so much for the sake of the advice itself, as because they felt that no important step ought to be taken without consulting him. An additional zest was imparted to whatever work they were en- gaged in, by a consciousness of the interest which he felt in the progress of their undertaking, and the importance which he at- tached to its result. They now felt the privilege of being able to ask him questions on the many points which his school teaching had suggested without fully developing — but yet more, perhaps, LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 125 they prized the sense of his sympathy and familiar kindness, which made them feel that they were not only his pupils, but his companions. That youthfulness of temperament which has been before noticed in his relation to boys, was still more important in his relation to young men. All the new influences which so strong- ly divide the students of the nineteenth century from those of the last, had hardly less interest for himself than for them ; and, after the dulness or vexation of business or of controversy, a visit of a few days to Rugby would remind them, (to apply a favourite im- age of his own,) " how refreshing it is in the depth of winter, when the ground is covered with snow, and all is dead and lifeless, to walk by the sea-shore, and enjoy the eternal freshness and live- liness of ocean. His very presence seemed to create a new spring of health and vigour within them, and to give to life an interest and an elevation which remained with them long after they had left him again, and dwelt so habitually in their thoughts, as a liv- ing image, that, when death had taken him away, the bond appear- ed to be still unbroken, and the sense of separation almost lost in the still deeper sense of a life and an union indestructible. What were the permanent effects of this system and influence, is a question which cannot yet admit of an adequate answer, least of all from his pupils. The mass of boys are, doubtless, like the mass of men, incapable of receiving a deep and lasting impres- sion from any individual character, however remarkable ; and it must also be borne in mind, that hardly any of his scholars were called by rank or station to take a leading place in English socie- ty, where the effect of his teaching and character, whatever it might be in itself, would have been far more conspicuous to the world at large. He himself, though never concealing from himself the impor- tance of his work, would constantly dwell on the scantiness of its results. " I came to Rugby," he said, " full of plans for school re- form ; but 1 soon found that the reform of a public school was a much more difficult thing than I had imagined." And again, " I dread to hear this called a religious school. I know how much there is to be done before it can really be called so." — " With re- gard to one's work," he said, " be it school or parish, I suppose the desirable feeling to entertain is, always to expect to succeed, and never think that you have succeeded." He hardly ever seems to have indulged in any sense of superiority to the other public schools. Eton, for example, he would often defend against the attacks to which it was exposed, and the invidious comparisons which some persons would draw between that school and Rugby. What were his feelings towards the improvements taking place there and elsewhere, after his coming to Rugby, have been mentioned alrea- dy ; even between the old system and his own, he rarely drew a 126 LIFE 0P DR- ARNOLD. strong distinction, conscious though he must have been of the to- tally new elements which he was introducing. The earliest let- ters from Rugby express an unfeigned pleasure in what he found existing, and there is no one disparaging mention of his predeces- sor in all the correspondence, published or unpublished, that has been collected for this work. If, however, the prediction of Dr. Hawkins at his election,1 has been in any way fulfilled, the result of his work need not depend on the rank, however eminent, to which he raised Rugby School ; or the influence, however powerful, which he exercised over his Rugby scholars. And if there be any truth in the following let- ter from Dr. Moberly, to whose testimony additional weight is giv- en, as well by his very wide difference of political and ecclesiasti- cal opinion, as by his personal experience, first as a scholar at Winchester, and an under-graduate at Oxford, then as the tutor of the most flourishing college in that University, and lastly, in his present position as Head-master of Winchester, it will be felt that, not so much amongst his own pupils, nor in the scene of his ac- tual labours, as in every Public School throughout England, is to be sought the chief and enduring monument of Dr. Arnold's Head-mastership at Rugby. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF DR. MOBERLY, HEAD-MASTER OF WINCHESTER. " Possibly," he writes, after describing his own recollections as a school- boy, " other schools may have been less deep in these delinquencies than Winchester; I believe that in many respects they were. But I did not find, on going to the University, that I was under disadvantages as compared with those who came from other places ; on the contrary, the tone of young men at the University, whether they came from Winchester, Eton, Rugby, Harrow, or wherever else, was universally irreligious. A religious under- graduate was very rare, very much laughed at when he appeared ; and I think I may confidently say, hardly to be found among public-school men ; or, if this be too strongly said, hardly to be found, except in cases where pri- vate and domestic training, or good dispositions, had prevailed over the school habits and tendencies. A most singular and striking change has come upon our public schools — a change too great for any person to appre- ciate adequately, who has not known them in both these times. This change is' undoubtedly part of a general improvement of our generation in respect of piety and reverence, but I am sure that to Dr. Arnold's personal earnest simplicity of purpose, strength of character, power of influence, and piety, which none who ever came near him could mistake or question, the carrying of this improvement into our schools is mainly attributable. He was the first. It soon began to be matter of observation to us in the University, that his pupils brought quite a different character with them to Oxford than that which we knew elsewhere. I do not speak of opinions; but his pupils were thoughtful, manly-minded, conscious of duty and obligation, when they first came to college ; we regretted, indeed, that they were often deeply imbued with principles which we disapproved, but we cordially acknowledged the immense improvement in their characters in respect of morality and personal piety, and looked on Dr. Arnold as exercising an influence for good, which (for how many years I know not) had been abso- lutely unknown to our public schools. "I knew personally but little of him. You remember the first occasion on which I ever had the pleasure of seeing him : but I have always felt and « See p. 55. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 127 acknowledged that I owe more to a few casual remarks of his in respect of the government of a public school, than to any advice or example of any- other person. If there be improvement in the important points of which I have been speaking at Winchester, (and from the bottom of my heart I tes- tify with great thankfulness that the improvement is real and great,) I do declare, in justice, that his example encouraged me'to hope that it might be effected, and his hints suggested to me the way of effecting it. " I fear that the reply which I have been able to make to your question, will hardly be so satisfactory as you expected, as it proceeds so entirely upon my own observations and inferences. At the same time I have had, per- haps, unusual'opportunity for forming an opinion, having been six years at a public school at the time of their being at the lowest, — having then min- gled with young men from other schools at the University, having had many pupils from the different schools, and among them several of Dr. Ar- nold's most distinguished ones ; and at last, having had near eight years' experience, as the master of a school which has undergone in great measure the very alteration which I have been speaking of. Moreover, I have often said the very things, which I have here written, in the hearing of men of all sorts, and have never found any body disposed to contradict them. Believe me, my dear Stanley, Yours most faithfully, George Moberly." CHAPTER IV, GENERAL LIFE AT RUGBY. It was natural that with the wider range of duty, and the more commanding position which Dr. Arnold's new station gave him, there should have been a new stage in his character and views, hardly less marked intellectually, than that which accompanied his change from Oxford to Laleham had been morally. The several subjects of thought, which more or less he had already entertained, especially during the two or three preceding years, now fell rapidly one by one into their proper places. Ready as he still was to take the advice of his friends in practice, his opinions now took a more independent course ; and whatever subsequent modification they underwent, came not from without but from within. Whilst he became more and more careful to reconcile his own views with those, whom, in ages past or present, he reverenced as really great men, the circle within which he bestowed his veneration became far more exclusive. The purely practical element sank into greater subordination to the more imaginative and philosophical tendencies of his mind ; — in works of poetical or speculative genius, which at an earlier period he had been inclined to depreciate, he now, looking at them from another point of view, took an increasing delight. Even within the letters of the first year there is a marked altera- tion down to the very form of his handwriting, and the very mode of addressing his friends. The character which has already been given of his boyish verses at Oxford, becomes less and less appli- cable to the simple and touching fragments of poetry in which from time to time he expressed the feelings of his later years. The change of style of his published writings from the baldness of his earlier works to the vigorous English of his mature age, indicates the corresponding impulse given to his powers, and the greater free- dom and variety of his new range of thought. With his entrance, therefore, on his work at Rugby, his public life, (if it may so be called,) no less than his professional life, prop- erly begins. But what was true of the effect of his own character in his sphere as a teacher, is hardly less true of it in his sphere as LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 129 an author. His works were not merely the inculcations of partic- ular truths, but the expression of his whole mind ; and excited in those who read them a sentiment almost of personal regard or of personal dislike, as the case might be, over and above the approba- tion or disapprobation of the opinions which they contained. Like himself, they partook at once of a practical and speculative charac- ter, which exposed them, like himself, to considerable misapprehen- sion. On the one hand, even the most permanent of them seemed to express the feeling of the hour which dictated them. On the other hand, even the most transitory seemed to express no less the fixed ideas, by which his whole life was regulated ; and it may be worth while, therefore, in regard to both these aspects, without descending into the details and circumstances of each particular work, which the ensuing correspondence will of itself sufficiently describe, to offer briefly a few remarks which may serve as a pre- face to all of them. I. Greatly as his practical turn of mind was modified in his later years, and averse as he always was to what are technically called " practical men," yet, in the sense of having no views, how- ever high, which he did not labour to bring into practice sooner or later, he remained eminently practical to the end of his life. " I always think," he used to say, " of that magnificent sentence of Bacon, ' In this world, God only and the angels may be specta- tors.'" "Stand still, and see the salvation of God," he observed in allusion to Dr. Pusey's celebrated sermon on that passage, " was true advice to Ihe Israelites on the shores of the Red Sea ; but it was not the advice which is needed in ordinary circumstances ; it would have been false advice when they were to conquer Ca- naan." " I cannot," he said, " enter fully into these lines of Words- worth— ' Tome the meanest flower that breathes can give Thoughts thai do often lie too deep for tears.' There is to me something in them of a morbid feeling — life is not long enough to take such intense interest in objects themselves so little. Secluded as he was, both by his occupations and his domestic habits, from contact with the world, even more than most men in his station, yet the interest with which, now more than ever, he entered into public affairs, was such as can rarely be felt by men not actually engaged in the government of the country. The life of a nation, he said, was to him almost as distinct as that of an individual ; and whatever might be his habitual subjects of public interest, — the advance of political and social reform, — the questions of peace and war, — the sufferings of the poorer classes, — the growth of those rising commonwealths in the Australian colonies, where, from time to time, he entertained an ardent desire to pass the close of his life, in the hope of influencing, if possible, what he conceived to be the germs of the future destinies of England and of the world, — came before him with a vividness which seemed to belong rather 130 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. to a citizen of Greece- or Rome, than to the comparative apathy and retirement of the members of modern states. It was of course only or chiefly through his writings, that he could hope to act on the country at large ; and they accordingly, almost all, became inseparably bound up with the course of public events. They were not, in fact, so much words as deeds ; not so much the result of an intention to instruct, as of an incontrollable desire to give vent to the thoughts that were struggling within him. " I have a testimony to deliver," was the motive which dictated almost all of them. " I must write or die," was an expression which he used more than once in times of great public interest, and which was hardly too strong to describe what he felt. If he was editing Thucydides, it was with the thought that he was engaged, " not on an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of the scholar, as for the instruction of the statesman and the citi- zen." (Pref. vol. iii. p. xxii.) If he felt himself called upon to write the History of Rome, one chief reason was, because it " could be understood by none so well as by those who have grown up under the laws, who have been engaged in the parties, who are them- selves citizens of our kingly commonwealth of England." (Pref. vol. i. p. vii.) If he was anxious to set on foot a Commentary of the Scrip- tures, it was mostly at times, when he was struck by the reluctance or incapacity of the men of his own generation to apply to their own social state the warnings of the Apostles and Prophets. If he was desirous of maintaining against the Oxford school his own views of the Church, it was that, " when he looked at the social condition of his countrymen," he " could not doubt that here was the work for the Church of Christ to do, that none else could do it, and that with the blessing of her Almighty Head she could." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. cxv.) It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, if that impatience of present evil, which belonged alike to his principles and his dispo- sition, appeared in his writings, and imparted to them — often, pro- bably, unknown to himself— something, if not of a polemical aspect, at least of an attitude of opposition and attack, averse though he was himself to controversy, and carefully avoiding it with those whom he knew personally, even when frequently challenged to enter upon it. " The wisdom of winter is the folly of spring," was a maxim with him, which would often explain changes of feeling and expression that to many might seem inconsistencies. " If I were living in London," he said, " I should not talk against the evil tendencies of the clergy, any more than if I were living in Oxford I should talk against the evil tendencies of the political economists. It is my nature always to attack that evil which seems to me most present." It was thus a favourite topic, in his exposition of Scrip- tire, to remark how the particular sins of the occasion were de- nt need, the particular forms of Antichrist indicated often without the qualification, which would have been required by the pres- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 13| ence of the opposite danger. " Contrast," he used to say, " the lan- guage of the first chapter of Isaiah, when the hierarchy of Judah was in its full pride and power, with the language of the second chapter of Malachi, when it was in a state of decline and neglect." Connected with this, was the peculiar vehemence of language, which he often used, in speaking of the subjects and events of the day. This was indeed partly to be accounted for by his eagerness to speak out whatever was in his mind, especially when moved by his keen sense of what he thought evil — partly by the natural sim- plicity of his mode . of speech, which led him to adopt phrases in their simplest sense, without stopping to explain them, or suspecting that they would be misunderstood. But with regard to public prin- ciples and parties, it was often more than this. With every wish to be impartial, yet his natural temperament, as he used himself to acknowledge, made it difficult for him to place himself completely in another's point of view ; and thus he had a tendency to judge individuals, with whom he had no personal acquaintance, from his conception of the party to which they belonged, and to look at both through the medium of that strong power of association, which influenced materially his judgment, not only of events, but of men, and even of places. Living individuals, therefore, and existing principles, became lost to his view in the long line of images, past and future, in which they only formed one link. Every political or ecclesiastical movement suggested to him the recollection of its historical representative in past times, — and yet more, as by an in- stinct, half religious and half historical, the thought of what he conceived to be the prototypes of the various forms of error and wickedness denounced by the Prophets in the Old Testament, or by our Lord and his Apostles in the New. And looking not back- wards only, but forwards, to their remotest consequences, and again guiding himself, as he thought, by the example of the language of St. Paul, who ;' seemed to have had his eye fixed in vision rather upon the full-grown evil of later times,- than upon the first imper- fect show — the faint indications of it — in his own time," (Serm. vol. v. p. 346,) he saw in them the germs of mischief yet to come, — not only the mischief of their actual triumph, but the mischief of the reaction against them. There was besides a peculiar importance attaching, in his view, to political questions, with which every reader of his works must be familiar. The life of the commonwealth is to him the main subject of history — the laws of political science, the main lesson of history — " the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government, the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind." And those who read his letters will be startled at times by the interest with which he watches the changes of administration, where to many the real difference would seem to be comparatively trifling. Thus he would speak of a ministry advocating even good mea- sures inconsistently with their position or principles, " as a daily painfullness — a moral east wind, which made him feel uncomfort- 132 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. able without any particular ailment" — or lament the ascendency of false political views, as tending " to the sure moral degradation of the whole community, and the ultimate social disorganization of our system," " not from reading the Morning Chronicle or the Ed- inburgh Review, but from reading the Bible and Aristotle, and all history." Such expressions as these must indeed be taken with the ne- cessary qualifications which belong to all words spoken to intimate friends in a period of great excitement. But they may serve to illustrate at least the occasional strength of feeling which it is the object of these remarks to explain. It arose, no doubt, in part from his tendency to view all things in a practical and concrete form, and in part from his belief of the large power possessed by the supreme governors of society over the social and moral condition of those intrusted to them. But there were also real principles present to his mind whenever he thus spoke, which seemed to him so certain, that " daily experience could hardly remove his wonder at finding that they .did not appear so to others." (Mod. Hist. Lect., p. 391.) What these principles were in detail, his own let- ters will sufficiently show. But it must be borne in mind how, whilst he certainly believed that they were exemplified to a great degree in the actual state of English politics, the meaning which he attached to them rose so far above their meaning as commonly used, that it could hardly be thought that the same subject was spoken of. Conservatism, in his mouth, was not merely the watch- word of an English party, but the symbol of an evil, against which his whole life, public and private, was one continued struggle ; which he dreaded in his own heart, no less than in the institutions of his country, and his abhorrence of which will be found to per- vade not only the pamphlets which have been most condemned, but the sermons which have been most admired, namely, the spirit of resistance to all change. Jacobinism, again, in his use of the word, included not only the extreme movement party in France or England, to which he usually applied it, but all the natural ten- dencies of mankind, whether " democratical, priestly, or chival- rous," to oppose the .authority of Law, divine and human, which he regarded with so deep a reverence. Popular principles and de- mocracy (when he used these words in a good sense) were not the opposition to an hereditary monarchy or peerage, which he always valued as precious elements of national life, but were inseparably blended with his strong belief in the injustice and want of sympathy generally shown by the higher to the lower orders, — a belief which he often declared had been first brought home to him. when after having, as a young man at Oxford, held the opposite view, he first began seriously to study the language used with regard to it by St. James and the Old Testament Prophets. Liberal principles were not merely the expression of his adherence to a Whig ministry, but of his belief in the constant necessity of applying those prin- ciples of advance and reform, which, in their most perfect develop- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 133 ment, he conceived to be identical with Christianity itself. Even in their lower exemplifications, and in every age of the world except that before the Fall of man from Paradise, he maintained them to have been, by the very constitution of human society, the representatives of the cause of wisdom and goodness. And this truth, no less certain in his judgment than the ordinary deductions of natural theology, he believed to have been placed on a still firmer basis by the higher standard held out in the Christian reli- gion, and the revelation of a moral law, which no intermixture of races or change of national customs could possibly endanger. That he was not, in the common sense of the word, a member of any party, is best shown by the readiness with which all parties alike, according to the fashion of the times, claimed or renounced him as an associate. Ecclesiastically, he neither belonged, nor felt himself to belong, to any of the existing sections of the English clergy ; and from the so-called High Church, Low Church, and Evangelical bodies, he always stood, not perhaps equally, but yet decidedly aloof. Politically, indeed, he held himself to be a strong Whig ; but as a matter of fact, he found that in cases of practical co-operation with that party, he differed almost as much from them as from their opponents ; and would often confess with sorrow, that there were none among them who realized what seemed to him their true principles. And whilst in later years his feelings and language on these subjects were somewhat modified, he at all times, even when most tenaciously holding to his opinions, maintained the principle, that " political truths are not, like moral truths, to be held as absolutely certain, nor ever wholly identical with the professions or practice of any party or individual." (Pref. to Hist, of Rome, vol. i. p. xi.) There were few warnings to his pu- pils on the entrance into life more solemn, than those against party- spirit, against giving to any human party, sect, society, or cause, that undivided sympathy and service whiph he held to be due only to the one party and cause of all good men under their Divine Head.1 There were few more fervent aspirations for his children, than that with which he closes a letter in 1833 : " May God grant to my sons, if they live to manhood, an unshaken love of truth, and a firm resolution to follow it for themselves, with an intense abhorrence of all party ties, save that one tie, which binds them to the party of Christ against wickedness." II. But no temporary interest or excitement was allowed to infringe on the loftiness or the unity of his ultimate ends, to which every particular plan that he took up, and every particular line of thought which he followed, was completely subordinate. How- ever open to objection may have been many of his practical sug- gestions, it must be remembered, that they were never the result of accidental fancies, but of fixed and ruling ideas. However fertile he might be in supplying details when called for, it was never on 1 See Sermon on " Who are partakers in our hope 1" vol. iii. 134 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. them, but on principles, that he rested his claim to be heard ; often and often he declared that if these could be received and acted upon, he cared nothing for the particular applications of them, which he might have proposed, and nothing for the failure of particular schemes, if he could hope that his example would excite others to execute them better. Striving to fulfil in his measure the definition of man, in which he took especial pleasure, " a being of large discourse, looking be- fore and after," he learned more and more, whilst never losing his hold on the present, to live also habitually in the past and for the future. Vehement as he was in assailing evil, his whole mind was essentially not destructive but constructive ; his love of reform was in exact proportion to his love of the institutions which he wished to reform ; his hatred of shadows in exact proportion to his love of realities. " He was an idoloclast," says Archdeacon Hare, " at once zealous and fearless in demolishing the reigning idols, and at the same time animated with a reverent love for the ideas which those idols carnalize and stifle." Impatient as he was, even to rest- lessness, of evils which seemed to him capable of remedy, he yet was ready, as some have thought even to excess, to repose with the most undoubting confidence on what he held to be a general law. " Ah," he said, speaking to a friend of the parable of the "earth, of herself, bringing forth first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear," — " how much there is in those words : I hope some day to be able to work at them thoroughly." " We walk by faith and not by sight." was a truth on which in its widest sense he en- deavoured to dwell alike in his private and public relations, — alike in practice and in speculation. "You know you do what God does," was his answer to an expression of a painful sense of the increase of a child's responsibility by an early Christian education. " We may be content, 1 think, to share the responsibility with Christ." And on more general subjects, "We must brace our minds," he said, in an unpublished sermon, " We must brace our minds to the full extent of that great truth — that ' no man hath seen God at any time ;' still amidst outward darkness and inward, — amidst a world going on, as it seems, in its own course, with no other laws than those which God has given to nature, — amidst all the doubts and perplexities of our own hearts — the deepest dif- ficulties sitting hard beside the most blessed truths — still we must seek after the Lord with unabated faith if so be that we may find him." It was not that he was not conscious of difficulties — but that (to apply his own words) "before a confessed and unconquer- able difficulty his mind reposed as quietly as in possession of a dis- covered truth." His time for reading at Laleham and Rugby was necesarily limited by his constant engagements — but his peculiar habits and turn of mind enabled him to accomplish much, which to others in similar circumstances would have been impossible. He had a re- markable facility for turning to account spare fragments of time — LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 135 for appropriating what he casually heard, and for mastering the contents of a book by a very rapid perusal. His memory was ex- ceedingly retentive of all subjects in which he took any interest ; and the studies of his youth — especially of what he used to call the " golden time " between his degree and his leaving Oxford — were perpetually supplying him with materials for his later labours. The custom which he then began, of referring at once to the sources and original documents of history, as in Rymer, Montfaucon, and. the Sum ma Conciliorum, gave a lasting freshness and solidity to his knowledge ; and, instead of merely exchanging his later for his earlier acquisitions, the one seemed to be a natural development of the other. Whenever a new line of study was opened to him, he fear- lessly followed it ; a single question would often cost him much research in books for which he naturally cared but little ; for phi- lological purposes, he was endeavouring even in his latest years to acquire a knowledge of the Sanscrit and Sclavonic languages ; he was constantly engaged in correspondence with scientific men or scholars on minute points of history or geography ; in theology he had almost always on hand one of the early Christian writers, with a view to the ultimate completion of his great work on Church and State. He had a great respect for learning, though impatient of the pretensions to the name often made by a mere amount of read- ing ; and the standard of what was required in order to treat of any subject fully, was perpetually rising before him. It would often happen, from the necessity of the case, that his works were written in haste, and were therefore sometimes expressed nakedly and abruptly. But it would be great injustice to infer from the unblotted, unrevised manuscript, which went to the press as it came from his pen, that it was not the result of much thought and read- ing ; although he hardly ever corrected what he had once written, yet he often approached the same subject in various forms ; the substance of every paragraph had, as he often said, been in his mind for years, and sometimes had been actually written at greater length or in another shape ; — his sense of deficient knowledge often deterred him from publishing on subjects of the greatest interest to him : he always made it a point to read far more than he ex- pressed in writing, and to write much which he never gave to the world. What he actually achieved in his works falls so far short of what he intended to achieve, that it seems almost like an injustice to judge of his aims and views by them. Yet, even in what he had already published in his lifetime, he was often the first to de- lineate in outline what others may hereafter fill up ; the first to give expression in England to views which, on the continent, had been already attained ; the first to propose, amidst obloquy or indif- ference, measures and principles, which the rapid advance of public opinion has so generally adopted, as almost to obliterate the remem- brance of those who first gave utterance to them. And those, who 136 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. know the intentions which were interrupted by his premature death, will form their notion of what he was as an historian, philosopher, and theologian, not so much from the actual writings which he lived to complete, as from the design of the three great works, to which he looked forward as the labours of his latest years, and which, as belonging not more to one period of his life than another, and as forming, even in his mere conception of them, the centres of all that he thought or wrote, on whatever subject, would have fur- nished the key to all hjs views— a History of Rome, a Commentary on the New Testament, and, in some sense including both of these within itself, a Treatise on Church and State, or Christian Politics. 1. His early fondness for history grew constantly upon him ; he delighted- in it, as feeling it to be " simply a search after truth, where, by daily becoming more familiar with it, truth seems for ever more within your grasp :" the images of the past were habit- ually in his mind, and haunted him even in sleep with a vividness, which would bring before him some of the most striking passages in ancient history— the death of Caesar, the wars of Sylla, the siege of Syracuse, the destruction of Jerusalem— as scenes in which he was himself taking an active part. What objects he put before him, as an historian, may best be judged from his own view of the province of history. It was, indeed, altogether imperfect, in his judgment, unless it was not only a plan but a picture ; unless it represented " what men thought, what they hated, and what they loved ;" unless it " pointed the way to that higher region, within which she herself is not permitted to enter ;'" and in the details of geographical or military descriptions he took especial pleasure, and himself remarkably excelled in them. Still it was in the dramatic faculty on the one hand, and the metaphysical faculty on the other hand, that he felt himself deficient ; and it is accordingly in the political rather than the philosophical and biographical department of history, — in giving a combined view of different states or of dif- ferent periods— m analyzing laws, parties, and institutions, that his chief merit consists. What were his views of Modern History will appear in the mention of his Oxford Professorship. But it was in ancient history that he naturally felt the greatest delight. " I linger round a sub- ject, which nothing could tempt me to quit but the consciousness of treating it too unworthily," were his expressions of regret, when he had finished his edition of Thucydides ; " the subject of. what is miscalled ancient history, the really modern history of the civili- zation of Greece and Rome, which has for years interested me so deeply, that it is painful to feel myself, after all, so unable to paint it fully." His earliest labours had been devoted not to Roman, but to Greek history ; and there still remains amongst his MSS. a short sketch of the rise of the Greek nation, written between 1820 and 1 History of Rome, vol. i. p. 98 ; vol. ii. p. 173. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 137 1823, and carried down to the time of the Persian wars. And in later years, his edition of Thucydides, undertaken originally with the design of illustrating that author rather historically than philo- logically, contains in its notes and appendices, the most systematic remains of his studies in this direction, and at one time promised to embody his thoughts on the most striking periods of Athenian history. Nor, after he had abandoned this design, did he ever lose his interest in the subject ; his real sympathies (if one may venture to say so) were always with Athens rather than with Rome ; some of the most characteristic points of his mind were Greek rather than Roman ; from the vacancy of the early Roman annals he was for ever turning to the contemporary records of the Greek common- wealths, to pay " an involuntary tribute of respect and affection to old associations and immortal names, on which we can scarcely dwell too long or too often ;" the falsehood and emptiness of the Latin historians were for ever suggesting the contrast of their Gre- cian rivals ; the two opposite poles in which he seemed to realize his ideas of the worst and the best qualities of an historian, with feelings of personal antipathy and sympathy towards each, were Livy and Thucydides. ' Even these scattered notices of what he had once hoped to have worked out more fully, will often furnish the student of Greek his- tory with the means of entering upon its most remarkable epochs under his guidance. Those who have carefully read his works, or shared his instructions, can still enjoy the light which he has thrown on the rise and progress of the Greek commonwealths, and their analogy with the States of Modern Europe ; and apply, in their manifold relations, the principles which he has laid down with regard to the peculiar ideas attached in the Greek world to race, to citizenship, and to law. They can still catch the glow of almost passionate enthusiasm, with which he threw himself into the age of Pericles, and the depth of emotion with which he watch- ed, like an eye-witness, the failure of the Syracusan expedition. They can still trace the almost personal sympathy with which he entered into the great crisis of Greek society, when " Socrates, the faithful servant of truth and virtue, fell a victim to the hatred alike of the democratical and aristocratical vulgar ;" when " all that auda- city can dare, or subtlety contrive, to make the words of ' good ' and ' evil ' change their meaning, was tried in the days of Plato, and by his eloquence, and wisdom, and faith unshaken, was put to shame." They can well imagine the intense admiration, with which he would have dwelt, in detail, on what he has now left only in faint outline : — Alexander at Babylon impressed him as one of the most solemn scenes in all history ; the vision of Alexander's career, even to the lively image which he entertained of his youth- ful and godlike beauty, rose constantly before him as the most sig- nal instance of the effects of a good education against the tempta- tions of power ;— as being, beyond any thing recorded in Roman history, the career of " the greatest man of the ancient world ;" and 10 138 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. even after the period, when Greece ceased to possess any real inte- rest for him, he loved to hang with a melancholy pleasure over the last decay of Greek genius and wisdom — " the worn-out and cast- off skin, from which the living serpent had gone forth to carry his youth and vigour to other lands." But, deep as was his interest in Grecian history, and though in some respects no other part of ancient literature derived so great a light from his researches, it was to his History of Rome that he looked as the chief monument of his historical fame. Led to it partly by his personal feeling of regard towards Niebuhr and Chevalier Bunsen, and by the sense of their encouragement, there was, moreover, something in the subject itself peculiarly attractive to him, whether in the magnificence of the field which it em- braced,— (" the History of Rome," he said, " must be in some sort the History of the World,") — or in the congenial element which he naturally found in the character of a people, " whose distinguish- ing quality was their love of institutions and order, and their reverence for law." Accordingly, after approaching it in various forms, he at last conceived the design of the work, of which the three published volumes are the result, but which he had intended to carry down, in successive periods, to what seemed to him its natural termination in the coronation of Charlemagne. (Pref. vol. i. p. vii.) The two earlier volumes occupy a place in the History of Rome, and of the ancient world generally, which in England had not and has not been otherwise filled up. Yet in the subjects of which they treat, his peculiar talents had hardly a fair field for their exercise. The want of personal characters and of distinct events, which Niebuhr was to a certain extent able to supply from the richness of his learning and the felicity of his conjectures, was necessarily a disadvantage to an historian whose strength lay in combining what was already known, rather than in deciphering what was unknown, and whose veneration for his predecessor made him distrustful not only of dissenting from his judgment, but even of seeing or discovering more than had been by him seen or discovered before. " No man," as he said, "can step gracefully or boldly when he is groping his way in the dark," (Hist. Rome, i. p. 133,) and it is with a melancholy interest that we read his com- plaint of the obscurity of the subject : — " I can but encourage myself, whilst painfully feeling my way in such thick darkness, with the hope of arriving at last at the light, and enjoying all the freshness and fulness of a detailed cotemporary history." (Hist Rome, ii. p. 447.) But the narrative of the second Punic war, which occupies the third and posthumous volume, both as being comparatively unbroken ground, and as affording so full a scope for his talents in military and geographical descriptions, may well be taken as a measure of his historical powers, and has been pro- nounced by its editor, Archdeacon Hare, to be the first history which "has given any thing like an adequate representation of LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. I39 the wonderful genius and noble character of Hannibal." With this volume the work was broken off ; but it is impossible not to dwell for a moment on what it would have been had he lived to complete it. The outline in his early articles in the Encyclopaedia Metro- politana, of the later history of the Civil Wars, " a subject so glo- rious," he writes in 1824, " that I groan beforehand when I think how certainly I shall fail in doing it justice," — provokes of itself the desire to see how he would have gone over the same ground again with his added knowledge and experience — how the charac- ters of the time, which even in this rough sketch stand out more clearly than in any other English work on the same period, would have been reproduced — how he would have represented the pure1 character and military genius of his favourite hero, Pompey — or expressed his mingled admiration and abhorrence of the intel- lectual power and moral degradation of Csesar ; — how he would have done justice to the coarseness and cruelty of Marius, " the lowest of democrats"— or amidst all his crimes, to the views of " the most sincere of aristocrats," Sylla. And in advancing to the fur- ther times of the Empire, his scattered hints exhibit his strong desire to reach those events, to which all the intervening volumes seemed to him only a prelude. " I would not overstrain my eyes or my faculties," he writes in 1840, " but whilst eyesight and strength are yet undecayed, I want to get through the earlier Roman History, to come down to the Imperial and Christian times, which form a subject of such deep interest." What his general admiration for Niebuhr was as a practical motive in the earlier part of his work, that his deep aversion to Gibbon, as a man, was in the latter part. " My highest ambition," he said, as early as 1826, " and, what I hope to do as far as I can, is to make my history the very reverse of Gibbon in this respect, — that whereas the whole spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly against it ; so my greatest desire' would be, in my History, by its high morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause, without actually bringing it forward." There would have been the place for his unfolding the rise of the Christian Church, not in a distinct ecclesiastical history, but as he thought it ought to be written, in conjunction with the history of the world. " The period from Augustus to Aurelian," he writes, 1 It may be necessary, (especially sinee the recent publication of Niebuhr's Lectures, where a very different opinion is advocated,) to refer to Dr. Arnold's own estimate of the moral character of Pompey, which, it is believed, he retained unaltered, in the Encyc. Metrop. ii. 252. The following extract from a letter of General Napier may not be without interest in confirmation of an opinion which he had himself formed independ- ently of it. " Tell Dr. Arnold to beware of falling into the error of Pompey being a bad general ; he was a very great one, perhaps in a purely military sense greater than Cae- sar."— At the same time it should be observed, that his admiration of Caesar's intellectual greatness was always very strong, and it was almost with an indignant animation that.. on the starting of an objection that Caesar's victories were only gained over inferior enemies, he at once denied the inference, and instantly recounted campaign after cam- paign in refutation. 140 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. as far back as 1824, " I will not willingly give up to any one, be- cause I have a particular object, namely, to blend the civil and re- ligious history together more than has ever yet been done." There he would, on the one hand, have expressed his view of the external influences, which checked the free growth of the early Church — the gradual revival of Judaic principles under a Christian form — the gradual extinction of individual responsibility, under the system of government, Roman and Gentile in its origin, which, according to his latest opinion, took possession of the Church rulers from the time of Cyprian. There, on the other hand, he would have dwelt on the self-denying zeal and devotion to truth, which peculiarly endeared to him the very name of Martyr, and on the bond of Christian brotherhood, which he delighted to feel with such men as Athanasius and Augustine, discerning, even in what he thought their weaknesses, a signal testimony to the triumph of Christianity, unaided by other means, than its intrinsic excellence and holiness. Lastly, with that analytical method, which he delighted to pursue in his historical researches, he would have traced to their source, " those evil currents of neglect, of uncharitableness, and of igno- rance, whose full streams we now find so pestilent," first, " in the social helplessness and intellectual frivolousness" of the close of the Roman empire ; and then, in that event which had attracted his earliest inierest, " the nominal conversion of the northern na- tions to Christianity, — a vast subject, and one of the greatest im- portance both to the spiritual and temporal advancement of the nations of Europe, (Serm. vol. i. p. 8S,) as explaining the more con- firmed separation of clergy and laity in later times, and the incom- plete influence which Christianity has exercised upon the institu- tions even of Christian countries." (Serm. vol. hi. Pref. p. xiv.) 2. Strong as was his natural taste for History, it was to Theol- ogy that he looked as the highest sphere of his exertions, and as the province which most needed them. The chief object, which he here proposed to himself — in fact, the object which he conceived as the proper end of Theology itself — was the interpretation and ap- plication of the Scriptures. From the time of his early studies at Oxford, when he analyzed and commented on the Epistles of St. Paul, with Chrysostom's Homilies, down te the last year of his life, when he was endeavouring to set on foot a Rugby edition of them, under his own superintendence, he never lost sight of this design. In the scattered notices of it in his Sermons, published and unpub- lished, there is enough to enable us to combine his principles into a distinct whole ; and to conceive them, not in the polemical form, which in his later years they sometimes presented in their external aspect, but as the declaration of his positive views of the Scriptures themselves, wholly independent of any temporary controversy ; and as the most complete reflex, not only of his capacities as an inter- preter, but also on the one hand, of his powers of historical dis- cernment, on the other, of the reality of his religious feelings. Impossible as it is to enter here into any detailed exposition of LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 14 ^ his views, it has been felt that the liveliest image of what he was in this department will be given by presenting their main features, as they were impressed upon the mind of the same earlier pupil and later friend, whose name has before occurred in these pages, and whose personal recollections of the sphere in which he most ad- mired him, will probably convey a truer and more distinct concep- tion than would be left by a representation of the same facts in general language, or from a more distant point of view. MY DEAR STANLEY, You ask me to describe Dr. Arnold as an Exegetical Divine : I feel myself altogether unequal to such a task ; indeed, I have no other excuse for writing at all on such a subject, than the fact that I early appreciated his greatness as a Theologian, and for many years had the happiness of discuss- ing frequently with him his general views on scientific Divinity. It was one of my earliest convietions respecting him, that, distinguished as he was in many departments of literature and practical philosophy, he was most dis- tinguished as an interpreter of Scripture ; and the lapse of years, and an intimate knowledge of his mind and character, have but confirmed this con- viction. As an expounder of the word of God, Arnold always has seemed to me to be truly and emphatically great. I do not say this on account of the extent and importance of what he actually achieved in this department ; for, unfortunately, he never gave himself up fully to it ; he never worked at it, as the great business of his literary life. I shall ever deplore his not having done so ; and I well remember how sharp was the struggle, when he had to choose between the interpretation of Scripture and the Roman History 3 and how the choice was determined, not by the consideration of what his peculiar talent was most calculated for performing successfully, but by regard to ex- trinsic matters, — the prejudice of the clergy against him, the unripeness of England for a free and unfettered discussion of scriptural Exegesis, and the injury which he might be likely to do to his general usefulness. And, as I then did my utmost to determine his labours to the field of Theology, so now I must deeply regret the heavy loss, which I cannot but think that the cause of sound interpretation — and, as founded upon it, of doctrinal theology — has sustained in England. The amount, then, of interpretation which he has published to the world, though not inconsiderable, is still small in respect of what there remained to be done by him ; but Arnold has furnished a method — has established principles and rules for interpreting Scripture, which, with God's blessing, will be the guide of many a future labourer, and prom- ise to produce fruit of inestimable value. In his writings the student will find a path opened before him — a, manner of handling the word of God — a pointing out of the end to be held in view — and a light thrown on the road that leads to it, that will amply repay the deepest meditation on them, and will (if I may say so without presumption) furnish results full of the richest truth, and destined to exercise a commanding influence on the conduct and determination of religious controversy hereafter. It must be carefully borne in mind, that there are two methods of read- ing Scripture, perfectly distinct in their objects and nature: the one is prac- tical, the other scientific ; the one aims at the edification of the reader, the other at the enlightenment of his understanding ; the one seeks the religious truth of Scripture as bearing on the inquirer's heart and personal feelings, the other the right comprehension of the literary and intellectual portions of the Bible. That Arnold read and meditated on the word of God as a disciple of Christ for his soul's daily edification ; that it was to him the word of life, the fountain of his deepest feelings, the rule of his life ; that he dwelt in the humblest, most reverential, most prayerful study of its simplest truths, and 142 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. under the abiding influence of their power, as they were assimilated into his spiritual being by faith ; that Arnold felt and did all this, the whole tenor of his life and every page of his biography amply attest. Those, who were most intimate with him. will readily recall the mingled feelings of reverence and devotion with which he would, in his lonelier hours, repeat to himself such passages as the raising of Lazarus, or the description of the judgment; nor will they easily forget the deep emotion, with which he was agitated, when, on a comparison having been made in his family circle, which seemed to place St. Paul above St. John, he burst into tears, and in his own earnest and loving tone, repeated one of the verses from St. John, and begged that the comparison might never again be made. It would be easy to multiply illustrations of this feeling ; but one more will suffice. Finding that one of his children had been greatly shocked and overcome by the first sight of death, he tenderly endeavoured to remove the feeling which had been awa- kened, and opening a Bible, pointed to the words, " Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." Nothing, he said, to his mind, afforded us such comfort when shrinking from the outward accompaniments of death, — the grave, the grave-clothes, the loneliness, — as the thought that all these had been around our Lord Himself, round Him who died, and is now alive for evermore. But I am here concerned with the other, and strictly intellectual process ; the scientific exposition of the Scriptures as a collection of ancient books full of the mightiest intellectual truths ; as the record of God's dealings with man; and the historical monument of the most wonderful facts in the history of the world. For the office of such an interpreter, Arnold possessed rare and eminent qualifications: learning, piety, judgment, historical tact, sa- gacity. The excellence of his method may be considered under two heads : — I. He had a very remarkable, I should rather say (if I might) wonderful discernment of the divine, as incorporated in the human element of Scrip- ture ; and the recognition of these two separate and most distinct elements, — the careful separation of the two, so that each shall be subject to its own laws, and determined on its own principles, — was the foundation of the grand characteristic principle of his Exegesis. Our Lord's words, that we must " render to Caesar the things which are Ceesai's, and to God the things which are God's," seemed to him to be of universal application, and nowhere more so, than in the interpretation of Scripture. And his object was not, accord- ing to the usual practice, to establish by its means certain religious truths, but to study its contents themselves — to end, in short, instead of beginning with doctrine. Indeed, doctrine, in the strict sense, doctrine, as pure religious theory, such as it is exhibited in scientific articles and creeds, never was his object. Doctrine, in its practical and its religious side, as bearing on religious feeling and character, not doctrine, m the sense of a direct disclosure of spiritual or material essences, as they are in themselves, was all that he endeavoured to find, and all that he believed could be found, in the teaching of Scripture. First of all he approached the human side of the Bible in the same real historical spirit, with the same methods, rules, and principles, as he did Thucydides. He recognized in the writers of the Scriptures the use of a human instrument — language : and this he would ascertain and fix, as in any other authors, by the same philological rules. Further, too, the Bible presents an assemblage of historical events, it announces an historical religion; and the historical element Arnold judged of historically by the established rules of history, substantiating the general veracity of Scripture even amidst occasional inaccuracies of detail, and proposing to himself, for his special end here, the reproduction, in the language and forms belonging to our own age, and therefore familiar to us, of the exact mode of thinking, feeling, and acting which prevailed in the days gone by. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 143 But was this all 1 Is the Bible but a common book, recording, indeed, more remarkable occurrences, but in itself possessed of no higher authority than a faithful and trustworthy historian like Thucydides ? Nothing could be farther from Dr. Arnold's feeling. In the Bible, he found and acknow- ledged an oracle of God — a positive and supernatural revelation made to man, an immediate inspiration of the Spirit. No conviction was more deeply seated in his nature ; and this conviction placed an impassable gulf between him and all rationalizing divines. Only it is very important to observe how this fact, in respect of scientific order, presented itself to his mind. He came upon it historically; he did not start with any preconceived theory of inspi- ration; but rather, in studying the writings of those who were commissioned by God to preach His Gospel to the world, he met with the fact, that they claimed to be sent from God, to have a message from Him, to be filled with His Spirit. Any acute, precise, and sharply defined theory of inspiration, to the best of my knowledge, Arnold had not; and, if he had been asked to give one, I think he would have answered that the subject did not admit of one. I think he would have been content to realize the feelings of those who heard the Apostles ; he would have been sure, on one side, that there was a voice of God in them ; whilst, on the other, he would have believed that probably no one in the apostolic age could have defined the exact limits of that inspiration. And this I am sure I may affirm with certainty, that never did a student feel his positive faith, his sure confidence that the Bible was the word of God, more indestructible, than in Arnold's hands. He was conscious that, whilst Arnold interpreted Scripture as a scholar, an antiqua- rian, and an historian, and that in the spirit and with the development of modern science, he had also placed the supernatural inspiration of the sa- cred writers on an imperishable historical basis, a basis that would be proof against any attack which the most refined modern learning could direct against it. Those only who are fully aware of the importance of harmo- nizing the progress of knowledge with Christianity, or rather, of asserting, amidst every possible form of civilization, the objective truths of Christianity and its life-giving power, can duly appreciate the value of the confidence inspired by the firm faith of a man, at once liberal, unprejudiced, and, in the estimation of even the most worldly men, possessed of high historical ability 11. But I have not yet mentioned the greatest merit of Arnold's Exege- sis ; it took a still higher range. It was not confined to a mere reproduction of a faithful image of the words and deeds recorded in the Bible, such as they were spoken, done, and understood at the times when they severally occurred. It is a great matter to perceive what Christianity was, such as it was felt and understood to be by the hearers of the Apostles. But the Christian prophet and interpreter had in his eyes a still more exalted office. God's dealings with any particular generation of men are but the application of the eternal truths of His Providence to their particular circumstances, and the form of that application has at different times greatly varied. Here it was that Arnold's most characteristic eminence lay. He seemed to me to possess the true ^aoio^a, the very spiritual gift, of yvoimq, having an insight not only into the actual form of the religion of any single age, but into the meaning and substance of God's moral government generally; a vision of the eternal principles by which it is guided ; and such a profound under- standing of their application, as to be able to set forth God's manifold wis- dom, as manifested at divers times, and under circumstances of the most op- posite kind; nay, still more, to reconcile with His unchangeable attributes those passages in Holy Writ at which infidels had scoffed, ard which pious men had read in reverential silence. Thus he vindicated God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, and to the Jews to exterminate the nations of Canaan, by explaining the principles on which these commands were given and their reference to the moral state of those to whom they were addressed ; thereby educing light out of darkness, unravelling the thread of God's reli- gious education of the human race, from its earliest infancy down to the ful- 144 LIFE op DR- ARNOLD. ness of times, and holding up God's marvellous counsels to the devout won- der and meditation of the thoughtful believer. As I said at first, Arnold has rather pointed out the path, than followed it to any extent himself; the stu- dent will find in his writings the principles of his method rather than its de- velopment. They are scattered, more or less, throughout all his writings, but more especially in the Appendix to vol. ii. of the Sermons, the Preface to the third, the Notes to the fourth, and the Two Sermons on Prophecy.1 These last furnish to the student a very instructive instance of his method ; for, whilst he will recognize there the double sense of Prophecy, and much besides that was held by the old commentators, he will also perceive how different an import they assume, as treated by Arnold ; and how his wide and elevated view could find in Prophecy a firm foundation for a Christian's hope and faith, without their being coupled with that extravagance with which the study of the Prophecies has been so often united. His Sermons, also, generally exhibit very striking illustrations of his faculty to discern general truth under particular circumstances, and his power to apply it in a very altered, nay, often opposite form to cases of a different nature ; thus making God's word an ever living oracle, furnishing to every age those pre- cise rules, principles, and laws of conduct, which its actual circumstances may require. I must not forget to add, that his principles of interpretation were of slow and matured growth ; he arrived at them gradually, and, in some instances, even reluctantly; and one of the most elaborate of his early sermons, which he had intended to h|ave preached before the University, was in defence of what is called the verbal inspiration of Scripture. But since I became ac- quainted with him, I have never known him to maintain any thing but what I have here tried to set forth. It is very possible that much of what I have here said may appear to many to be exaggerated ; but I know not how else to express adequately my firm confidence that the more the principles which guided Arnold's interpretation of Scripture are studied in his writings, the more will their power to throw light on the depths of God's wisdom be ap- preciated. Yours, ever, B. PRICE. 3. Lastly, his letters will have already shown how early he had conceived the idea of the work,2 to which he chiefly looked forward, as that of his old age, on Christian Politics, or Chinch and State. But it is only a wider survey of his general views that will show how completely this was the centre round which were gathered not only all his writings, but all his thoughts and actions on social subjects, and which gave him a distinct position amongst English divines, not only of the present,Jbut oi almost all pre- ceding generations. We must remember how the Greek science, noXmxi], of which the English word "politics," or even political science, is so inadequate a translation — society in its connexion with the highest welfare of men — exhibited to him the great prob- lem which every educated man was called upon to solve. We must conceive how lofty were the aspirations which he entertained 1 To these may be added the posthumous volume of •* Sermons, mostly on Interpre- talion of Scripture." 2 This work he approached at four different times: 1, in a sketch drawn up in 1827 ; 2, in two fragments in 1833, 34 ; 3, in a series of Letters to Chevalier Bunsen, 1839 ; 4, in an historical fragment, 1838,1841. These have been all published in the 2nd edition of the Fragment on the Church, which in the 1st edition only contained the 4th of those here mentioned. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 145 of what Christianity was intended to effect, and what, if rightly applied, it might yet effect, far beyond any thing which has yet been seen, or is ordinarily conceived, for the moral and social res- toration of the world. We must enter into the keen sense of the startling difficulty which he felt to be presented by its comparative failure. " The influence of Christianity no doubt has made itself felt in all those countries which have professed it ; but ought not its effects," he urged, " to have been far more perceptible than they are, now that nearly eighteen hundred years have elapsed since the kingdom of God was first proclaimed ? Is it, in fact, the king- dom of God in which we are now living? Are we at this hour living under the law or Under grace ?" Every thing, in short, which he thought or said on this subject, was in answer to what he used to call the very question of questions ; the question which oc- curs in the earliest of all his works, and which he continued to ask of himself and of others as long as he lived. " Why. amongst us in this country, is the mighty work of raising up God's kingdom stopped ; the work of bringing every thought and word and deed to the obedience of Christ ?" (Serm. vol. i. p. 115.) The great cause of this hindrance to the triumph of Christian- ity, he believed to lie (to adopt his own distinction) in the corrup- tion not of the Religion of Christ, but of the Church of Christ. The former he felt had on the whole done its work — " its truths," he said, " are to be sought in the Scriptures alone, and are the sam# at all times and in all countries." But " the Church, which is not a revelation concerning the eternal and unchangeable God, but an institution to enable changeable man to apprehend the unchange- able," had, he maintained, been virtually destroyed : and thus, "Christianity being intended to remedy the intensity of the evil of the Fall by its Religion, and the universality of the evil by its Church, has succeeded in the first, because its Religion has been retained as God gave it, but has failed in. the second, because its Church has been greatly corrupted." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. xliv.) What he meant by this corruption, and why he thought it fatal to the full development of Christianity, will best appear by ex- plaining his idea of the Church, both with regard to its true end, and its true nature. Its end he maintained " to be the putting down of moral evil." " And if this idea"' he asks, {! seem strange to any one, let him consider whether he will not find this notion of Christianity every where prominent in the Scriptures, and whether the most peculiar ordinances of the Christian Religion are not founded upon it ; or again, if it seems natural to him, let him ask himself whether he has well considered the legitimate consequen- ces of such a definition, and whether, in fact, it is not practically forgotten ?" Its true nature he believed to be not an institution of the Clergy, but a living society of all Christians. " When I hear men talk of the Church," he used to say, " I cannot help recalling how Abbe Sieyes replied to the question, ' What is the Tiers Etat?' by saying ' La nation moins la noblesse et le clerge ;' and so I, if I 146 LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. were asked, What are the laity ? would answer, the Church minus the Clergy. This," he said, " is the view taken of the Church in the New Testament ; can it be said that it is the view held amongst ourselves, and if not, is not the difference incalculable ?" It was as frustrating the union of all Christians, in accomplishing what he believed to be the true end enjoined by their common Master, that he felt so strongly against the desire for uniformity of opinion or worship, which he used to denounce under the name of sectari- anism ; it was an annihilating what he believed to be the Apostol- ical idea of a Church, that he felt so strongly against that principle of separation between the clergy and laity, which he used to de- nounce under the name of priestcraft. " As far as the principle on which Archbishop Laud and his followers acted went to reactuate the idea of the Church, as a co-ordinate and living power by virtue of Christ's institution and express promise, I go along with them, but I soon discover that by the Church they meant the clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and there I fly off from them at a tangent. For it is this very interpretation of the Church that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostacy." Such was the motto from Coleridge's Remains, which he selected as the full expression of his own views, and it was as realizing this idea that he turned eagerly to all institutions, which seemed likely to impress on all Christians the moral, as distinct from the ceremo- nial character of their religion, the equal responsibility and power which they possessed, not " as friends or honorary members" of the Church, but as its most essential parts. Such (to make intelligible, by a few instances, what in general language must be obscure) was his desire to revive the order of deacons, as a link between the clergy and laity, — his defence of the union of laymen with clerical synods, of clergy with the civil legis- lature,— his belief that an authoritative permission to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism, might be beneficially granted to civil or military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to procure the presence of clergy, — his wish for the restoration of Church discipline, "which never can and never ought to be restored, till the Church puts an end to the usurpation of her powers by the clergy ; and which, though it must be vain when opposed to public opinion, yet, when it is the expression of that opinion, can achieve any thing." (Serm. vol. iv. pp. liii. 416.) Such was his sugges- tion of the revival of many " good practices, which belong to the true Church no less than to the corrupt Church, and would there be purely beneficial ; daily church services, frequent communions, memorials of our Christian calling, presented to our notice in crosses and wayside oratories ; commemorations to holy men of all times and countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints practically taught ; religious orders, especially of women, of different kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin of perpetual vows." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. lvi.) A society organized on these principles, and with such or simi- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 147 lar institutions, was, in his judgment, the "true sign from heaven" meant to be " the living witness of the reality of Christ's salvation, which should remind us daily of God, and work upon the habits of our life as insensibly as the air we breathe," (Serm. vol. iv. p. 307,) which would not " rest satisfied with the lesser and imperfect good which strikes thrice and stays," (Ibid. Pref. p. liv.) which would be " something truer and deeper than satisfied not only the last centu- ry, but the last seventeen centuries." (Ibid. Pref. p. liii.) But it was almost impossible for his speculations to have stopped short of the most tangible shape which the theory assumed, viz., his idea not of an alliance or union, but of the absolute identity of the Church with the State. In other words, his belief that the object of the State and the Church was alike the highest welfare of man, and that as the State could not accomplish this, unless it acted with the wisdom and goodness of the Church, nor the Church, unless it was invested with the sovereign power of the State, the State and the Church in their ideal form were not two societies, but one ; and that it is only in proportion as this identity is real- ized in each particular country, that man's perfection and God's glory can be established on earth. This theory had, indeed, al- ready been sanctioned by some of the greatest names in English theology and philosophy, by Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity, and in later times by Burke, and in part by Coleridge. .But (if a negative may be universally asserted on such a subject) it. had never before, at least in England, been so completely the expression of a man's whole mind, or the basis of a whole system, political as well as religious, positive as well as negative. The peculiar line of his historical studies — the admiration which he felt for the Greek and Roman commonwealths — his intensely political and national turn of mind — his reverence for the authority of law — his abhorrence of what he used to consider the anarchical spirit of dissent on the one hand, and the sectarianism of a clerical government on the other — all tended to the same result. His de- testation, on the one hand, of what he used to call the secular or, Jacobinical notion of a State, as providing only for physical ends, — on the other hand, of what he used to call the superstitious or antichristian view of the Church, as claiming to be ruled not by national laws, but by a divinely appointed succession of priests or governors, — both combined to make him look to the nation or com- monwealth as the fit sphere for the full realization of Christianity ; to the perfect identification of Christian with political society, as the only mode of harmonizing the truths which, in the opposite systems of Archbishop Whately and Mr. Gladstone, he lamented to, see " each divorced from its proper mate." Accordingly, no full development of the Church, no full Chris- tianization of the State, could in his judgment take place, until the Church should have become not a subordinate, but a sovereign society ; not acting indirectly on the world, through inferior in- struments, but directly through its own government, the supreme 148 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. legislature. Then at last all public officers of the State, feeling themselves to be necessarily officers of the Church, would endea- vour " each in his vocation and ministry," to serve its great cause " not with a subject's indifference, but with a citizen's zeal. Then the jealousy, with which the clergy and laity at present regard each other's interference, would, as he hoped, be lost in the sense that their spheres were in fact the same ; that nothing was too sec- ular to claim exemption from the enforcement of Christian duty, nothing too spiritual to claim exemption from the control of the government of a Christian State. Then the whole nation, amidst much variety of form, ceremonial, and opinion, would at last feel that the great ends of Christian and national society, now for the first time realized to their view, were a far stronger bond of union between Christians, and a far deeper division from those who were not Christians, than any subordinate principle either of agreement or separation. It was thus only, that he figured to himself the perfect consum- mation of earthly things, — the triumph of what he used emphati- cally to call the Kingdom of God. Other good institutions, indeed, he regarded as so many steps towards this end. The establishment of a parochial clergy, even in its present state, seemed to him the highest national blessing, — much more the revival of the Church, as he would have wished to see it revived. Still the work of Chris- tianity itself was not accomplished, so long as political and social institutions were exempt from its influence, so long as the highest power of human society professed to act on other principles than those declared in the Gospel. But, whenever it should come to pass that the strongest earthly bond should be identical with the bond of Christian fellowship, — that the highest earthly power should avowedly minister to the advancement of Christian holiness — that crimes should be regarded as sins — that Christianity should be the acknowledged basis of citizenship, — that the region of political and national questions, war and peace, oaths and punishments, economy and education, so long considered by good and bad alike as worldly and profane, should be looked upon as the very sphere to which Christian principles are most applicable, — then he felt that Chris- tianity would at last have gained a position, where it could cope for the first time, front to front, with the power of evil ; that the unfulfilled promises of the older prophecies, so long delayed, would have received their accomplishment ; that the kingdoms of this world would have indeed become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ. No one felt more keenly than himself how impossible it was to apply this view directly to existing circumstances ; how the whole framework of society must be reconstructed before it could be brought into action ; how far in the remote future its accomplishment must necessarily lie. " So deeply," he said, "is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 149 God's Providence seems capable within any definite time of erad- icating it."1 Still it was not in his nature to postpone, even in thought, the fulfilment of his desires to a remote Millennium or Utopia, such as in the minds of many men acts rather as a reason for acquiescence in the existing order of the world, than as a motive for rising above it. The wisdom of Hesiod's famous paradox, " He is a fool who knows not how much better the half is than the whole," was often in his mouth ; in answer to the frequent allegation that because the complete fulfilment of the theory was impracticable, therefore no part of it could be made available. " I cannot answer all your ob- jections fully," he writes to Archbishop Whately, " because if I could, it were to suppose that the hardest of all human questions con- tained no great difficulties ; but I think on the whole that the objec- tions to my scheme are less than to any other, and that on the positive side it is in theory perfect ; and though it never will be wholly realized, yet if men can be brought to look at it as the true theory, the practical approximations to it may in the course of time be in- definitely great." It was still the thought which animated all his exertions in be- half of his country, where he felt that " the means were still in our hands, which it seems far better to use even at the eleventh hour, than desperately to throw them away."2 And, convinced as he was, that the founders of our present constitution in Church and State did " truly consider them to be identical, the Christian nation of England to be the Church of England, the head of that nation to be for that very reason the head of the Church," he asked with an indignant sorrow, " whether it were indeed indifference or latitudina- rianism, to wish most devoutly that this noble, this divine theory might be fully and for ever realized."3 It was still the vision which closed the vista of all his speculations ; the ideal whole, which might be incorporated part by part into the existing order of society ; the ideal end which each successive age might approach more closely, — its very remoteness only impressing him more deeply with the conviction of the enormous efforts which must be made to bring all social institutions nearer to that perfection which Christi- anity designed for them, of the enormous mass of evil which lay undisturbed because so few dared to acknowledge the identity of the cause of reform with the cause of Christianity. It was still, in its practical form, the great idea of which the several parts of his life were so many distinct exemplifications ; his sermons — his teaching — his government of the school — his public acts- — his own personal character ; and to which all his dreams of wider useful- ness instinctively turned, from the first faint outline of his hopes in his earliest letters down to the last evening of his life, when the last thought which he bestowed on the future, was of " that great work, if I be permitted to take part in it." 1 Preface to History of Rome, vol. i. p. ix. 2 Serm. vol. ii. Pref. p. vi. 3 Church Reform, Postscript, p. 24. J50 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. The general view of Dr. Arnold's life at Rugby must not be closed, without touching, however briefly and imperfectly, on that aspect of it, which naturally gave the truest view of his mind and character, whilst to those at a distance it was comparatively but little, known. Perhaps the scene which, to those who knew him best, would bring together the recollections of his public and private life in the most lively way, was his study at Rugby. There he sat at his work, with no attempt at seclusion, conversation going on around him — his children playing in the room— his frequent guests, wheth- er friends or former pupils, coming in or out at will — ready at once to break off his occupations to answer a question, or to attend to the many interruptions to which he was liable ; and from these interruptions, or from his regular avocations, at the few odd hours or minutes which he could command, would he there return and recommence his writing, as if it had not been broken off. " Instead of feeling my head exhausted," he would sometimes say after the day's business was over, " it seems to have quite an eagerness to set to work." " I feel as if I could dictate to twenty secretries at once." Yet, almost unfailing as was this " unhasting, unresting dili- gence," to use the expression of a keen observer, who thus charac- terized his impression of one day's visit at Rugby, he would often wish for something more like leisure and repose. ".We some- times feel," he said, " as if we should like to run our heads into a hole to be quiet for a little time from the stir of so many human beings which greets us from morning to evening." And it was from amidst this chaos of employments that he turned, with all the delight of which his nature was capable, to what he often dwelt upon as the rare, the unbroken, the almost awful happiness of his domestic life. It is impossible adequately to describe the union of the whole family round him, who was not only the father and guide, but the elder brother and playfellow of his children ; the first feelings of enthusiastic love and watchful care, carried through twenty-two years of wedded life, — the gentleness and de- votion which marked his whole feeling and manner in the privacy of his domestic intercourse. Those who had known him only in the school, can remember the kind of surprise with which they first witnessed his tenderness and playfulness. Those who had known him only in the bosom of his family, found it difficult to conceive how his pupils or the world at large should have formed to themselves so stern an image of one in himself so loving. Yet both were alike natural to him ; the severity and the playfulness expressing each in their turn the earnestness with which he en- tered into the business of life, and the enjoyment with which he entered into its rest; whilst the common principle, which linked both together, made every closer approach to him in his private life a means for better understanding him in his public relations. Enough, however, may perhaps be said to recall something at LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 151 least of its outward aspect. There were his hours of thorough re- laxation, when he would throw off all thoughts of the school and of public matters — his quiet walks by the side of his wife's pony, when he would enter into the full enjoyment of air and exercise, and the outward face of nature, observing with distinct pleasure each symptom of the burst of spring or of the richness of summer—" feel- ing like a horse pawing the ground, impatient to be off," — "as if the very act of existence was an hourly pleasure to him." There was the cheerful voice that used to go sounding through the house in the early morning, as he went round to call his children ; the new spirits which he seemed to gather from the mere glimpses of them in the midst of his occupations — the increased merriment of all in any game in which he joined — the happy walks on which he would take them in the fields and hedges, hunting for flowers— r the yearly excursions to look in a neighbouring clay-pit for the earliest coltsfoot, with the mock siege that followed. Nor, again, was the sense of his authority as a father, ever lost in his playful- ness as a companion. His personal superintendence of their ordi- nary instructions was necessarily limited by his other engagements, but it was never wholly laid aside ; in the later years of his life it was his custom to read the Psalms and Lessons of the day with his family every morning ; and the common reading of a chapter in the Bible every Sunday evening, with repetition of hymns or parts of Scripture, by every member of the family — the devotion with which he would himself repeat his favourite poems from the Christian Year, or his favourite passages from the Gospels— the same attitude of deep attention in listening to the questions of his youngest children, the same reverence in answering their difficul- ties, that he would have shown to the most advanced of his friends or his scholars — form a picture not soon to pass away from the mind of any one who was ever present. But his teaching in his family was naturally not confined to any particular occasions ; they looked to him for information and advice at all times ; and a word of authority from him was a law not to be questioned for a moment. And with the tenderness which seemed to be alive to all their wants and wishes, there was united that peculiar sense of solemnity, with which in his eyes the very idea of a family life was invested. " I do not wonder," he said, " that it was thought a great misfortune to die childless in old times, when they had not fuller light — it seems so completely wiping a man out of existence." The anniversaries of domestic events — the passing away of suc- cessive generations — the entrance of his sons on the several stages of their education, — struck on the deepest chords of his nature, and made him blend with every prospect of the future, the keen sense of the continuance (so to speak) of his own existence in. the good and evil fortunes of his children, and to unite the thought of them with the yet more solemn feeling, with which he was at all times wont to regard " the blessing " of " a whole house trans- planted entire from earth to heaven, without one failure." 152 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. In his own domestic happiness he never lost sight of his early friends. " He was attached to his family," it was trnly said of him by Archbishop Whately, as if he had no friends ; to his friends, as if he had no family ; and," he adds, " to his country, as if he had no friends or relations." Debarred as he was from frequent inter- course with most of them by his and their occupations, he made it part of the regular business of his life to keep up a correspondence with them. " I never do," he said, " and I trust I never shall ex- cuse myself for not writing to old and dear friends, for it is really a dutv which it is mere indolence and thoughtlessness to neg- lect." " The very aspect of their several homes lived as distinct images in his mind, and seemed to have an equal claim on his interest. To men of such variety of opinion and character, that the very names of some of them are identified with measures and views the most opposite that good men can entertain, he retained to the end a strong and almost equal affection. The absence of greater mutual sympathy was to him almost the only shadow thrown over his happy life ; no difference of opinion ever destroyed his desire for intercourse with them ; and where, in spite of his own efforts to continue it, it was so interrupted, the subject was so painful to him, that even with those most intimate with him, he could hardly bear to allude to it. How lively was his interest in the state of England generally, and especially of the lower orders, will appear elsewhere. But the picture of his ordinary life would be incomplete without men- tion of his intercourse with the poor. He purposely abstained, as will be seen, from mixing much in the affairs of the town and neighbourhood of Rugby. But he was always ready to assist in matters of local charity or usefulness, giving lectures, for example, before the Mechanics' Institutes at Rugby and Lutterworth, writing tracts on the appearance of the cholera in the vicinity, and, after the establishment of the railway station at half a mile from the town, procuring the sanction of the Bishop for the performance of a short service there on Sunday by himself and the assistant mas- ters in turn. And with the poor generally, though his acquaint- ance was naturally much more limited than it had been in the village of Laleham, yet with some few, chiefly aged persons in the almshouse of the place, he made a point of keeping up a frequent and familiar intercourse. In this intercourse, sometimes in conversations with them as he met or overtook them alone on the road, usually in such visits as he could pay to them in his spare moments of relaxation, he as- sumed less of the character of a teacher than most clergymen would have thought right, reading to them occasionally, but generally talking to them with the manner of a friend and an equal. This resulted partly from the natural reserve and shyness which made him shrink from entering on sacred subjects with comparative strangers, and which, though he latterly somewhat overcame it, almost disqualified him, in his own judgment, from taking charge LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. I53 of a parish. But it was also the effect of his reluctance to address them in a more authoritative or professional tone than he would have used towards persons of his own rank. Feeling keenly what seemed to him at once the wrong and the mischief done by the too wide separation between the higher and lower orders, he wished to visit them " as neighbours, without always seeming bent on reliev- ing or instructing them ;'" and could not bear to use language which to any one in a higher station would have been thought an interference. With the servants of his household, for the same reasons, he was in the habit, whether in travelling or in his own house, of consulting their accommodation and speaking to them familiarly as to so many members of the domestic circle. And in all this, writes one who knew well his manner to the poor, " there was no affectation of condescension, it was a manly address to his fellow men, as man addressing man." " I never knew such a humble man as the Doctor," said the parish clerk at Laleham, after he had revisited it from Rugby ; "he comes and shakes us by the hand as if he was one of us." " He used to come into my house," said an old woman near his place in Westmoreland, " and talk to me as if I was a lady." Often, no doubt, this was not appreciated by the poor, and might, at times, be embarrassing to himself, and it is said that he was liable to be imposed upon by them, and greatly to overrate their proficiency in moral and religious excellence. But he felt this intercourse to be peculiarly needful for one engaged in occupations such as his ; to the remembrance of the good poor, whom he visited at Rugby, he often recurred when absent from them, and nothing can exceed the regret which they testify at his loss, and the grateful affection with which they still speak of him, pointing with delight to the seat which he used to occupy by their firesides : one of them especially, an old alms woman, who died a few months after his own decease, up to the last moment of con- sciousness never ceasing to think of his visits to her, and of the hope with which she looked forward now to seeing his face once more again. Closely as he was bound to Rugby by these and similar bonds of social and familiar life, and yet more closely by the charm, with which its mere outward aspect and localities were invested by his interest in the school, both as an independent institution and as his own sphere of duty, yet the place in itself never had the same strong hold on his affections as Oxford or Laleham, and his holi- days were almost always spent away from Rugby, either in short tours, or in later years at his Westmoreland home, Fox How, a small estate between Rydal and Ambleside, which he purchased in 1832, with the view of providing for himself a retreat, in case of his retirement from the school, or for his family in case of his death. The monotonous character of the midland scenery of Warwick- shire was to him, with his strong love of natural beauty and va- riety, absolutely repulsive ; there was something almost touching 1 Sermons, vol. ii. p. 411. 11 154 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. in the eagerness with which, amidst that "endless succession of fields and hedge-iows," he would make the most of any features of a higher order ; in the pleasure with which he would cherish the few places where the current of the Avon was perceptible, or where a glimpse of the horizon could be discerned ; in the humorous des- pair with which he would gaze on the dull expanse of fields east- ward from Rugby. " It is no wonder we do not like looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between us and the Ural mountains. Conceive what you look over, for you just miss Sweden, and look over Holland, the north of Germany, and the centre of Russia." With this absence of local attraction in the place, and with the conviction that his occupations and official sta- tion must make him look for his future home elsewhere, "I feel," he said, " that I love Middlesex and Westmoreland, but I care no- thing for Warwickshire, and am in it like a plant sunk in the ground in a pot, my roots never strike beyond the pot, and I could be transplanted at any minute without tearing or severing of my fibres. To the pot itself, which is the school, I could cling very lovingly, were it not that the laborious nature of the employment makes me feel that it can be only temporary, and that, if I live to old age, my age could not be spent in my present situation." Fox How accordingly became more and more the centre of all his local and domestic affections. " It is with a mixed feeling of solemnity and tenderness," he said, " that I regard our mountain nest, whose surpassing sweetness, I think I may safely say, adds a positive happiness to every one of my waking hours passed in it." When absent from it, it still, he said, " dwelt in his memory as a vision of beauty from one vacation to another," and when present at it he felt that " no hasty or excited admiration of a tourist could be compared with the quiet and hourly delight of having the mountains and streams as familiar objects, connected with the enjoyments of home, one's family, one's books, and one's friends," — " associated with our work-day thoughts as well as our gala-day ones." Then it' was that, as he sat working in the midst of his family, " never raising his eyes from the paper to the window without an influx of ever new delights," he found- that leisure for writing, which he so much craved at Rugby. Then it was that he enjoyed the entire relaxation, which he so much needed after his school occupations, whether in the journeys of coming and returning, those long journeys, which, before they were shortened by railway travelling, were to him, he used to say, the twelve most restful days of the whole year ; — or in the birthday festivities of his chil- dren, and the cheerful evenings when all subjects were discussed, from the gravest to the lightest, and when he would read to them his favourite stories from Herodotus, or his favourite English poets. Most of all, perhaps, was to be observed his delight in those long mountain walks, when they would start with their provisions for the day, himself the guide and life of the party, always on the look-out how best to break the ascent by gentle stages, comforting LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 155 the little ones in their falls, and helping forward those who were tired, himself always keeping with the laggers, that none might strain their strength by trying to be in front with him — and then, when his assistance was not wanted, the liveliest of all ; his step so light, his eye so quick in finding flowers to take home to those who were not of the party. Year by year bound him with closer ties to his new home ; not only Fox How itself with each particular tree, the growth of which he had watched, and each particular spot in the grounds, associated by him with the playful names of his nine children ; but also the whole valley in which it lay became consecrated with something of a domestic feeling. Rydal Chapel, with the congre- gation to which he had so ofen preached — the new circle of friends and acquaintance with whom he kept up so familiar an inter- course— the gorges and rocky pools which owed their nomencla- ture to him, all became part of his habitual thoughts. He delight- ed to derive his imagery from the hills and lakes of Westmore- land, and to trace in them the likenesses of his favourite scenes in poetry and history ; even their minutest features were of a kind that were most attractive to him ; " the running streams " which were to him " the most beautiful objects in nature ;" — the wild flowers on the mountain sides, which were to him, he said, ''his music ;" and which, whether in their scarcity at Rugby, or their profusion in Westmoreland, " loving them," as he used to say, " as a child loves them," he could not bear to see removed from their natural places by the wayside, where others might enjoy them as well as himself. The. very peacefulness of all the historical and moral associations of the scenery — free alike from the remains of feudal ages in the past, and suggesting comparatively so little of suffering or evil in the present, — rendered doubly grateful to him the refreshment which he there found from the rough world in the school, or the sad feelings awakened in his mind by the thoughts of his Church and country. There he hoped, when the time should have come for his retreat from Rugby, to spend his declining years. Other visions, indeed, of a more practical and laborious life, from time to time passed before him, but Fox How was the image, which most constantly presented itself to him in all pros- pects for the future ; there he intended to have lived in peace, maintaining his connexion with the rising generation by receiving pupils from the Universities ; there, under the shade of the trees of his own planting, h^e hoped in his old age to give to the world the fruits of his former experience and labours, by executing those works for which at Rugby he felt himself able only to prepare the way, or lay the first foundations, and never again leave his retire- ment till (to use his own expression) " his bones should go to Grasmere churchyard, to lie under the yews which Wordsworth planted, and to have the Rotha, with its deep and silent pools, passing by. CHAPTER V. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, AUGUST 1828 TO AUGUST 1830. The two first years of Dr. Arnold's life at Rugby remarkably exhibit the natural sanguineness of his character, whether in the feeling with which he entered on the business of the school, or in the hopefulness with which he regarded public affairs, and which, more or less, pervaded all that he wrote at this time. The first volume of sermons, and the first volume of his edition of Thucydides, containing, as they did, in many respects the basis of his theological and historical views, were published in February, 1829, and May, 1830 ; and little need be added to what has already been said of them. To the latter, indeed, an additional interest is imparted from its being the first attempt in English phi- lology to investigate not merely the phrases and formulae, but the general principles of the Greek language, and to illustrate, not merely the words, but the history and geography of a Greek histo- rian. And in the Essay on the different periods of national exist- ence appended to this first volume, but, in fact, belonging more to his general views of history and politics than to any particular illustration of Thucydides, is brought out more forcibly than in any other of his writings, his belief in the progress and inherent excellence of popular principles ; in the distinct stages of civiliza- tion through which nations have to pass ; and in the philosophical divisions of ancient and modern history, of which he made so much use in treating of either of them. But the work which naturally excited most public attention, was a pamphlet on " the Christian Duty of conceding the claims of the Roman Catholics," published in February, 1829. To those who knew him in later life, it may appear strange that he should have treated at length of the question of Ireland, which he was accustomed to shun as a problem of inextricable difficulty, and on which nothing but a sense of justice could ever prevail upon him to enter. But this sense of justice was, at this time, quickened by the deep conviction which, for some years past, he had entertained of the alarming state of the Irish nation. " There is more to be done there," he writes in 1828, from Laleham, " than in any corner of the world. I had, at one time, a notion of going over there and taking Irish LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 157 pupils, to try what one man could do towards civilizing the people, by trying to civilize and Christianize their gentry." And the par- ticular crisis of the Roman Catholic Relief Act was exactly one of those occasions which brought him into direct collision, both with the tone of the Liberal party, who assumed that, as being a politi- cal measure, it could not be argued on religious grounds ; and of the Tory party, who assumed that, as being a religious question^ it was one on which the almost united authority of the English clergy ought to have decisive weight ; whereas, his own views of course led him to maintain that, being a great national question of right and wrong, it must, on the one hand, be argued on Chris- tian grounds, and yet, on the other hand, that the clergy would not be the best judges of it, because "the origin, rights, and successive revolutions of society were subjects which they avowedly neg- lected to study." The pamphlet was published at so late a stage of the controversy, that it had not time to reach a second edition before the act was passed. But the grounds of solemn duty on which his vindication of the Relief Act was based, as the best mode of repairing the sin and mischief, never yet effaced, of the original conquest of Ireland, and as a right, which, as being still a distinct national society, the Irish people justly claimed, — attracted considerable attention. Other parts, such as that in which he de- nied the competence of the clergy to pronounce upon historical questions, created an impression against him in the great body of his profession, which, perhaps, was never wholly removed. Its intrinsic interest, independent of the particular controversy, con- sists in its being his first and most emphatic protest against the divorce of religion and politics, and the most complete statement of his abstract views of political science, as his Appendix to Thu- cydides furnished his statement of their historical development. I. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Rugby, August 29, 1828. Here we are actually at Rugby, and the school will open to- morrow. I cannot tell you with what deep regret we left Laleham, where we had been so peaceful and so happy, and left my mother, aunt, and sisters for the first time in my life, except during my school and college absences. It was quite " feror exul in altum," &c, but then we both looked upon Rugby as on our Italy, and entered it, I think, with hope and with thankfulness. . . . But the things which I have had to settle, and the people whom I have had to see on business, have been almost endless ; to me, unused as I was to business, it seemed quite a chaos ; but, thank God, being in high health and spirits, and gaining daily more knowledge of the state of affairs, I get on tolerably well. Next week, however, will be the grand experiment ; and I look to it naturally with great anxiety. I trust, I feel how great and sol- emn a duty I have to fulfil, and that I shall be enabled to fulfil it by that help which can alone give the " Spirit of power and love, and of a sound mind ;" the three great requisites, I imagine, in a schoolmaster. You need not fear my reforming furiously ; there, I think, I can assure you; but, of my success in introducing a religious principle into education, 158 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. I must be doubtful ; it is my most earnest wish, and I pray God that it may be my constant labour and prayer ; but to do this would be to succeed be- yond all my hopes ; it would be a happiness so great, that I think the world would yield me nothing comparable to it. To do it, however imperfectly, would far more than repay twenty years of labour and anxiety. Saturday, August 30th. I have been receiving, this morning, a constant succession of visitors, and now, before I go out to return . August 31st. I was again interrupted, and now, I think that I had better at once finish my letter. I have entered twenty-nine new boys, and have got four more to enter ; and I have to day commenced my business by calling over names and going into chapel, where I was glad to see that the boys behaved very well. I cannot tell you how odd it seems to me, recalling, at once, my school-days more vividly than I could have thought possible. II. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE. Rugby, September 23, 1628. It is, indeed, a long time since I wrote to you, and there has been much of intense interest in the period which has elapsed since I did write. But it has been quite an engrossing occupation ; and Thucydides and every thing else has gone to sleep while I have been attending to it. Now it is becom- ing more familiar to me, but still the actual employment of time is very great, and the matters for thought which it affords are almost endless. Still I get my daily exercise and bathing very happily, so that I have been, and am, perfectly well, and equal in strength and spirits to the work. . . . . . . For myself, I like it hitherto beyond my expectation, but, of course, a month is a very short time to judge from. [After speaking of the details of the school, and expressing his generally favourable impression of it.] I am trying to establish something of a friendly intercourse with the Sixth Form, by asking them in succession, in parties of four, to dinner with us, and I have them each separately up into my room to look over their ex- ercises I mean to bring in something like " gatherings " be- fore it is long, for they understand that I have not done with my alterations, nor probably ever shall have ; and I am going to have an Examination for every form in the school, at the end of the short half-year, in all the business of the half-year, Divinity, Greek and Latin, Arithmetic, History, Geogra- phy, and Chronology, with first and second classes, and prize books for those who do well. I find that my power is perfectly absolute, so that I have no excuse if I do not try to make the school something like my beau ideal — it is sure to fall far enough short in reality. There has been no flogging yet, (and I hope that there will be none,) and surprisingly few irregularities. I chastise, at first, by very gentle impositions, which are raised for a repeti- tion of offences — flogging will be only my ratio ultima — and talking I shall try to the utmost. I believe that boys may be governed a great deal by gentle methods and kindness, and appealing to their better feelings, if you show that you are not afraid of them : I have seen great boys, six feet high, shed tears when I have sent for them up into my room and spoken to them quietly, in private, for not knowing their lesson, and I have found that this treatment produced its effects afterwards, in making them do better. But, of course, deeds must second words when needful, or words will soon be laughed at. III. TO THE SAME. Laleham, Dec. 19, 1828. I should have greatly enjoyed seeing you again and seeing you with your wife, and at your own home, to say nothing of resuming LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD.. 159 some of the matters we discussed a little in the summer. The constitutional tone of different minds naturally gives a different complexion to their view of things, even when they may agree in the main ; and in discussing mat- ters besides, one, or at least /, am apt to dwell on my points of difference with a man rather than on my points of agreement with him, because, in one case, I may get my own opinions modified and modify his — in the other, we only end where we began. I confess that it does pain me when I find my friends shocked at the expression of my sentiments, because, if a man had entered on the same particular inquiry himself, although he should have come to a wholly different conclusion at last, still if he gave me credit for sincerity, he ought not to be shocked at my not having as yet come to the same conclusion with himself, and would rather quietly try to bring me there — and if he had not inquired into the subject, then he certainly ought not to be shocked ; as giving me credit for the same fundamental principles with himself, he ought not to think that non-inquiry would lead to truth, and inquiry to error. In your case, I know that your mind is entirely candid ; and that no man will conduct an inquiry with more perfect fairness ; you have, therefore, the less reason for abstaining from inquiry altogether. I can assure you, that I never remember to have held a conversation such as those which we had last summer, without deriving benefit in some way or other from the remarks urged in opposition to my own views ; very often they have modified my opinions, sometimes entirely changed them — and when they have done neither, they have yet led me to consider myself and my own state of mind ; lest even whilst holding the truth, I might have bought the possession of it too dearly (I mean of course in lesser matters) by exercising the understanding too much, and the affections too little. IV. TO MRS. EVELYN. (On the death of her husband.) Ru?by, February 23, 1829. I need not, I trust, say how deeply I was shocked and grieved by the intelligence contained in your letter. I was totally ignorant of your most heavy loss, and it was one of the hopes in which I have often fondly indulged, that I might some time or other again meet one who I believe was my earliest friend, and for whom I had never ceased to entertain a strong ad- miration and regard. I heard of him last winter from a common friend who had been indebted to his kindness, and whom I have also lost within the last few months, Mr. Lawes, of Marlborough ; and since that time I had again lost sight of him, till I received from you the account of his death. He must, indeed, be an irreparable loss to all his family; for I well remember the extraordinary promise which he gave as a boy. of mingled nobleness and gentleness of heart, as well as of very great powers of un- derstanding. These were visible to me even at an earlier period of his life than you are perhaps aware of; for it was not at Harrow that I knew him, but at Warminster, when we were both very young, and since the year 1806, I have never seen him ; but the impression of his character has re- mained strongly marked on my memory ever since, for I never knew so bright a promise in any other boy ; I never knew any spirit at that age so pure and generous, and so free from the ordinary meannesses, coarsenesses, and littlenesses of boyhood. It will give me great, pleasure to comply with your wishes with regard to an inscription to his memory, if you will be kind enough to furnish me with some particulars of his life and character in later years ; for mine is but a knowledge of his boyhood, and I am sure that his manhood must have been even still better worth knowing. You will, how- ever, I am sure, allow me to state in perfect sincerity, that I feel vey ill qualified to write any thing of this nature, and that it requires a peculiar 160 LIFE DF DR. ARNOLD. talent which I feel myself wholly to want. I should give you, I fear, but a very bad inscription ; but if you really wish me to attempt it, I will do the best I can to express at least my sincere regard and respect for the memory of my earliest friend.1 Let me thank you sincerely for all the particulars which you have been kind enough to give me in your letter. V. TO THE REV. JULIUS HARE. Rugby, March 30, 1820. I am much obliged to you for sending me your Defence of Niebuhr ; and still more for the most kind and gratifying manner in which you have mentioned me in it ; there are few things more delightful than to be so spoken of by those whom we entirely respect, and whose good opinion and regard we have wished to gain. I should not have troubled you with my pamphlet on the Catholic ques- tion, had it not involved points beyond the mere question now at issue, and on which I was desirous to offer you some explanation, as I think our opin- ions respecting them are widely different. From what you say in the Guesses at Truth, and again in your Defence of Niebuhr, you appear to me to look upon the past with feelings of reverence, in which I cannot partici- pate. It is not that I think we are better than our fathers in proportion to our lights, or that our powers are at all greater ; on the contrary, they de- serve more admiration, considering the difficulties they had to struggle with ; yet still I cannot but think, that the habit of looking back upon them as models, and more especially in all political institutions, as the surest way to fetter our own progress, and to deprive us of the advantages of our own su- perior experience, which, it is no boast to say, that we possess, but rather a most disgraceful reproach, since we use them so little. The error of the last century appears to me to have been this, that they undervalued their ances- tors without duly studying antiquity ; thus they naturally did not gain the experience which they ought to have done, and were confident even whilst digging from under their feet the ground on which their confidence might have rested justly. Yet still, even in this respect, the 16th and 17th centu- ries have little cause, I think, to insult the 18th. The great writers of those times read, indeed, enormously, but surely their critical spirit was in no pro- portion to their reading — and thus the true experience to be gained from the study of antiquity was not gained, because antiquity was not fully under- stood. It is not, I believe, that I estimate our actual doings more highly than you do ; but, I believe, I estimate those of our fathers less highly ; and instead of looking upon them as in any degree a standard, I turn instinctively to that picture of entire perfection which thg Gospel holds out, and from which I cannot but think that the state of things in times past was further removed even than ours is now, although our little may be more inexcusable han their less was in them. And, in particular, I confess, that if I were 1 The following was the inscription which he sent ; — TO THE MEMORY OF GEORGE EVELYN, ESQ., ETC., ETC., ETC. HIS EARLY YEARS GAVE A BEAUTIFUL PROMISE OF VIGOUR OF UNDERSTANDING, KINDNESS OF HEART, AND CHRISTIAN NUBLENESS OF PRINCIPLE: HIS MANHOOD ABUNDANTLY FULFILLED IT. LIVING AND DYING IN THE FAITH OF CHRIST, HE HAS LEFT TO HIS FAMILY A HUMBLE BUT LIVELY HOPE THAT, AS HE WAS RESPECTED AND LOVED BY MEN, HE HAS BEEN FORGIVEN AND ACCEPTED BY GOD. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 161 called upon to name what spirit of evil predominantly deserved the name of Antichrist, I should name the spirit of chivalry ' — the more detestable for the very guise of the " Archangel ruined," which has made it so seductive to the most generous spirits — but to me so hateful, because it is in direct op- position to the impartial justice of the Gospel, and its comprehensive feeling of equal brotherhood, and because it so fostered a sense of honour rather than a sense of duty. VI. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. May 29, 1829. [After refusing to reprint the pamphlet on the Roman Catholic Claims* and expressing his belief that the school has not and will not sustain any injury from what he has done.] I claim a full right to use my own discre- tion in writing upon any subject I choose, provided I do not neglect my duties as master in order to find time for it. But those who know me will be aware that, to say nothing of duty, my interest in the school far exceeds what I feel in any sort of composition of my own ; and that neither here nor at Laleham, have I ever allowed my own writings to encroach upon the time, or on the spirits and vigour of mind and body, which I hold that my pupils have a paramount claim upon. As to the principles in the pamphlet, it is a matter of unfeigned aston- ishment to me, that any man calling himself a Christian, should think them bad, or should not recognize in them the very principles of Christianity itself. If my principles are bad, I only wish that those who think them so would state their own in opposition to them. It is all very well to call certain prin- ciples mischievous and democratical ; but I believe very few of those who do so call them, would be able to bear the monstrous nature of their own, if they were obliged fully to develope them. I mean that they would then be seen to involve what in their daily language about things of common life their very holders laugh at as absurdity and mischief. For instance, about continual reforms, or the wisdom of our ancestors — I have heard Tories laugh at the farmers in their parish, for opposing the mending of the roads, because, as they said, what had been good enough for their fathers was good enough for them ; and yet these farmers were not an atom more silly than the people who laughed at them, but only more consistent. And as to the arrogance of tone in the pamphlet, I do not consider it to be arrogance to assume that I know more of a particular subject, which I have studied eagerly from a child, than those do who notoriously do not study it at alL The very men who think it hard to be taxed with ignorance of modern his- tory, and of the laws and literature of foreign nations, are men who, till this question came on, never pretended to know any thing about them : and, in the case of the Evangelicals, professed to shun such studies as profane. I should consider no man arrogant, who, if I were to talk about some math- ematical or scientific question which he had studied habitually, and on which all scientific men were agreed, should tell me that I did not, and could not understand the subject, because I had never liked mathematics, and had never pretended to work at them. Those only who have studied history with that fondness that I have done all my life can fully appreciate the pain which it gives me to see the most mischievous principles supported, as they 1 "' Chivalry,' or (as he used more frequently to call the element in the middle ages which he thus condemned) ' feudality,' is especially Keltic and barbarian — incompatible with the highest virtue of which man is capable, and the last at which he arrives — a sense of justice. It sets up the personal allegiance to the chief above allegiance to God and law." And in like manner he maintained that the great excellence of the 18th century was the development of the idea of justice, — even amid the excesses to which it was carried in some of the notions then prevalent on what was called civil and religious liberty. 162 LIFE OF DP. ARNOLD. have been on this question, with an ignorance truly audacious. I will only instance Mr. C.'s appeal to English History in proof that God's judgments will visit us, if we grant any favour to the Catholics On the point of Episcopacy, I can only say, that my notions, whether right or wrong, have been drawn solely from the New Testament itself, according to what appears to me its true meaning and spirit. I do not know that I ever read any Low Church or No Church argument in my life. But I should bike to develope my notions on this point more fully hereafter. I have some thoughts of publishing a volume of essays on various points connected with Christian doctrine and practice : I do not mean now — but if I live, and can work out some points, on which I have not yet got far enough to authorize me to address others, yet I think I see my way to some useful truths. Mean- time I trust I shall not give just cause of offence to any good and wise man — or personal offence to any man. VII. TO A PARENT HOLDING UNITARIAN OPINIONS. Rugby, June 15, 1829. I had occasion to speak to your son this evening on the subject of the ap- proaching confirmation ; and. as I had understood that his friends were not members of the Established Church, my object was not so much to persuade him to be confirmed, as to avail myself of the opportunity thus afforded me to speak with him generally on the subject of his state as a Christian, and the peculiar temptations to which he was now peculiarly exposed, and the nature of that hope and faith which he would require as his best defence. But, on inquiring to what persuasion his friends belonged, I found that they were Unitarians. I felt myself therefore unable to proceed, because, as nothing would be more repugnant to my notions of fair dealing, than to avail myself indirectly of my opportunities of influencing a boy's mind con- trary to the religious belief of his parents, without giving them the fullest notice, so, on the other hand, when the differences of belief are so great and so many, I feel that I could not at all enter into the subject, without enforc- ing principles wholly contrary to those in which your son has been brought up. This difficulty will increase with every half-year that he remains at the school, as he will be gradually coming more and more under my imme- diate care ; and I can neither suffer any of those boys with whom I am more immediately connected, to be left without religious instruction, nor can I give it in his case, without unavoidably imparting views wholly different from those entertained by the persons whom he is naturally most disposed to love and honour. Under these circumstances, I think it fair to state to you, what line I shall feel bound to follow, after the knowledge which I have gained of your son's religious belief. In every things I should say to him on the subject, I should use every possible pains and delicacy to avoid hurting his feelings with regard to his relations ; but at the same time, I cannot avoid labouring to impress on him, what is my belief on the most valuable truths in Christianity, and which, I fear, must be sadly at variance with the tenets in which he has been brought up. I should not do this controversially, and in the case of any other form of dissent from the Establishment, I would avoid dwelling on the differences between us, because I could teach all that I conceive to be essential in Christianity, without at all touching upon them. But in this instance, it is impossible to avoid interfering with the very points most at issue. I have a very good opinion of your son, both as to his con- duct and abilities, and I should be very sorry to lose him from the school. I think, also, that any one who knows me, would give you ample assurance that I have not the slightest feeling against Dissenters as such, or any desire, but rather very much the contrary, to make this school exclusive. My difficulty with your son is not one which I feel as a Churchman, but as LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. Ig3 a Christian ; and goes only on this simple principle, that I feel bound to teach the essentials of Christianity to all those committed to my care — and with these the tenets of the Unitarians alone, among all the Dissenters in the kingdom, are in my judgment irreconcilable. I trust that you will for- give me for having troubled you thus at length on this subject. VIII. TO THE REV. GEORGE CORNISH. (After the death of his father-in-law.) Rugby, September 2, 1829. I, too, had been meditating a letter to you for some time past, when the sight of yours roused me to make a vigorous effort, and here I have regular- ly begun a sheet of paper to you. You will perhaps have heard already that all our anxiety for Mr. Penrose was speedily and mercifully terminated, by as blessed a death as I suppose ever was witnessed. Although we were naturally anxious about him, because his attacks, though very slight and tran- sient, had rather increased in frequency, yet he was perfectly able to per- form all his usual duties, and enjoy his usual comforts in his family, and even his amusements in attending to his garden. On the Thursday before his death he was standing on his ladder, and pruning his vine for some time, and he went to bed perfectly well. The next morning he was seized with a more violent attack, but still without pajn, or without affecting his senses, and all he said indicated perfect Christian peace. A second attack the same morning made him speechless, and he soon sank into a lethargic slumber, in which he remained till Sunday night, when he expired in the arms of his children without a struggle. We arrived in time to see him alive, although he was then insensible, and Mary followed him to his grave on the Thursday following, with her aunts, brothers and sisters, and John Keble to read the funeral service When I dwell on the entire happiness that we are tasting day after day and year after year, it really seems startling ; and the sense of so much and such continued temporal mercy, is even more than humbling. — it is at times even fearful to me when I look within, and know how little truly grateful I am for it. All the children are well, and all, I trust, improving in character — thanks to their dear mother's care for them, who, under God, has been their constant corrector and guide. As for myself, I think of Wordsworth's lines, " Ye9 ! they can make who fail to find Brief leisure e'en in busiest days," &c. and I know how much need I have to make such moments of leisure ; for else one goes on still employed, till all makes progress, except our spiritual life, and that, I fear, goes backward. The very dealing, as I do, with beings in the highest state of bodily health and spirits, is apt to give a correspond- ing carelessness to my own mind. I must be all alive and vigorous to manage them, and to do my work ; very different from the contemplations of sickness and sorrow, which so often present themselves to a man who has the care of a parish. And, indeed, my spirits in themselves are a great blessing, for without them, the work would weigh me down, whereas now I seem to throw it off like the fleas from a dog's back when he shakes himself. May I only learn daily and hourly ao>q>oovdv. I am very much delighted with what you say of my pamphlet [on the Ro- man Catholic claims]. I know it gave pain, and I fear it has , and others of my friends. Yet, I know that I did not write it with one atom of unkindness or violence of feeling — nor do I think that the language or tone is violent ; and what I said of the clergy, I said in the very simplicity of my heart, no more imagining that it would give offence, than if I had said that they were unacquainted generally with military tactics or fortification. The 164 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. part which you object to, was not put in unthinkingly — hut I wished very much to bring the matter of schism to an issue ; and if any respectable man were to notice that part of the pamphlet, I should like to enter more fully into the subject. My own notions upon it have grown up wholly out of the New Testament, and because I never have thought, that what people call the Primitive Church, and much less the Anti-Nicene Church more generally, was any better authority per se, than the Church of Rome, or the Greek Church. But I do not know that what I have said in the pamphlet goes at all beyond the fair conclusions to be drawn from our own article, which gives to any national Church an authority to manage its own concerns, where God has not laid down any fixed rule; and, besides, what resemblance, is there between the government of the most ancient Episcopal Churches, and that of the Church of England, to those who regard resemblances or differences of government to consist in things more than in names 1 I think, that what I have said in my pamphlet merely goes so far as to assert, that there is no schism in the Church of England, having nothing to do with the Bishop of Rome, or in the Kirk of Scotland, having nothing to do with any Archbishops and Bishops at all, but that I have not at all treated of the question of differ- ent ecclesiastical societies existing in one and the same civil society like our English Dissenters, whatever my own opinions may be about the matter. I find people continually misunderstanding the strong distinction which I draw between individuals and societies, insomuch that Faber charges me with say- ing, that every individual has a right to govern himself, which I have spe- cially disclaimed in divers places ; being, in fact, a firm believer in the duty of absolute passive obedience in all cases between an individual and the gov- ernment— but not when the individual is acting as a member of the society, and their. concurrence with him tells him that obedience is now a misplaced term — because there is no authority in a rebellious government — rebellious against society — to claim obedience. I am sure that my views in this mat- ter are neither seditious nor turbulent — and I think I stated them clearly, but it seems they were not clear to every body. IX. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE. Rugby, October 14, 1829. I never felt more strongly the desire of keeping up my old friendships, and it often grieves me to think how little I see or hear of many of those for whom I feel the strongest regard. I do not mean that this is their fault rather than mine, or that it is a fault at all ; but it is a tendency of middle life and settled occupation, which I think we ought to struggle against, or else it grows with a fearful rapidity. I am very anxious to ex- press my repentance of that passage in my pamphlet, which you allude to, " raving about idolatry," &c. I mean my repentance of its tone and lan- guage, for the substance of it I think correct, and that men whose most ignorant, and worse than ignorant, application of English history had, to say the truth, made me angry, are likely to do a great deal of mischief in Ire- land. But the expression was unkind, and too sweeping, and I certain- ly ought not, nor would I, speak of all those as " raving about idolatry," whose opinions as to the guilt of the Romish Church differ from my own. With regard to the apparent inconsistency between the sermons and the pamphlet, you will find the term " practically idolatry" applied to the Roman Catholic system in some countries, even in the pamphlet. I never wished to mince the matter with their practices, but still, in principle, I cannot call the Romish Church an idolatrous Church in that strong sense as to warrant Faber's conclusions, even putting aside the difference of Christian times from Jewish. I should compare their superstitions to the worship of the brazen serpent, which Hezekiah did away with, which appears to have LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. ] 55 been long in existence, and which, in many of its worshippers, at any rate, was practically idolatry ; but I should not have called the Jewish Church idolatrous so long as this worship was encouraged, nor applied to it the lan- guage of" Come out of her my people," &c Of the moral state of the boys, for which of course I care infinitely the most, I can judge the least : our advantages in that respect are great, at least in the absence of many temptations to gross vice ; but to cultivate a good spirit in the highest sense is a far different thing from shutting out one or two gross evils from want of opportunity. X. TO REV. J. TUCKER. Rugby, October 26, 1829. If we are alive fifteen years hence, I think I would go with you gladly to Swan River, if they will make me schoolmaster there, and lay my bones in the land of kangaroos and opossums. I laugh about it ; yet if my wife were alive, and able to go, I should think it a very great benefit to the good cause to go out with all my family, and become a Swan River man : and I should try to get others of our friends to go out with us. My notion is, that no misssionaryzing is half so beneficial, as to try to pour sound and healthy blood into a young civilized society : to make one colony, if possible, like the ancient colonies, or like New England — a living sucker from the mother country, bearing the same blossoms and the same fruits, not a repro- duction]^ its vilest excrescences, its ignorance, and its wickedness, while all its good elements are left behind in the process. No words can tell the evil of such colonies as we have hitherto planted, where the best parts of the new society have been men too poor to carry with them or to gain much of the higher branches of knowledge ; or else mere official functionaries from England, whose hearts and minds have been always half at home, and who have never identified themselves with the land in which they were working. But if you and your sisters were to go out, with half Southborough after you, — apothecary, lawyers, butchers, bakers, tailors, carpenters, and la- bourers, and if we were to join with a similar draught from Rugby and Lale- ham, I think we should deserve to be avctygantol eitgydrcu both here and in Swan River. Such are my notions about it ; and I am not clear that I shall not devote my first £1000 that I make here to the purchase of land in Swan River, that I may have my estate and tbe school buildings got into due order, before I shut up shop at Rugby. Meantime, I hope you will not think I ought to shut up shop forthwith, and adjourn to the next asylum for daft people, because I am thus wildly dreaming about Swan River, instead of talking soberly about Rugby. But Rugby is a very nice place all the same, and I wish you would come and form your own judgment of it, or that some of your sisters would, if you cannot or will not. XI. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Rugby, November 4, 1829. What a time it is since I wrote to you ! And how much has occurred, and is continually occurring, on which I should like to write to you. You have heard perhaps of Mr. Penrose's death in September last, when, from the enjoyment of full health and vigour of mind and body, he was called away in three days with no intermediate pain or struggle, but by a gentle lethargic sleep, which lasted uninterrupted to his very last moment. Coupled with his holy and Christian life, which made him require no long time to go and renew his exhausted oil, his end was a most complete 166 L1FE 0F DR ARNOLD. (vO-avaoCa, so rare a blessing, that one dares not hope or pray for a s imilar mercy in one's own case We are going on comfortably, and I trust, thrivingly, with the school. We are above 200, and still looking upwards ; but I neither expect, and much less desire, any great addition to our numbers. The school cannot, I think, regularly expect more than 200 or 250 ; it may ascend higher with a strong flood, but there will be surely a corresponding ebb after it. You may imagine that I ponder over, often enough, the various discussions that I have had with you about education, and verse making, and reading the Poets. I find the natural leaning of a schoolmaster is so much to your view of the question, that my reason is more than ever led to think my own notions strongly required in the present state of classical education, if it were only on the principle of the bent stick. There is something so beautiful in good Latin verses, and in hearing fine poetry well construed, and something so attractive altogether in good scholarship, that I do not wonder at masters directing an undue portion of their attention to a crop so brilliant. I feel it growing in myself daily ; and, if I feel it, with prejudices all on the other side, I do not wonder at its being felt generally. But my deliberate con- viction is stronger and stronger, that all this system is wholly wrong for the greater number of boys. Those who have talents, and natural taste, and fondness for poetry, find the poetry lessons very useful ; the mass do not feel one tittle about the matter, and, I speak advisedly, do not, in my belief, benefit from them one grain. I am not sure that other things would answer better, though I have very little doubt of it ; but at any rate, the present plan is so entire a failure, that nothing can be risked by chang- ing it More than half my boys never saw the sea, and never were in London, and it is surprising how the first of these disadvantages interferes with their understanding much of the ancient poetry, while the other keeps the range of their ideas in an exceedingly narrow compass. Brought up myself in the Isle of Wight, amidst the bustle of soldiers and sailors, and familiar from a child with boats and ships, and the flags of half Europe, which gave me an instinctive acquaintance with geography, I quite marvel to find in what a state of ignorance boys are at seventeen or eighteen, who have lived all their days in inland country parishes, or small country towns For your comfort, I think I am succeeding in making them write very fair Latin prose, and to observe and understand some of the differences between the Latin and English idioms. On the other hand, what our boys want in one way they get in another ; from the very circum- stance of their being the sons of quieter parents, they have far less i»/?§te and more liiri&iict, than the boys of any other school 1 ever knew. Thus, to say the least, they have less of a most odious and unchristian quality, and are thus more open to instruction, and have less repugnance to be good, because their master wishes them to be so I have almost filled my paper, and can only add that Thucydides is getting on slowly, but I think that it will be a much less defective book than it was likely to have been had I remained at Laleham ; for though I have still an enormous deal to learn, yet my scholarship has mended considerably within the last year at Rugby. I suppose you will think at any rate that it will be better to publish Thucydides, however imperfectly, than to write another pamphlet. Poor dear pamphlet ! I seem to feel the greater tenderness for it, because it has excited so much odium ; and now I hear that it is reported at Oxford that I wish to suppress it, which is wholly untrue. I would not print a second edi- tion, because the question was settled, and controversy about it was become absurd ; but I never have repented of it in any degree, or wished it unwrit- ten, " pace tua dixerim," and I only regret that I did not print a larger im- pression. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 167 XII. TO REV. H. JENKYNS. Rugby, November 11, 18S9. I thank you heartily for two very kind letters, and am very anxious to be favoured with some more of your friend's comments [on Thucydides.] . . . I hope I am not too old, or too lazy, or too obstinate to be taught better. I do thank you very much for your kindness in taking so much trouble in my behalf; and I earnestly beg of you to send me more. And can you tell me, or, if not, will you ask Amicus Doct., — where is to be found a summary of the opinions of English Scholars about o7rws and on ox; iir], and the moods which they require : and further, do you or he hold their doctrine good for any thing ? Dawes, and all men who endeavour to establish general rules, are of great use in directing one's attention to points which one might otherwise have neglected ; and labour and acuteness often discover a rule, where indolence and carelessness fan- cied it was all hap-hazard. But larger induction and sounder judgment (which I think exist in Hermann in an infinite degree beyond any of our English scholars) teach us to distinguish again between a principle and an usage ; the latter may be general, but if it be merely usage, grounded on no intelligible principle, it seems to me foolish to insist on its being universal, and to alter texts right and left, to make them all conformable to the Canon. Equidem, — both in Greek and in other matters, — think liberty a far better thing than uniformity of form merely, where no principle is concerned. Voila the cloven foot. XIII. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESft. (In allusion to a libel in the John Bull.) Rugby, May II, 1830. I thank you for another very kind letter. In a matter of this sort, I wil- lingly resign my own opinion to that of a man like yourself, at once my friend and legal adviser. I think, too, that I am almost bound to attend to the opinion of the Bishop of London ; for his judgment of the inexpediency of prosecuting must rest on the scandal which he thinks it will bring upon religion and the Church, and of this he is a far better judge than I am ; nor, to say the truth, should I much like to act in a -doubtful matter in opposition to the decided advice of a Bishop in a case that concerned the Church. I say this in sober earnest, in spite of what you call my Whiggery and Radi- calism. XIV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Rugby, May 1 9, 1830. The authorities which are arrayed against proceeding are quite decisive, and I heartily agree with you that clergymen must not go to law, when lawyers say they should not. Still as I had no thought of gain or of vengeance, but simply of procuring a public justification of my char- acter— not my opinions — I feel that it would have been no lack of charity to proceed, though I am heartily glad to be spared the necessity of doing so by so many and such powerful representations. But I trust that you and all my friends will give me credit for being perfectly tolerant of all attacks upon my writings or general abuse of my opinions Believe me, I am heartily glad of the final result of this discussion, for I had no wish to go to law but I thought that mine own, or rather my misrepresented opin- [68 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. ions on politics, ought to make me particularly anxious to deny any charge respecting religious matters. But I am perfectly willing to take the judg- ment of my friends and of impartial persons in what rests wholly on opinion, and besides, if the attack or loss to my own character were ever so great, I should quite agree with you that it was better to bear it, than to bring sacred things into discussion in places, and through disputants wholly unfitted for them. But this I at first did not contemplate as the likely result. XV. TO F. HARTWELL, ESQ_ Rugby, June 28, J830. I have just published one volume of Thucydides ; when the others will follow it is hard to say, for the work here is more and more engrossing continually : but I like it better and better; it has all the interest of a great game of chess, with living creatures for pawns and pieces, and your adversary, in plain English, the Devil ; truly he plays a very tough game, and is very hard to beat, if I ever do beat him. It is quite surprising to see the wickedness of young boys ; or would be surprising, if I had not had my own school experience and a good deal since to enlighten me. [The following letters, which have been inserted as exhibiting the earlier stages of his views of ancient history, were occasioned by his revision of the "Outlines of General History," and the first numbers of " The History of Rome," for the Useful Knowledge Society.] XVI. TO T. F. ELLIS, ESQ.. June 26, 1830. . . . . In the Roman History, I have been inclined to doubt Niebuhr's notion of the Alpine origin of the Tuscans. Do not all existing accounts concur in stating that the Metropolis of the race in Italy was south, not north, of the Appenines ? and does not the Tuscan notion of the God's dwelling to the north, on the Alps, and from thence looking down on the world, rather imply that the Alps were to the Tuscans in Italy the barrier of their world, the limit of their knowledge, rather than the earliest home of their nation. But this is happily not of any great consequence. Further. I believe that the great falsehood of the Roman history begins with the Com- monwealth ; the reigns of the kings I cannot but think contain more truth than Niebuhr allows. The story of the elder Tarquin in particular seems to me thoroughly probable, and to be confirmed by the authority of the Em- peror Claudius, in his speech preserved on the brass plate at Lyons ; and Claudius was well acquainted with the Tuscan historians. Again, the great Crisis in the foreign powers of Rome seems to me to have been her war with the Samnites, Gauls, Tuscans, and Umbrians, in the fifth century of Rome. Why did the Romans triumph over this coalition? And was it by the superior population of Latium, which we know was ex- ceedingly dense 1 I have always wanted this period to be brought out into stronger light, though I do not know whether it is practicable. I am de- lighted that you have given Vico his due. I have mentioned him also in the Appendix to the first volume of my Thucydides, which, is just published. In the account of the origin of the Roman tribes, I do not see clearly whom you suppose the Rhamnes to have been — were they the mixed Casco-Pelas- gian people, and the Luceres the pure Pelasgian ? But then how came the traditions of the inferior tribe to prevail so entirely ? I am still inclined to think that the Luceres were connected with Tuscany. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 169 XVII. TO THE SAME. _ Rugby, July 2, 1830. I ought to have written to you sooner about chapter xiv., but I have had . very much to do immediately before the holidays. The following remarks have occurred to me, which I will put down in order. Sect. 1. — Is not some brief explanation required of the causes of the Roman successes by sea, immediately after the first creation of their navy ? And is not the principle of general usefulness, that any superiority acquired only by one nation getting the start of another, and so having studied the subject longer, is always liable to be overthrown, when the rival nation fairly enters into the race 1 [After some remarks on the Jus Italicum.] The Jus Cseritum appears ^to have been a mere communication of the private rights of citizen- ship, made at a time when the citizenship of Caere was as valuable to a Roman as that of Rome to a Caeritan. I have long had a suspicion that the term " socii navales," habitually applied to the Roman seamen, was derived from a time when all the navy of Rome was furnished by her allies, proba- bly by this very Caere or Agylla. Sect. 5. — The Little St. Bernard is not at the source of the Isere, but some miles below it. If Cramer's statement fail any where, I have always imagined that it was here, and that the army might possibly have followed the Isere higher up than he imagines, and descended into a valley which would take them more directly down upon Turin. The passes between the Little St.. Bernard and Mount Cenis are almost the only points which 1 believe have not been examined. Might not the wisdom and firmness of the Romans in maintaining the struggle in Spain, and thus depriving Hannibal of his great nursery of sol- diers, be noticed as contributing mainly to the success of the war ? Had Hasdrubal followed him immediately, instead of nine years afterwards, the fate of Rome was inevitable. I have noticed all that struck me as worth noticing as to the expediency of any alteration. I am very much pleased to have had an opportunity of reading these chapters attentively, and I am sure they must have cost you no little trouble, and will be exceedingly useful. I like much your summary of the second Punic war, and your remarks at the close of it. The great art seems to be to make certain salient points, in an abridged history, in the way of remarks or recapitulation — otherwise it is like travelling through the plains of Lombardy ; one is interested with each successive scene, but gains no general notion of the whole country, and the bearings of one place with another. XVIII. TO THE SAME. Rugby, September 12, 1830. About the Pelasgian element in the Athenian people, I am not quite satisfied. There is a clever pamphlet by a Dr. Edwards, a friend of Thierry's, in which he maintains that the original inhabitants of all coun- tries, such as the Celts in Britain, have been much less lost by subsequent conquests than is commonly supposed, and that their physical type shows itself unchanged after the lapse of centuries. II' so, the predominant element at Athens would have been Pelasgian — and was it then the Pelasgian rather than the Hellenic people whose intellectual nature was so wonderful ? Cer- tainly there appears very little of the same superiority amongst the Dorians of Peloponnesus, who were pure Hellenes, or amongst the ^Eolic Boeotians. But this question of race requires still a much larger induction, I think, before we can argue solidly about it. 12 170 L1FE 0F DR ARNOLD. XIX. TO THE SAME. Rugby, October 3, 1530. I have kept the two volumes which were sent to me longer than I ought, but my time has been sadly occupied, and I find it impossible to do either of them justice. The Rome, I think, promises exceedingly well : and I have ventured to add a sort of sketch of the scenery from my recollection of it, chiefly, I believe, because it is a delight to me to recall to my mind images of such beauty. But if the description be clear, of which I cannot judge, I think it will not be misplaced ; at least'I have a great fondness for such topo- graphical details myself. I cannot yet be quite so skeptical about the kings ; nor can I see so clearly the poetical character of the early Roman History. Perhaps, how- ever, it would be better to say that I do not trace the fictitious character of* it so strongly ; for the traditions may well have come down in verse, but it makes all the difference whether they were merely real events described in the style and form most fitted to make them relished and remembered, or whether they were wild inventions, like Ariosto's tale of the siege of Paris by the Saracens. Is not one of the most correct accounts of William the Conqueror's Expedition to be found in an old poem, Le Roman du Rou 1 What you say of the Achsans is I suppose quite just : Achaia was less Doricized than the rest of the Peloponnesus, but, from its obscurity during the brilliant times of Greece, very little seems to be known about it . The system of federation existed every where in the early state of society, and Achaia was ripe for its renewal at a later period, because no one town had so outgrown the others as to aspire to become the capital of the whole country. [Some of these opinions, especially those on mythical history, were afterwards much modified. See the early chapters of his History of Rome, and the Preface to the 3rd Vol. of his Edition of Thucydides] XX. TO THE REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Rugby, August 24, 1830. Your letter was a most welcome sight to me the first morning of my arrival at home, amidst the host of strange handwritings and letters of business which now greet me every morning. It rejoices me to think that we are going to have a cousin of yours at Rugby, and I suppose we shall see him here on Saturday, when the great coach starts. You know that it is licensed to carry not exceeding 260 passengers, besides the foundationers. I agreed with the Pythagoreans that to aouiotov was one of the number of xaxa, and so I applied to the Trustees, and got the limit set. We are not near it yet, being not quite 260, including foundationers, and perhaps may never reach it ; but that I shall not at all regret, and all I wanted was never to go beyond it. We have got a Cambridge man, a Fellow of Trinity, who was most highly recommended to me, as a new master ; and I hope we shall pull hard and all together during the next half year : there is plenty to be done, I can assure you ; but thank God, I continue to enjoy the work, and am now in excellent condition for setting to it. You may see Mary's name and mine amongst the subscribers for the sufferers at Paris. It seems to me a most blessed revolution, spotless beyond all example in history, and the most glorious instance of a royal rebellion against society, promptly and energet- ically repressed, that the world has yet seen. It magnificently vindicates the cause of knowledge and liberty, showing how humanizing to all classes of society are the spread of thought and information, and improved political institutions ; and it lays the crimes of the last revolution just in the right LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 17j place, the wicked aristocracy, that had so brutalized the people by itc long iniquities, that they were like slaves broken loose when they first bestirred themselves. Before all these events took place, on my way out through France, I was reading Guizot's History of the Progress of Civilization in France from the earliest times. You know he is now Minister of the Interior, and one of the ablest writers in France. In his book he gives a history of the Pelagian con- troversy, a most marvellous contrast with the Liberals of a former day, or with our Westminster Reviewers now. Guizot sides with St. Augustine ; but the whole chapter is most worthy of notice ; the freedom of the will, so far as to leave a consciousness of guilt when we have not done our duty, — the corruption of our nature, which never lets us in fact come up to what we know we ought to do, and the help derived from prayers to God, — are stated as incontrovertible philosophical facts, of which every man's experience may convince him ; and Guizot blames Pelagius for so exaggerating the notion of human freedom as to lose sight of our need of external assistance. And there is another chapter on the unity of the Church no less remarkable. Now Guizot is Professor of History in the University of Paris, and a most eminent liberal ; and it seems to me worthy of all notice to observe his lan- guage with regard to religion. And I saw Niebuhr at Bonn, on my way home, and talked with him for three hours ; and I am satisfied from my own ears, if I had had any doubts before, of the grossness of the slander which called him an unbeliever. I was every way delighted with him, and liked very much what I saw of his wife and children. Trevenen and his wife en- joyed the journey exceedingly, and are all the better for it. Amongst other things, I visited the Grand Chartreuse, which is certainly enough to make a man romantic, and the Church of Madonna del Monte ; from whence, or ra- ther from a mountain above it, I counted twelve mountain outlines between me and the horizon, — the last, the ridge of the highest Alps — upon a sky so glowing with the sunset, that instead of looking white from their snow, they were like the teeth of a saw upon a plate of red hot iron, all deep and black. I was delighted also with Venice ; most of all delighted to see the secret pri- sons of the old aristocracy converted into lumber rooms, and to see German soldiers exercising authority in that place, which was once the very focus of the moral degadation of the Italian race, the seat of falsehood and ignorance and cruelty. They talk of building a bridge to Venice over the Lagune; if so, I am glad that I have seen it first. I liked Padua also, more than I thought I could have liked the birth-place of Titus Livius. The influence of the clergy must be great there, and most beneficially exercised ; for a large institution for the poor of Padua, providing for those who are out of work, as well as for the old and infirm, derives its main support from legacies ; the clergy never failing to urge every man who can at all afford it to leave something at his death for this object. We came home through the Tyrol, and through Wurtemberg and Baden, countries apparently as peaceful and prosperous and simple-mannered as I ever saw ; it is quite economical trav- elling there. And now, when shall I travel to Kenwyn ? I hope one of these days ; but whether in the next winter or not, is hard to say ; I only know that there are few things which I should enjoy better. I was so sorry to miss old Tucker, who came here for one day when I was abroad ; he was at Leam- ington with his sister, to consult our great oracle, Jephson. Charles, I sup- pose, is only coming home upon leave, and will go out again; I should be very glad to see him, and to show him his marks on my Hederic's Lexicon when he was at Wyatt's. I wish I may be able to do any thing for you as to a curate, but I am very much out of the world in those matters, and I have no regular correspondence with Oxford. I am afraid I am sadly in dis- grace with all parties, between my Pamphlet and Sermons, and I am afraid that Thucydides will not mend the matter. As for the pamphlet, that is all natural enough, but I really did not think there was any cloven foot in the Sermons, nor did I wish to show any ; not, I hope, from time-serving, but |72 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. because, what you said about the schism question, I wished to do with that and divers other points, — i. e., reserve them for a separate volume, which I hope I may be able to publish before I die. There are some points on which I feel almost as if I had a testimony to deliver, which I ought not to withhold. And Milman1s History of the Jews made me more and more eager to deliver myself of my conceptions. But how to do it without interfering with other and even more pressing duties, I cannot tell. Last half year, I preached every Sunday in Lent, and for the last five Sundays of the half year also, besides other times ; and I had to write new sermons for all these, for I can- not bear to preach to the boys any thing but what is quite fresh, and sug- gested by their particular condition. I never like preaching any where else so well ; for one's boys are even more than a parish, inasmuch as one knows more of them all individually, than can easily be the case in a parish, and has a double authority over them, temporal as well as spiritual Thouo-h, to speak seriously, it is quite awful to watch the strength of evil in such young minds, and how powerless is every effort against it. It would give the vainest man alive a very fair notion of his own insufficiency, to see how little he can do, and how his most earnest addresses are as a cannon ball on a bolster : thorough careless unimpressibleness beats one all to pieces. And so it is, and so it will be ; and as far as I am concerned, I can quite say that it is much better that it should be so ; for it would be too kindling, could one perceive these young minds really led from evil by one's own efforts ; one would be sorely tempted to bow down to one's own net. As it is, the net is so palpably ragged, that one sees perforce how sorry an idol it would make. But I must go to bed, and spare your eyes and your patience. XXI. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Rugby, November, 1830. I am always glad to write to you, but I have now two especial causes for doing so ; one to thank you for your Visitation sermon, and another to explain to you why I do not think it right to comply with your wishes touch- ing the tricolor work-bag. For your sermon, I thank you for it ; I believe I agree with it almost entirely, waiving some expressions, which 1 hold one never*should cavil about, where one agrees in substance. But have you ever clearly defined to yourself what you mean by " one society," as ap- plied to the whole Christian Church upon earth ? It seems to me that most of what I consider the errors about " the Church," turn upon an imperfect understanding of this point. In one sense, and that a very important one, all Christians belong to one society ; but then it is more like Cicero's sense of " societas," than what we mean by a society. There is a " societas ge- neris humani," and a " societas hominum Chrjstianorum ;" but there is not one " respublica" or " civitas" of either, but a great many. The Roman Catholics say there is but one "respublica," and therefore, with perfect con- sistency, they say that there must be one central government : our Article, if I mistake not its sense, says, and with great truth, that the Christian Res- publica depends on the political Respublica ; that is, that there may be at least as many Christian societies as there are political societies, and that there may be, and in our own kingdom are, even more. If there be one Christian society, in the common sense of the word, there must be one go- vernment; whereas, in point of fact, the Scotch Church, the English Church, and the French Church, have all separate and perfectly independ- ent crovernments ; and consequently can only be in an unusual and peculiar sense " one society :" that is, spiritually one, as having the same objects and the same principles, and the same supports, and the same enemies. You therefore seem to me right, in saying that a Roman Catholic should be ad- dressed in England as a Dissenter ; but all this appears to me to lead ne- LIFE OF D&. ARNOLD. I73 eessarily to this conclusion, — that the constitution and government of every Church is a political institution, and that conformity and nonconformity are so far matters of civil law, that, where nonconformity, as in England, is strictly legal, there it is no offence, except in so far as it may be accompa- nied with heretical opinions, which is merely xarw. av(t(li(Jr\xh$. For the State says that there may be any given number of religious societies within its jurisdiction — societies, that is, in the common sense of the term, as bo- dies governing themselves ; and it is clear that the State may lawfully say this, for, if the Church were one society, in this sense, by Christ's institu- tion, then the Romanist doctrine would be true, and, I do not say the Pope, but certainly a General Council would possess an authority paramount in ecclesiastical matters, payment of tithes, &c, to any local and human au- thority of Kings or Parliaments of this or that political division of the hu- man race. I have thought not a little upon all this matter in my time, and I fancy that I see my own way straight ; whether other people will think so, is a different question. (After explaining a false report about a tricolored cockade and work- bag.) It is worse than obnoxious to apply this to English politics, and if any man seriously considers me to wish for a revolulion here, wilh my seven children and good house to lose, to put it on no other ground, why he must even continue to think so. But I do admire the Revolution in France — admire it as heartily and entirely, as any event recorded in history ; and I think that it becomes every individual, still more every clergyman, and most of all, every clergyman in a public situation, to express this opinion publicly and decidedly. I have, not forgotten the twenty years' war, into which the English aristocracy and clergy drove Mr. Pitt in 1793, and which the Quarterly Review and other such writers are now seeking to repeat. I hold it to be of incalculable importance, that, while the conduct of France has been beyond all example pure and heroic, there should be so manifest a display of sympathy on the part of England, as to lead to a real mutual con- fidence and friendship between the two countries. Our government, I be- lieve, is heartily disposed to do this, and I will not, for one, shrink from avowing a noble cause and a noble nation, because a party in England, join- ed through timidity by a number of men who have really no sympathy with it, choose to try to excommunicate all who will not join them. I have my- self heard them expressing hearty approbation of the French Revolution, and yet shrink from avowing it, lest they should appear to join the Radi- cals. And thus they leave the Radicals in exclusive possession of senti- ments, which they themselves join in, just as 'they would leave the Useful Knowledge Society to the Benthamites. I quarrel with no man for disap- proving of the revolution, except he does it in such a manner as to excite national animosities, and so tend to provoke a war ; but in a case so fla- grant— a case ot as clear right, as the abolition of the slave trade — it is clear- ly not for the friends of France to suppress or conceal their sentiments. About Belgium the case is wholly different: there, the merits of the quar- rel are far more doubtful, and the. conduct oT the popular party far less pure ; and there I have no sympathy with the Belgians. But France, if it. were only for the contrast to the first revolution, deserves, I think, the warmest admiration, and the most cordial expression of it. I have written now more upon this subject than I have either written or spoken upon it before to any one ; for indeed I have very little time, and no inclination for disputes on such matters. But, if I am questioned about my opinions, and required to conceal them, as if I were ashamed of them, I think it right then to avow them plainly, and to explain my reasons for them. There is not a man in England who is less a party man than I am, for in fact no party would own me ; and, when I was at 's in the summer, he looked upon me to be quite illiberal. But those who hold their own opinions in a string, will sup- pose that their neighbours do the same. CHAPTER VI. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, SEPTEMBER 1830 TO DECEMBER 1832. Perhaps no more striking instance of his deep interest in the state of the country could be found, than in the gloom, with which his correspondence is suddenly overcast in the autumn of 1830. The alarming aspect of English society brought to view in the rural disturbances in the winter of 1830. and additionally darkened in 1831-32, by the visitation of the Cholera, and the political agi- tations of the Reform Bill, little as it came within his own expe- rience, gave a colour to his whole mind. Of his state of feeling at this time, no better example can be given than the five sermons appended to the opening course of his practical school sermons, in his second volume, especially the last of them, which was preached in the chapel on the Sunday when the news of the arrival of the Cholera in England first reached Rugby. There are those amongst his pupils who can never forget the moment when on that dark Novemher afternoon, after the simple preface, stating in what sense worldly thoughts were or were not to be brought into that place, he at once began with that solemnity which marked his voice and maimer when speaking of what deeply moved him : ': I need not tell you that this is a marked time — a time such as neither we, nor our fathers for many generations before us, have experienced ; and to those who know what the past has been, it is no doubt awful to think of the change which we are now about to encounter." (Serm. vol. ii. p. 413.) But in him the sight of evil, and the endeavour to remove it, were hardly ever disjoined ; and whilst every thing which he felt partook of the despondency with which that sermon opens, every thing which he did partakes of that cheerful activity with which the same sermon closes in urging the example of the Apostle's " wise and manly conduct amidst the dangers of storm and shipwreck." The alarm which he felt was shared by many of the most opposite opinions to his own ; but there could have been few, whom it touched at once on so many points. The disturbances of the time were to him the very evils which he had anticipated even as far back as 1819 ; they struck on some of the most sensitive of LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 175 his natural feelings — his sense of justice, and his impatience of the sight of suffering : they seemed to him symptoms of a deep-seated disease in all the relations of English society — the results of a long series of evils from the neglect of the eighteenth century, (Church Ref. p. 24) — of the lawlessness of the feudal system, (Hist Rome, vol. i. p. 266) — of the oppressions of the Norman conquest, (Sheff. Letters) — of the dissoluteness of the Roman empire, (ib.)— of the growth of those social and national sins which the Hebrew Pro- phets had denounced, and which Christianity in its full practical development was designed to check. Hence arose his anxiety to see the clergy take it up, as he had himself endeavoured to do in the sermons already noticed. ' " I almost despair," he said, " of any thing that any private or local ef- forts can do. I think that the clergy as a body might do much, if they were steadily to observe the evils of the times, and preach fearlessly against them. I cannot understand what is the good of a national Church if it be not to Christianize the nation, and introduce the principles of Christianity into men's social and civil relations, and expose the wickedness of that spirit which maintains the game laws, and in agriculture and trade seems to think that there is no such sin as covetousness, and that if a man is not dishonest, he has nothing to do but to make all the profit of his capital that he can." Hence, again, his anxiety to impart or see imparted to the pub- lications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, then in the first .burst of their reputation, and promising to exercise a really extensive influence on the country at large, something of the religious spirit, in which they seemed to him to be deficient. " I am not wishing to see the Society's tracts turned into sermons,— fat less to see them intermeddle in what are strictly theological controversies; — but I am sure that, with the exception of the Unitarians, all Christians have a common ground in all that is essential in Christianity, and beyond that I never wish to go ; — and it does seem to me as forced and unnatural in us now to dismiss the principles of the Gospel and its great motives from our consideration —as is done habitually, for example, in Miss Edgeworth's books, — as it is to till our pages with Hebraisms, and to write and°speak in the words and style of the Bible. The slighest touches of Christian princi- ple and Christian hope in the Society's biographical and historical articles would be a sort of living salt to the whole ;— and would exhibit that union which I never will consent to think unattainable, between goodness and wisdom ;— between every thing that is manly, sensible, and free, and every thing that is pure and self-denying, and humble, and heavenly." His communications with the Society, made, however, from the nature of the case, rather through individuals than officially, were at one time frequent; and though, from the different view' which he took of its proper province, he was finally induced to discon- tinue them, he felt great reluctance in abandoning his hope of being able to co-operate with a body which he " believed might, with God's blessing, do more good of all kinds, political, intellectual, and spiritual, than any other society in existence." " There was a show of reason," he said, " in excluding Christianity from the plan of the Society's works, so long as they avowedly confined them- selves to science or to intellectual instruction : but in a paper intended to 176 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. improve its readers morally, to make men better and happier, as well as bet- ter informed, surely neutrality with regard to Christianity is, virtually, hos- tility." " For myself," he adds, " I am well aware of my own insignificance, but if there were no other objection to the Penny Magazine assuming a de- cidedly Christian tone, than mere difficulties of execution, I would most read- ily offer my best services, such as they are, to the Society, and would en- deavour to furnish them regularly with articles of the kind that I desire. My occupations here are so engrossing, that it would be personally very incon- venient to me to do so; and I am not so absurd as to think my offer of any value, except in the single case of a practical difficulty existing as to finding a writer, should the principle itself be approved of. I am fully convinced that if the Penny Magazine were decidedly and avowedly Christian, many of the clergy throughout the kingdom would be most delighted to assist its circula- tion by £v~ery means in their power. For myself, I should think that I could not do too much to contribute to the support of what would then be so great a national blessing: and I should beg to be allowed to offer £50 annually towards it, so long as my remaining in my present situation enabled me to gratify my inclinations to that extent." The most practical attempt at the realization of these views, was his own endeavour to set up a weekly newspaper, the Eng- lishman's Register, which he undertook in 1831, " more to relieve his own conscience than with any sanguine hope of doing good," ■ but " earnestly desiring to speak to the people the words of truth and soberness — to tell them plainly the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and their remedies." He was the proprietor, though not the sole editor, and he contributed the chief articles in it (signed A.), consisting chiefly of explanations of Scripture, and of comments on the political events of the day. It died a natural death in a few weeks, partly from his want of leisure to control it properly, and from the great expenses which it entailed upon him — partly from the want of cordial sympathy in any of the existing parties of the country. Finding, however, that some of his articles had been copied into the Sheffield Courant by its editor, Mr. Piatt, he opened a communication with him in July, 1831, which he maintained ever afterwards, and commenced writing a series of Letters in that paper, which, to the number of thirteen, were afterwards published separately, and constitute the best exposition of his views, on the main causes of social distress in England. It was now that, with " the thirst for a lodge in some vast wilderness, which in these times of excitement," he writes to a friend, " is almost irresistible," he began to turn his thoughts to what ultimately became his home in Westmoreland. It was now, also, that as he came more into contact with public affairs, he began to feel the want of sympathy and the opposition which he subsequently experienced on a larger scale. " I have no man like- minded with me," he writes to Archbishop Whately, — "none with whom I can cordially sympathize ; there are many good men to be found, and many clever men, some too, who are both good and clever ; but yet there is a want of some greatness of mind, or single- ness of purpose, or delicacy of feeling, which makes them grate LIPE_OF DR. ARNOLD. 177 against the edge of one's inner man." This was the period when he felt most keenly his differences with the so-called Evangelical party, to which, on the one hand, he naturally looked for co-opera- tion, as the body which at that time was placed at the head of the religious convictions of the country, but from which, on the other hand, he was constantly repelled by his strong sense of the obsta- cles which (as he thought) their narrow views and technical phraseology, were for ever opposing to the real and practical appli- cation of the Old and New Testament, as the remedy of the great wants of the age, social, moral, and intellectual. It was his own conviction of these wants which now more than ever awakened his desire for a commentary on the Scriptures, which should explain their true reference to the present state of England and of the world, as well as remove some of the intellec- tual difficulties, especially in the Old Testament, to which men's minds seemed to be growing more and more awake. And this, for the time, he endeavoured to accomplish by the statement of some of his general principles of interpretation in the Essay on that subject, which he affixed to his second volume of sermons publish- ed in December 1831. The objections which this Essay excited at the time in various quarters were very great, nnd according to his own belief it exposed him to more misunderstanding than any other of his writings. But he never wavered in the conviction that its publication had been an imperative duty — it was written, as he said, " professionally, from his having had so much to do with young men, and from knowing what they wanted ;" even in the last year of his life, he said that he looked upon it as the most im- portant thing he had ever written ; and at the time he thought it " likely, with God's blessing, to be so beneficial, that I published it at the end of this volume, rather than wait for another opportunity, because under that sense of the great uncertainty of human life which the present state of things brings especially home to my mind, I should be sorry to die without having circulated what I believe will be to many most useful and most satisfactory ;" and the objections which it had roused only made him more and more anxious to go on with the subject, feeling "that the more it was considered, men would find that they had been afraid of a ground- less danger," and that " the further I follow up my own views, the more they appear to me to harmonize with the whole system of God's revelations, and not only absolutely to do away with all the difficulties of the Scriptures, but to turn many of them into valuable instructions."1 XXII. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.. Rugliy, November 1. 1830. It is quite high time that I should write to you, for weeks and months go by, and it is quite startling to think how little communication I hold with many 1 Some of the points touched upon in this Essay are enlarged upon in his Sermons — 178 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. of those I love most dearly. And yet these are times, when I am least of all disposed to loosen the links that bind me to my oldest and dearest friends, for I imagine we shall all want the union of all the good men we can get to- gether; and the want of sympathy which I cannot but feel towards so many of those whom I meet with, makes me think how delightful it would be to have daily intercourse with those with whom I ever feel it thoroughly. What men do in middle life, without a wife and children to turn to, I cannot imagine ; for I think the affections must be sadly checked and chilled, even in the best men, by their intercourse with people, such as one usually finds them in the world. I do not mean that one does not meet with good and sensible people ; but then their minds are set, and our minds are set, and they will not, in mature age, grow into each other. But with a home filled with those whom we entirely love and sympathize with, and with some old .friends, to whom one can open one's heart fully from time to time, the world's society has rather a bracing influence to make one shake off mere dreams of delight. You must not think me bilious or low-spirited ; — I never felt better or more inclined to work ; — but one gets pathetic with thinking of the pre- sent and the past, and of the days and the people that you and I have seen together, and of the progress which we have all made towards eternity ; for I, "who am nearly the youngest of our old set, have completed half my three score and ten years. Besides, the aspect of the times is really to my mind awful : — on one side a party profaning the holiest names by the lowest prin- ciples, and the grossest selfishness and ignorance, — on the other, a party who seem likely /.axov y.axw laa&ai, who disclaim and renounce even the very name of that, whose spirit their adversaries have long renounced equal- ly. If I had two necks, I should think that I had a very good chance of be- ing hanged by both sides, as I think I shall now by whichever gets the bet- ter, if it really does come to a fight. I read now, with the deepest sympathy, those magnificent lines of your Uncle's, on the departed year, and am my- self, in fact, experiencing some portion of the abuse which he met with from the same party; while, like him, I feel utterly unable to shelter myself in the opposite party, whose hopes and principles are such as I shrink from with abhorrence. So what Thucydides says of ia fuaa tmv noUtmv often rises upon my mind as a promising augury of my future exaltation, ij nov tzqo Nianvlr]tz at,wjt]d-t'vro<;. ij tfinvyt noh PnvySflcu;. November 3rd. — I wrote these two sides in school on Monday, and I hope to finish the rest of my letter this evening, while, my boys are translating into Latin from my English that magnificent part in the De Oratore, about the death ofCrassus. I see I have given you enough of discourse on things in general — I will only add one thing more ; that I know there are reports in Oxford of my teaching the boys my politics, and setting revolutionary themes. If you hear these reports, will you contradict them flatly? I never disguise or suppress my opinions, but I have been and am most religiously careful not to influence my boys with thempand I have just now made them begin Russell's Modern Europe again, because we were come to the period of the French Revolution, and I did not choose to enter upon that subject with them. As to the revolutionary themes, I cannot even imagine the origin of so absurd a falsehood, except it be that one of my subjects last half year was " the particular evils which civilized society is exposed to. as opposed to savage life," which I gave for the purpose of clearing their notions about luxury, and the old declamations about Scythian simplicity, &c. ; but I suppose that I am thought to have a longing for the woods, and an impatience of the restraint of breeches. It is really too great a folly to be talked of as a revolutionist, with a family of seven young children, and a house and income that I should be rather puzzled to match in America, if I were obliged to change my quarters. My quarrel with the anti-liberal party that on "the Lord's day," in the 3rd volume, and those on " Phinehas," " Jael," and M the Disobedient Prophet," in the 6th. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 179 is, that they are going the way to force my children to America, and to de- prive me and every one else of property, station, and all the inestimabb benefits of society in England. There is nothing so revolutionary, becau e there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society, as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is, by the very law of its creation, in eternal progress ; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption, that our business is to preserve and not to improve. It is the ruin of us all alike, individuals, schools, and nations. XXIII. TO HIS SISTER SUSANNAH ARNOLD. Rugby, November, 1830. 1 The paramount interest of public affairs outweighs with me even the school itself; and I think not unreasonably, for school and all would go to the dogs, if the convulsion which I dread really comes to pass. I must write a pamphlet in the holidays, or I shall burst. No one seems to me to unders'and our dangers, or at least to speak them out manfully. One good man, who sent a letter to the Times the other day, recommends that the clergy should preach subordination and obedience. I seriously say, God forbid they should ; for, if any earthly thing could ruin Christianity in England, it would be this. If they read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Habakuk, they will find that the Prophets, in a similar state of society in Judea, did not preach subordination only or chiefly, but they denounced oppression, and amassing overgrown properties, and grinding the labourers to the smallest possible pittance ; and they denounced the Jewish high-church party for countenancing all these iniquities, and prophesying emooth things to please the aristocracy. If the clergy would come forward as one man from Cumberland to Cornwall, exhorting peaceableness on the one side, and justice on the other, denouncing the high rents and the game laws, and the carelessness which keeps the poor ignorant, and then wonders that they are brutal, I verily believe they might yet save themselves and the state. But the truth is that we are living amongst a population whom we treat with all the haughtiness and indifference that we could treat slaves, whom we allow to be slaves in ignorance, without having them chained and watched to prevent them from hurting us. I only wish you could read Ar- thur Young's Travels in France in 1789 and 1790, and see what he says of the general outbreak then of the peasantry, when they burnt the chateaux all over France, and ill-used the families of the proprietors, and then com- pare the orderliness of the French populace now. It speaks volumes for small subdivided properties, general intelligence and an absence of aristo- cratical manners and distinctions. We know that, in the first revolution, to be seen in decent clothes was at one time a sure road to the guillotine ; so bitter was the hatred engendered in a brute population against those who had gone on in luxury and refinement, leaving their poorer neighbours to remain in the ignorance and wretchedness of savages, and therefore with the ferocity of savages also. The dissolution of the ministry may do some- thing ; but the evil exists in every parish in England; and there should be a reform in the ways and manners of every parish to cure it. We have got up a dispensary here, and I am thinking of circulating small tracts a la Cobbett, in point of style, to show the people the real state of things and their causes. Half the truth might be of little use, but ignorance of all the truth is something fearful, and a knowledge of the whole truth would. I am convinced, do nothing but pacify, because the fault of the rich has been a sin of ignorance and thoughtlessness ; they have only done what the poor would have done in their places, because few men's morality rises higher than to take care of themselves, abstaining from actual wrong to others. So you ]30 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. have got a long sermon. showed me a copy of the Record newspa- per, a true specimen of the party, with their infinitely little minds, disputing about anise and cummin, when heaven and earth are coming together around them ; with much of Christian harmlessness, I do not deny, but with no- thing of Christian wisdom ; and these are times when the dove can ill spare the addition of the serpent. The state of affairs, therefore, keeps me doubtful about going from home in the holidays, because, if there is likely to be any opening for organizing any attempts at general reform, I should not like to be away from my post. But the interest is too intense, and makes me live ten lives in one every day. However, I am very well, and perfectly comfortable as far as regards family and school. XXIV. TO REV. JULIUS HARE. Rugby, November 12, 1830. Your account of the MSS. is very tempting: — the one which I wanted is that marked " Hudsoni Codex Clarendonius," but I find from you that there is another, and I know that it can never have been collated, so that I •am exceedingly desirous, if it be possible, to get the two. But would it not be better that I should give the security in my own name, rather than entail that trouble upon you 1 And if the bond required be for a considerable sum, perhaps it ought to be in my name, to prevent difficulties with my ex- ecutors in case of my death ; a contingency which I think every man should bear in mind in all money transactions. The Birmingham coach I think goes through Dunchurch, within three miles of us, and if so, any parcel s^ent by it to me would be left there, if so directed, and would be forwarded to me immediately. I cannot close this letter without thanking you most warmly for the invaluable man you procured me in Lee. He is, indeed, far too good for any subordinate situation, yet having once had such a man here, it will be a bitter loss to be obliged to part with him. I trust, however, that we may keep him for a few years at least. XXV. TO REV. AUGUSTUS HARE. December 24, 1830. I have longed very much to see you, over and above my general wish that we could meet oftener, ever since this fearful state of our poor has announced itself even to the blindest. My dread is that when the special Commissions shall have done their work, (necessary and just I most cordially agree with you that it is,) the richer classes will again relapse into their old callousness, and the seeds be sown of a far more deadly and irre- mediable quarrel hereafter. If you can get Arthur Young's Travels in France. I think you will be greatly struck with their applicability to our own times and country. He shows how deadly was the hatred of the peasantry towards the lords, and how in 1789 the chateaux were destroyed, and the families of the gentry insulted, from a common feeling of hatred to all who had made themselves and the poor two orders, and who were now to pay the penalty of having put asunder what God had joined. At this moment Carlile tells the poor that they and the rich are enemies, and that to destroy the property of an enemy, whether by fire or otherwise, is always lawful in war — a Devil's doctrine, certainly, and devilishly applied ; but un- questionably our aristocratical manners and habits have made us and the poor two distinct and unsympathizing bodies ; and from want of sympathy, I fear the transition to enmity is but too easy when distress embitters the feelings, and the sight of others in luxury makes that distress still more in- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 181 tolerable. This is the plague spot to my mind in our whole state of society, which must be removed or the whole must perish. And under God it is for the clergy to come forward boldly and begin to combat it. If you read Isaiah, chap. v. iii. xxxii. ; Jeremiah, chap. v. xxii. xxx. ; Amos, iv. ; Ha- bakkuk, ii. ; and the Epistle of St. James, written to the same people a little before the second destruction of Jerusalem, you will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own state to that of the Jews ; while the state of the Greek Churches to whom St. Paul wrote is wholly different, because from their thin population and better political circumstances, poverty among them is hardly noticed, and our duties to the poor are consequently much less prominently brought forward. And unluckily our Evangelicals read St Paul more than any other part of the Scriptures, and think very little of consulting most those parts of Scripture which are addressed to persons circumstanced most like ourselves. I want to get up a real Poor Man's Magazine, which should not bolster up abuses and veil iniquities, nor prose to the poor as to children ; but should address them in the style of Cobbett, plainly, boldly, and in sincerity, excusing nothing — concealing nothing — and misrepresenting nothing — but speaking the very whole truth in love — Cob- bett-like in style — but Christian in spirit. Now you are the man I think to join with me in such a work, and most earnestly do I wish that you would think of it I should be for putting my name to whatever I wrote of this nature, for I think that it is of great importance that our addresses should be those of substantive and tangible persons, not of anonymous shadows. XXVI. TO REV. H. MASSINGBERD. Rugby, February, 1831. This is my constant defence of a liberal government'; the high wisdom and purity of their principles are overwhelming to their human infirmity, and amidst such a mass of external obstacles. But what do we gain by getting in exchange men who cannot fall short of their principles, only because their principles are zero? As to the budget, I liked it in its first state, although the F«x Romuli, i. e. the fundholders, made such an outcry about it. What between the landed' aristocracy and the moneyed aristocracy, the interests of the productive classes are generally sure to go to the wall ; and this goes on for a time, till at last the squeeze gets intolerable, and then productive classes put up their backs, and push in their turn so vig- orously, that rank and property get squeezed in their turn against the wall opposite. O utinam ! that they would leave each other their fair share of the road ; for I honour aristocracy in its proper place, and in France should try to raise it with all my might, for there it is now too low. simply because it was once too high. Dii omen avertant, and may the Tories who are ho- ping to defeat the Ministers on the Reform question, remember how bitterly the French aristocracy had cause to repent their triumph over Turgot. " Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo," is the cry of Reform when, long repulsed and scorned, she is on the point of changing her visage to that, of Revolution. What you say about the progress of a people to- wards liberty, and their unfitness for rt at an earlier stage, I fully agree in. If ever my Thucydides falls in your way, you will find in the Appendix, No. 1, a full dissertation on this matter. XXVII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, March 7, 1831. I am most truly obliged to you for all your advice and collected opinions about the Register. Now, certainly, I never should embark in such a scheme \Q£ LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. for my own amusement. I have enough to do in all reason. I am not so craving after the honour of appearing in print, as to wish to turn newspaper writer on that account. I should most wish that the thing were not needed at all ; next, that it might he done by somebody else, without my taking part in it. But all seem to agree that it is needed, grievously needed, and will any body else undertake it 1 That is to my mind the real question. For if not, I think there is. a great call for much to be risked, and much to be braved, and the thing done imperfectly is better than not done at all. So much for the principle The aidof liberal Tories I should be most thankful for, and I earnestly crave it ; but never will I join with the High Church party It would be exposing myself to the fate of Amphiareus with a vengeance, for such co-operation would sink any thing into the earth, or else render it such that it had better be sunk Most earnestly would I be Conservative ; but defend me from the Conserva- tive party — i. e. from those who call themselves so par excellence. Above all, I cannot understand why a failure should be injurious to future efforts. A bad history of any one particular period, may doubtless hinder sensible men from writing upon the same period ; but I cannot see how a foolish newspa- per, dying in 1831. should affect a wise one in 1832 ; and if the thing is im- practicable rei natura, then, neither mine, nor any other with the same views, will ever answer. Certainly our failure is very conceivable — very probable if you will ; but something must be risked, and I think the experimentum will be made " in corpore vili ;" for all the damage will be the expense which it will cost me, and that of course I shall not stand beyond a certain point. Ergo, I shall try a first number In the opinions I have already received, I have been enough reminded of Gaffer Grist, Gaf- fer's son, and a little jackass. &c. ; but I have learned this good from it, i. e. to follow my own judgment, adopting from the opinions of others just what I approve of, and no more. One thing you may depend on, that nothing shall ever interfere with my attention to the school. Thucydides, Register and all, should soon go the dogs if they were likely to do that. I have got a gallows at last, and am quite happy ; it is like getting a new twenty horse power in my capacities for work. I could laugh like Democritus himself at the notion of my being thought a dangerous person, when 1 hang happily on my gallows, or make it serve as a target to spear at. XXVHI. TO CHEVALIER BUNSEN. Rugby, March 20, 1831. I was reminded of you when I heard of the great loss that all Europe has sustained in the sudden death of Niebuhr. I knew your personal admiration and regard for him, and that you wcmld feel his loss privately as well as publicly. Besides all this, the exceedingly anxious state of public affairs has naturally made me think of you, whose views on those matters I had found to be so entirely in agreement with my own. Our accounts of Italy are very imperfect, but there have been reports of disturbances in Rome itself, which made me wish that you and your family were in a more tran- quil country, or at least, in one, where, if there were any commotions, you might be able to be of more service than you could be amongst foreigners and Italians. I was again in Italy this last summer We were at Venice during the Revolution at Paris, and the first intelligence I heard of it was from the postmaster at the little town of Bludenz in the Vorarlberg. The circum- stances under which I first heard of it, will never, I think, depart from my memory. We had been enjoying the most delightful summer weather throughout our tour, and particularly in all the early part of that very day; when, just as we arrived at Bludenz, about four or five in the afternoon, the LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. ]83 whole sky was suddenly overcast, the wind arose violently, and every thing announced the approach of a complete Alpine storm. We were in the very act of putting up the head of the carriage and preparing for the coming rain, when the postmaster, in answer to an observation of mine about the weather when I had passed through France a few weeks before, seemed to relieve himself by telling me of all the troubles that were then raging. His expression was, " Alles ist ubel in Frankreich," the mere tumult and vio- lence of political quarrels seeming to the inhabitant of a Tyrolese valley, as something shocking, because it was so unpeaceful. Hearing only indis- tinct accounts of what was going on, we resolved not to enter France imme- diately, but to go round by the Rhine through Wirtemberg and Baden ; a plan which I shall now ever think of with pleasure, as otherwise I never should have seen Niebuhr. I was very glad too, to see something more of Germany ; only it was rather vexatious to be obliged to pass on so quickly, for I could not wait at Heidelberg long enough to see Creuzer, and my stay even at Bonn was only one afternoon. I had the happiness of sitting three hours with Niebuhr, and he introduced me to his poor wife and children. His conversation completely verified the impression which you had given me of his character, and has left me with no recollections but such as are satis- factory to think of now. The news l of the Duke of Orleans' accession to the French throne reached Bonn while t was with Niebuhr, and I was struck with the enthusiastic joy which he displayed on hearing it. I fully expected that the Revolution in France would lead to one in Belgium ; and indeed, we passed through Brussels scarcely ten days before the insurrection broke out. You are so well acquainted with English politics, that you will take a deep interest in the fate of the Reform Bill, now before Parliament. I believe that, if it passes now, " Felix sa^clorum nascitur ordo ;" that the aristocracy still retain a strong hold on the respect and regard of England,, and if their excessive influence is curtailed, they will be driven to try to. gain a more legitimate influence, to be obtained by the exercise of those great and good qualities which so many of them possess. At present this may be done ; but five years hence the democratical spirit may have gained such a height, that the utmost virtue on the part of the aristocracy will be unable to save it. And I think nearly the same with regard to the Church. Reform would now, I fully believe, prevent destruction; but every year of delayed reform strengthens those who wish not to amend, but to destroy. Meanwhile, the moral state of France is to me most awful ; I sympathized fully with the Revolution in July, but if this detestable warlike spirit gets head amongst the French people, I hope, and earnestly believe, th'at we shall see another and more effectual coalition of 1815 to put it down. Nothing can be more oppo- site than Liberalism and Bonapartism ; and, I fear, the mass of the French people are more thirsting to renew the old career of spoliation and conquest than to establish or promote true liberty ; " for who loves that, must first be wise and good." My hope is that, whatever domestic abuses may exist, Germany will never forget the glorious struggle of 1813, and will know that the tread of a Frenchman on the right bank of the Rhine is the worst of all pollutions to her soil. And I trust and think, that the general feeling in England is strong on this point, and that the whole power of the nation would be heartily put forth to strangle in the birth the first symptoms of Napoleonism. I was at a party at in the summer, at Geneva, where I met Thierry, the historian of "Les Gaulois," and the warlike spirit which I perceived, even then, in the French liberals, made a deep impression on me. 1 See Extracts from Journals, in 1830, in the Appendix. 134 LIFE 0F DR ARNOLD. XXIX. TO JOHN WARD, ESQ. (Co-Editor with him of the Englishman's Register.) Rugby, April 27, 1831. Your own articles I have carefully read over ; and, in style, they more than answer all my expectations. Still, as we are beginning a work which must take its character chiefly from us two, I will fairly say that, consider- ing for whom Ave are principally writing, I think the spirit too polemical. When I speak of the aristocracy of England bearing hard upon the poor, I always mean the whole class of gentlemen, and not the nobility or great landed and commercial proprietors. I cannot think that you or I suffer from any aristocracy above us, but we ourselves belong to a part of society which has not done its duty to the poor, although, with no intention to the con- trary, but much the reverse. Again, I regard the Ministerial Reform Bill as a safe and a necessary measure, and I should, above all things, dread its rejection, but I cannot be so sanguine as you are about its good effects ; be- cause I think that the people are quite as likely to choose men who will commit blunders and injustice as the boroughmongers are, though not ex- actly of the same sort. Above all, in writing to the lower people, my object is much more to improve them morally than politically; and I would, there- fore, carefully avoid exciting political violence in them Now so far as the Register is concerned, I care comparatively little about the Re- form Bill, but I should wish to explain, as you have done most excellently, the baseness of corruption on one hand, and as I think you might do, the mischief of party and popular excitement on the other. I should urge the duty of trying to learn the merits of the case, and that an ignorant vote is little better than a corrupt one, where the ignorance could in any degree be helped. But in such an address I would not assume that the Reform Bill would do all sorts of good, and that every honest man must be in favour of it: because such assertions, addressed to ignorant men, are doing the very thing I deprecate, i e. trying rather to get their vote, than to make that vote, whether it be given for us or against us, really independent and re- spectable. Again, with the debt. It is surely a matter of importance to show that the greatest part of our burthens is owing to this, and not to present extravagance. It affords a memorable lesson against foolish and unjust, wars, and the selfish carelessness with which they were waged. This you have put very well,1 and have properly put down the nonsense of the '• Debt being no harm." Urge all this as strongly as you will, to pre- vent any repetition of the loan system for the time to come. But the fund- holders are not to blame for the Debt ; they lent their money ; and if the money was wasted, that was no fault of theirs. Pay the debt off", if you will and can, or make a fair adjustment of the advantages and disadvantages of different sorts of property, with a view of putting them all on equal terms ; but surely the fundholder's dividends are as much his lawful property as a land- holder's estate, or a merchant's or manufacturer's capital, liable justly, like all other property, to the claims of severe national distress ; but only together with other property, and by no means as if it were more just in the nation to lay hands on the fundholder's dividends than on the profits of your law or of my school. Nor can the fundholders be fairly said to be living in idleness at the expense of the nation in any invidious sense, any more than your clients who borrowed my money could say it of me, if they had borrowed £10,000 of me instead of £300, and then choose to go and fool it away in fireworks and illuminations, if they had spent the principal no doubt they would find it a nuisance to pay the interest, but still, am I to be the loser, or can I fairly be said, if I get my interest duly paid, to be living at their- 1 On this he felt at all times strongly. " Woe be to that generation," he would say, " that is living in England when the coal-mines are exhausted and the National Debt not paid off." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. ,o- expense ? Besides, as a mere matter of policy, we should be ejected at once from most of the quarters where we might otherwise circulate if we are thought to countenance in any degree the notion of a "spono-e."1' The "tea monopoly," as you call it, involves the whole question of the Indian charter, and in fact of the Indian empire. The " timber monopoly " involves far more questions than I can answer, about Canada, and the ship- ping interest, and whether the economical principle of buying where you can buy cheapest, is always to be acted upon by a nation, merely because it is economically expedient. Even about the Corn Lawsj there are difficul- ties connected with the question that are not to be despised, and I would rather not cut the knot so abruptly I wish to distinguish the Regis- ter from all other papers by two things : that politics should hold in it Just that place which they should do in a well-regulated mind ; that is as one field of duty, but by no means the most important one ; and that with'respect to this field, our duty should rather be to soothe than to excite, rather to fur- nish tacts, and to point out the difficulties of political questions, than to press forward our own conclusions. There are publications enough to excite the people to political reform; my object is moral and intellectual reform, which will be sure enough to work out political reform in the best way, and my writing on politics would have for its end, not the forwarding any political measure, but the so purifying, enlightening, sobering, and^in one word Christianizing men's notions and feelings on political matters that from the improved tree may come hereafter a better fruit. With any lower views or for the sake of furthering any political measures, or advocating a political party, I should think it wrong to engage in the Register at all, and certainly would not risk my money in the attempt to set it afloat. XXX. TO HIS SISTER SUSANNAH ARNOLD. Rugby, April, 1831. I should like you to see 's letter to me about the Re- gister ; the letter of a really good man and a thinking one, and a really lib- eral one. I wrote to him to thank him, and got the kindest of answers in return, in which he concludes by saying that he cannot help taking in the Register after all when it does make its appearance. Those are the men whom I would do every thing in my power to conciliate, because I honour and esteem them ; but for the common Church and Kino- Tories I never would go one hair's breadth to please them'; for their notions, principles they are not, require at all times and at all places to be denounced as found- ed on ignorance and selfishness, and as having been invariably opposed to truth and goodness from the days of the Jewish aristocracy downwards. It is therefore nothing but what I should most wish, that such opinions and mine should be diametrically opposite. . . . . . Not that I anticipate with much confidence any great benefits to result from the Reform Bill ; but the truth is, that we are arrived at one of those periods in the prooress' of soci- ety when the constitution naturally undergoes a change, jusfas it did two centuries ago. It was impossible then for the king to keep down the higher part of the middle classes ; it is impossible now to keep down the middle and lower parts of them. All that resistance to these natural chano-es can effect is to derange their operation, and make them act violently and mis- chievously, instead of healthfully or at least harmlessly. The old state of things has gone past recall, and all the efforts of all the Tories cannot save it, but they may by their folly, as they did in France, get us a wild democ- racy, or a military despotism in the room of it, instead of letting it change 1 The proposal alluded to was the taxation of the funds distinctly from other property as in the plan proposed by Lord Althorp's first budget, 13 IQQ LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. quietly into what is merely a new modification of the old state. One would think that people who talk against change were literally as well as meta- phorically blind, and really did not see that every thing in themselves and around them is changing every hour by the necessary laws of its being. XXXI. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. Rugby, May 2, 1831. Every selfish motive would deter me from the Register ; it will be a pecuniary loss, it will bring me no credit, but much trouble and probably some abuse, and some of my dearest friends look on it not only coldly but with aversion. But I do think it a most solemn duty to make the attempt. I feel our weakness, and that what I can hope to do is very little, and perhaps will be nothing ; but if I can but excite others to follow the same plan, I shall rejoice to be superseded by them if they will do the thing more effectually. I have this morning been over to Coventry to make the required affidavit of Proprietorship, and to sign the bond for the payment of the ad- vertisement duty. And No. 1 will really appear on Saturday with an open- ing Article of mine, and a religious one. The difficulty of the undertaking is indeed most serious ; all the Tories turn from me as a Liberal, whilst the strong Reformers think me timid and half corrupt, because I will not go alono-'with them or turn the Register into a new " Examiner " or " Ballot." So that I dare say my fate will be that of tw fie'aa roiv noliTwv from the days of Thucydides downwards. I wrote to Parker immediately on the receipt of your letter, proposing to him either to give up [Thucydides] altogether except the Appendices, put- ting all my materials of every sort into his hands freely to dispose of, or else to share with him all the expenses of the next volume, and to refund at once what I have already received for the first. I have told him often before, and now have told him again, that I cannot do it quickly ; and that I never meant or would consent to devote to it every spare moment of my time, so as to leave myself no liberty for any other writing. I have written nothing for two years but Thucydides and Sermons for the boys ; but though I will readily give up writing merely for my own amusement, or fame, or profit, I cannot abandon what I think is a positive duty, such as the attempting at least the Register. Parker wrote immediately a very kind letter, begging me to continue the Editorship as at present, and stating in express words " that though advantage might arise from the early completion of the book, no injury whatever has been sustained by him, or is likely to be sustained." I am proprietor of the Register, and will be answerable for it up to a cer- tain point ; but I cannot pretend to say that I shall see every thing that is in- serted in it, or that I should expunge every thing with which I did not aoree, although I certainly should, if the disagreement were great, or the opinions so differing seemed to me likely to be mischievous. I have no wish to conceal any thing about it, and if I cannot control it to my mind, or find the thing to be a failure, I will instantly withdraw it. Sed Dii meliora piis. XXXII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, Juno 11, 1831. I confess that your last letter a good deal grieved me, not at all personal- ly but as it seemed to me to give the death blow to my hopes of finding co- operators for the Register. That very article upon the Tories has been ob- jected to as being too favourable to them, so what is a man to do ? You will see by No. 5, that I do not think the Bill perfect, but still I like it as far as it goes and especially in its disfranchisement clauses. But my great ob- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 187 ject in the Register was to enlighten the poor generally in the best sense of the term ; as it is, no one joins me, and of course my nephew and I cannot do it alone. " What is everybody's business is nobody's," is true from the days of the Peloponnesian confederacy downwards. Unless a great change in our prospects takes place, Register will therefore undergo transmigration when the holidays begin ; whether into a set of penny papers, or into a monthly magazine I cannot tell. But I cannot sit still without trying to do something for a state of things which often and often, far oftener I believe than any one knows of, comes with a real pang of sorrow to trouble my own private happiness. I know it is good to have these sobering reminders, and it may be my impatience, that I do not take them merely as awakeners and reminders to myself. Still ought we not to fight against evil, and is not moral ignorance, such as now so sadly prevails, one of the worst kinds of evil? XXXIII. TO W. TOOKE, ESQ. Rugby, June 18, 1831. I must take the earliest opportunity of thanking you most heartily for your active kindness towards me, to which I am indebted for the most grati- fying offer1 announced to me in your letter of yesterday. I feel doubly obliged to you both for your good opinion of me, and for your kind recollec- tion of me I trust that you will not think me the less grateful to you, because I felt that I ought not to avail myself of the Chancellor's offer. Engaged as I am here, I could not reside upon a living, and I would not be satisfied to hold one without residence. I have always strenuously maintained that the elergy engaged in education should have nothing to do with church benefices, and I should be very unwilling to let my own prac- tice contradict what I really believe to be a very wholesome doctrine. But I am sure that I value the offer quite as much, and feel as heartily obliged both to the Chancellor and you for it, as if I had accepted it. In this day's number of the Register there is a letter on the " Cottage Evenings," condemning very decidedly their unchristian tone. It is not written by me, but I confess that I heartily agree with it. You know of old how earnestly I have wished to join your Useful Know- ledge Society ; and how heartily on many points 1 sympathize with them. This very work, the " Cottage Evenings," might be made every thing that I wish, if it were but decidedly Christian. I delight in its plain and sensi- ble tone, and it might be made the channel of all sorts of information, use- ful and entertaining ; but, as it is, so far from co-operating with it, I must feel utterly adverse to it. To enter into the deeper matters of conduct and principle, to talk of our main hopes and fears, and' yet not to speak of Christ, is absolutely, to my mind, to circulate poison. In such points as this, " He that is not with us is against us." It has occurred to me that the circumstance of some of the principal members of the Useful Knowledge Society being now in the government, is in itself a strong reason why the Society should take a more decided tone on matters of religion. Undoubtedly their support of that Society, as it now stands, is a matter of deep grief and disapprobation to a large pro- portion of the best men in this kingdom, while it encourages the hopes of some of the very worst. And it would be, I do verily think, one of the greatest possible public blessings, if, as they are honest, fearless, and en- lightened against political corruption, and, as I hope they will prove, against ecclesiastieal abuses also, so they would be no less honest and fearless and truly wise in labouring to Christianize the people, in spite of the sneers and 1 Viz., of a stall in Bristol Cathedral, with a living attached to it — offered to him by Lord Brougham. 188 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. opposition of those who understand full well that, if men do1 not worship God, they at once by that very omission worship most surely the power of evil. You will smile at my earnestness or simplicity ; but it does strongly ex- cite me to see so great an engine as your Society, and one whose efforts I would so gladly co-operate with, and which could effect so easily what I alone am vainly struggling at, to see this engine at the very least neutral- izing its power of doing good, and, I fear, doing in some respects absolute evil. On the other side, the Tories would not have my assistance in reli- gious matters, because they so disapprove of my politics ; and in the mean time the people, in this hour of their utmost need, get either the cold deism of the Cottage Evenings, or the folly of the Cottager's Monthly Visitor. Would the Committee accept my assistance for those " Cottage Evenings?" I would give a larger sum than I should be thought sane to mention, if I might but once see this great point effected. 2 XXKIV. TO MRS. FLETCHER. (After the death of her Son.) Rugby, August, 1831. I know that you are rich in friends, and it seems like pre- sumption in me to say it ; but I entreat you earnestly to remember that Ma- ry and myself regard you and yours with such cordial respect and affection, that it would give us real pleasure, if either now or hereafter we can be of any use whatever in any arrangements to be made for your grandchildren. I feel that it would be a delight to me to be of any service to fatherless chil- dren, contemplating, as I often do, the possibility of myself or their dear mother being taken away from our own little ones. And I feel it the more7 because I confess that I think evil days are threatening, insomuch that, whenever I hear of the death of any one that is dear to me, there mixes with my sense of my own loss a sort of joy that he is safe from the evil to come. Still more strong is my desire that all Christ's servants who are left should draw nearer every day to him, and to one another, in every feeling and every work of love. XXXV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Skipton, July 11, 1831. . . . . The Register is now dead, to revive however in another shape ; but I could'not afford at once to pay all, and to write all, and my nephew's own business hindered him from attending to it sufficiently, and it thus de- volved on the mere publisher, who put in things of which I utterly disap- proved. But the thing has excited attention in some quarters, just as I wished ; all the articles on the labourers were copied at length into one of the Sheffield papers, and, when the Register died, the Sheffield proprietor wrote up to our editor, wishing to engage the writer of those articles to con- 1 " There is something to me almost awful," he used to say, speaking of Lord Byron's Cain, " in meeting suddenly in the works of such a man, so great and solemn a truth as is expressed in that speech of Lucifer, ' He who bows not to God hath bowed to me.' " 2 From a later letter to the same.—" I cannot tell you how much I was delighted by the conclusion of the article on Mirabeau, in the Penny Magazine of May 12. The article is a specimen of what I wished to see, but done far better than I could do it. I never wanted articles on religious subjects half so much as articles on common subjects written with a decidedly Christian tone. History and Biography are far better vehicles of good, I think, than any direct comments on Scripture, or essays on Evidences." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. [go, tinue them for his own paper. By a strange coincidence I happened to walk into the office of this very paper, at Sheffield, to look at the division on the Reform Bill, knowing nothing of the application made to our editor in town. I saw the long quotation from the Register, and as the proprietor of the paper happened to be in the shop, I .talked to him about it, and finally told him who I was, and what were my objects in the Register. He spoke of those articles on the labourers being read with great interest by the mechanics and people of that class, and I have promised to send him a letter or two in continuation. XXXVI. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. August 12, 1831. Touching the Magazine, I think it StvTignv nlovv in compa- rison with a weekly paper ; but ttXi'ov ri[uav ndi'toq. 1 will join in it gladly, and, if required, try to undertake even the editorship, only let something be done. I found all the articles about the labourers in my Register had been copied into the Sheffield Courant, and the proprietor told me that they had excited some interest. Thus even a little seed may be scattered about, and produce more effect than we might calculate on ; by all means let us sow while we can. What do Mayo and you say to the Cholera 1 Have you read the ac- counts of the great fifty years' pestilence of the 6th century, or of that of the 14th, both of which seem gradually to have travelled like the cholera ? How much we have to learn about the state of the atmosphere and the causes that affect it. It seems to me that there must be a " morbus cceli," which at particular periods favours the spread of disorders, and thus, although the cholera is contagious, yet it also originates in certain constitutions under a certain state of atmosphere, and then is communicated by contagion to many who would not have originated it themselves ; while many again are so antipathetic to it, that neither contagion nor infection will give it them. Agathias says that the old Persian and Egyptian philosophers held that there were certain periodical revolutions of time, fraught with evil to the human race, and others, during which they were exempt from the worst sort of visitations. This is mysticism; yet from Thucydides downwards, men have remarked that these visitations do not come single ; and although the connexion between plague and famine is obvious, yet that between plague and volcanic phenomena is not so ; and yet these have been coincident in the most famous instances of long travelling pestilences hitherto on record. Nor is there much natural connexion between the ravages of epidemic dis- ease and a moral and political crisis in men's minds, such as we now seem to be witnessing. XXXVII. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE. (In answer to a question about Jrvingism at Port Glasgow.) Rugby, Oct. 25, 1831. . . . . If the thing be real I should take it merely as a sign of the com- ing of the day of the Lord — the only use, as far as I can make out, that ever was derived from the gift of tongues. I do not see that it was ever made a vehicle of instruction, or ever superseded the study of tongues, but that it was merely a sign of the power of God, a man being for the time transformed into a mere instrument to utter sounds which he himself understood not. . . . However, whether this be a real sign or no, I believe that " the day of the 190 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. Lord" is coming, i. e. the termination of one of the great aiojvic; of the hu- man race ; whether the final one of all or not, that I believe no created being knows or can know. The termination of the Jewish aiiov in the first century, and of the Roman cuwv in the fifth and sixth, were each marked by the same concurrence of calamities, wars, tumults, pestilences, earthquakes, «fec, all marking the time of one of God's peculiar seasons of visitation.1 And society in Europe seems going on fast for a similar revolution, out of which Christ's Church will emerge in a new position, purified, I trust, and strengthened by the destruction of various earthly and evil mixtures that have corrupted it. But I have not the slightest expectation of what is com- monly meant by the Millennium, and I wonder more and more that any one can so understand Scripture as to look for it. As for the signs of the times in England, I look nowhere with confidence : politically speaking, I respect and admire the present government. The ministry, I sincerely believe, would preserve all our institutions by reforming them ; but still I cannot pretend to say that they would do this on the highest principles, or that they keep their eye on the true polar star, how skilfully soever they may observe their charts and work their vessel. But even in this I think them far better than the Tories We talk, as much as we dare talk of any thing two months distant, of going to the Lakes in the winter, that I may get on in peace with Thucydides, and enjoy the mountains besides. XXXVIII. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. Rugby, October 26, 1831. .... I spear daily, as the Lydians used to play in the famine, that I may at least steal some portion of the day from thought. My family, the school, and, thank God, the town also, are all full of restful and delightful thoughts and images. All there is but the scene of wholesome and happy labour, and has much to refresh the inward man, with as little to disturb him as this earth, since Paradise, could, I believe, ever present to any one individual. But my sense of the evils of the times, and to what prospects I am bringing up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All in the moral and physical world appears so exactly to announce the coming of the " great day of the Lord," — i. e., a period of fearful visitation to terminate the existing state of things, whether to terminate the whole existence of the human race, neither man nor angel knows, — that no entireness of private happiness can possibly close my mind against the sense of it. Mean time it makes me very anxious to do what work I can, more especially as I think the prospect of the cholera makes life even more than ordinarily uncertain ; and I am inclined to think, from my own peculiar constitution, that I should be very likely to be at- tacked by it J believe I told you that I am preparing for the press a new volume of sermons, and I wish a small book on the Evidences' to accompany them ; not a book to get up like Paley, but taking the real way in which the difficulties present themselves, half moral, half intellectual, to the mind of an intelligent and well educated young man ; a book which, by God's blessing may be a real stay in that state of mind when neither an address to the intellect alone, nor one to the moral feelings, is alone most likely to answer. And I wish to make the main point not the truth of Christianity per se, as a theorem to 1 For the same belief in the connexion of physical with moral convulsions, see Nie- buhr, Lebens-nach-richten, ii. p. 167. It may be as well to add, that the view above expressed of the apostolical gift of tongues, was founded on a deliberate study of the passages which relate to it, especially 1 Cor. xiv. 14. 13. 28. 21. 2 This he partially accomplished in the 17th Sermon in the second volume, and the 18th and 19th in the third. The work itself was begun, but never finished. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 191 be proved, but the wisdom of our abiding by it, and whether there is any- thing else for it but the life of beast or of devil. I should like to do this if I could before I die ; for I think that times are coming when the Devil will fight his best in good earnest. I must not write any more, for work rises on every side open mouthed upon me. XXXIX. TO REV. JULIUS HARE. Nov. 9,1831. (After thanking him for the first number of the Philological Museum, and wishing him success.) For myself, I am afraid Thucydides will have shown you that I am a very poor philologist, and my knowledge is too superficial on almost every point to enable me to produce any thing worth your having ; and to say the truth, every moment of spare time I wish to devote to writing on Religion or 7inlitiy.r\. I use the Greek word, because " politics" is com- monly taken in a much baser sense. I know I can do but little, perhaps nothing, but the " Liberavi animam meam" is a consolation; and I would fain not see every thing good and beautiful sink in ruin, without making a single effort to lessen the mischief. Since the death of the Register, I am writing constantly in one of the Sheffield papers, the proprietor of which I earnestly believe sincerely wishes to do good. I heartily sympathize with the feeling of your concluding paragraph — in your note I mean — but who dare look forward now to any thing ? XL. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, November 8,1831. You must not go to Ireland without a few lines from me. I cannot ye be reconciled to your being on the other side of St. George's Channel, or to thinking of Oxford as being without you. I^do not know where to look for the Mezentius who should L< succedatpugnse," when Turnus is gone away. My great ignorance about Ireland is also very inconvenient to me in thinking about your future operations, as I do not know what most wants mending there, or what is likely to be the disposition to mend it in those with whom you will be surrounded. But you must not go out with words of evil omen ; and, indeed, I do anticipate much happiness for you, seeing that happiness consists, according to our dear old friend, iv h't^yiCa, and of that you are likely to have enough I am a coward about schools, and yet I have not the satisfaction of being a coward y.ara nQoafyioiv ; for I am inclined to think that the trials of a school are useful to a boy's after character, and thus I dread not to expose my boys to it ; while, on the other hand, the immediate effect of it is so ugly, that, like washing one's hands with earth, one shrinks from dirting them so grievously in the first stage of the process I cannot get over my sense of the fearful state of public affairs : — is it clean hopeless that the Church will come forward and crave to be allowed to reform itself? I can have no confidence in what would be in men like , but a death- bed repentance. It can only be done effectually by those who have not, through many a year of fair weather, turned a deaf ear to the voice of reform, and will now be thought only to obey it, because they cannot help it. If I were indeed a Radical, and hated the Church, and longed for a democ- racy, I should be jolly enough, and think that all was plain sailing ; but as it is, I verily think that neither my spirits nor my occupation, nor even spear- ing itself, will enable me to be cheerful under such an awful prospect of public evils. 192 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. XLI. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ.. Knutsfoi'J, Duccmber 16, 1331. I want to write an Essay on the true use of Scripture ; i. e. that it is a direct guide so far forth as we are circumstanced exactly like the persons to whom it was originally addressed ; that where the differ- ences are great, there it is a guide by analogy ; i. e. if so and so was the duty of men so circumstanced, ergo, so and so is the duty of men circum- stanced thus otherwise ; and that thus we shall keep the spirit of God's rev- elation even whilst utterly disregarding the letter, when the circumstances are totally different. E. g. the second commandment is in the letter utterly done away with by the fact of the Incarnation. To refuse, then, the benefit which we might derive from the frequent use of the crucifix under pretence of the Second Commandment is a folly, because God has sanctioned one conceivable similitude of himself, when He declared Himself in the person of Christ. The spirit of the commandment not to think unworthily of the Divine nature, nor to lower it after our own devices, is violated by all un- scriptural notions of God's attributes and dealings with men, such as we see and hear broached daily, and, though in a less important degree, by those representations of God the Father which one sees in Catholic pictures, and by what Whately calls. peristerolatry, the foolish way in which people allow themselves to talk about God the Holy Ghost, as of a dove. The applica- tions of this principle are very numerous, and embrace. I think, all the principal errors both of the High Church and of the Evangelical party. XLII. TO REV. G. CORNISH. RYDAL ! ! ! December 23, 1831. We are actually here and going up Nabb's Scar presently, if the morn- ing holds clear : the said Nabb's Scar being the mountain at whose foot our house stands ; but you must not suppose that we are at Rydal Hall ; it is only a house by the road-side, just at the corner of the lane that leads up to Wordsworth's house, with the road on one side of the garden, and the Rotha on the other, which goes brawling away under our windows with its perpetual music. The higher mountains that bound our view are all snow- capped, but it is all snug, and warm and green in the valley. — nowhere on earth have I ever seen a spot of more perfect and enjoyable beauty, with not a single object out of tune with it, look which way 1 will. In another cottage, about twenty yards from US) Capt. Hamilton, the author of Cyril Thornton, has taken up his abode lor the winter ; close above us are the Wordsworth's ; and we are in our own house a party of fifteen souls, so that we are in no danger of being dull. And I think it would be hard to say which of us all enjoys our quarters the most. We arrived here on Monday, and hope to stay here about a month from the present time. It is indeed a long time since I have written to you, and these are times to furnish ample matter to write or to talk about. How earnestly do I wish that I could see you ; it is the only ungratified wish as to earthly happiness of my most happy life, that I am so parted from so many of my dearest friends [After speaking of objections which he had heard made to the appointment of Dr. Whately to the Archbishopric of Dublin.] Now I am sure that in point of real essential holiness, so far as man can judge of man, there does not live a truer Christian than Whately; and it does grieve me most deeply to hear people speak of him as of a dangerous and latitu- dinarian character, because in him the intellectual part of his nature keeps pace with the spiritual — instead of being left, as the Evangelicals leave it, a fallow field for all unsightly creeds to flourish in. He is a truly great man LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 193 — in the highest sense of the word, — and if the safety and welfare of the Protestant Church in Ireland depend in any degree on human instruments, none could be found, I verily believe, in the whole empire, so likely to main- tain it I am again publishing Sermons, with an essay at the tail, on the Interpretation of Scripture, embodying things that I have been thinking over for the last six or seven years ; and which I hope will be useful to a class whose spiritual wants I am apt to think are sadly provided for — young- men bringing up for other professions than the church, who share deeply in the intellectual activity of the day, and require better satisfaction to the working of their minds than I think is commonly given them. XLIII. TO THE SAME. Rugby, February 15, 1832. A letter from Tucker has this morning informed me of the heavy trial which has fallen upon you. I write, because I would wish to hear from you under similar circumstances, and because it is unnatural not to assure you at such a moment how dearly your friends at Rugby love you and your dear wife, and how truly they sympathize with your sorrow. Tucker's let- ter leaves us anxious both for your wife and for little Robert — especially for the latter ; it would be a great comfort to hear favourable accounts of them, if you could give them. I will not add one word more. May God strengthen and support you, my dear friend, and bless all His dispensations towards us both, through Jesus Christ. XLIV. TO THE LADY FRANCIS EGERTON. (On the subject of the conversion of a person witli atheistical opinions.) Rugby, February 15, 1832. The subject of the letter which I have had the honour of receiving from you has so high a claim upon the best exertions of every Christian, that I can only regret my inability to do it justice. But in cases of moral or intel- lectual disorder, no less than of bodily, it is difficult to prescribe at a dis- tance ; so much must always depend on the particular constitution of the individual, and the peculiarly weak points in his character. Nor am I quite sure whether the case you mention is one of absolute Atheism, or of Epi- curism ; that is to say, whether it be a denial of God's existence altogether, or only of his moral government, the latter doctrine being, I believe, a favourite resource with those who cannot evade the force of the evidences of design in the works of Creation, and yet cannot bear to entertain that strong and constant sense of personal responsibility, which follows from the notion of God as a moral governor. At any rate, the great thing to ascer- tain is, what led to his present state of opinions ; for the actual arguments, by which he would now justify them, are of much less consequence. The proofs of an intelligent and benevolent Creator are given in my opinion more clearly in Paley's Natural Theology, than in any other book that I know, and the necessity of faith arising from the absurdity of skepticism on the one hand, and of dogmatism on the other, is shown with great power and eloquence in the first article in the second part of Pascal's " Pensees," a book of which there is an English translation by no means difficult to meet with. In many cases the real origin of a man's irreligion is, I believe, political. He dislikes the actual state of society, hates the Church as con- nected with it, and, in his notions, supporting its abuses, and then hates Christianity because it is taught by the Church. Another case is, when a man's religious practice has degenerated, when he has been less watchful of himself and less constant and earnest in his devotions. The consequence 194 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. is, that his impression of God's real existence, which is kept up by practical experience, becomes fainter and fainter ; and in this state of things it is merely an accident that he remains nominally a Christian ; if he happens to fall in with an antichristian book, he will have nothing in his own expe- rience to set against the difficulties there presented to him, and so he will be apt to yield to them. For it must be always understood that there are diffi- culties in the way of all religion, such, for instance, as the existence of evil which can never be fairly solved by human powers ; all that can be done intellectually is to point out the equal or greater difficulties of Atheism or skepticism ; and this is enough to justify a good man's understanding in being a believer. But the real proof is the practical one ; that is, let a man live on the hypothesis of its falsehood, the practical result will be bad ; that is, a man's besetting and constitutional faults will not be checked ; and some of his noblest feelings will be unexercised, so that if he be right in his opinions, truth and goodness are at variance with one another, and falsehood is more favourable to our moral perfection than truth ; which seems the most monstrous conclusion which the human mind can possibly arrive at. It fol- lows from this, that if I were talking with an Atheist, I should lay a great deal of stress on faith as a necessary condition of our nature, and as a gift of God to be earnestly sought for in the way which God has appointed, that is, by striving to do his will. For faith does no violence to our understand- ing,; but the intellectual difficulties being balanced, and it being necessary to act on the one side or the other, faith determines a man to embrace that side which leads to moral and practical perfection ; and unbelief leads him to embrace the opposite, or, what I may call the Devil's religion, which is, after all, quite as much beset with intellectual difficulties as God's religion is, and morally is nothing but one mass of difficulties and monstrosities. You may say that the individual in question is a moral man, and you think not unwilling to be convinced of his errors ; that is, he sees the moral truth of Christianity, but cannot be persuaded of it intellectually. I should say that such a state of mind is one of very painful trial, and should be treated as such ; that it is a state of mental disease, which like many others is aggra- vated by talking about it, and that he is in great danger of losing his per- ception of moral truth as well as of intellectual, of wishing Christianity to be false as well as of being unable to be convinced that it is ttue. There are thousands of Christians who see the difficulties which he sees quite as clearly as he does, and who long as eagerly as he can do for that time when they shall know, even as they are known. But then they see clearly the difficulties of unbelief, and know that even intellectually they are far greater. And in the meanwhile they are contented to live by faith, and find that in so doing, their course is practically one of perfect light ; the moral result of the experiment is so abundantly satisfactory, that they are sure that they have truth on their side. I have written a sermon rather than a letter" and perhaps hardly made myself intelligible after all. But the main point is, that we cannot, and do not pretend to remove all the intellectual difficulties of religion ; we only contend that even intellectually unbelief is the more unreasonable of the two, and that practically unbelief is folly, and faith is wisdom. If I can be of any further assistance to you in your charitable labour, I shall be most happy to do my best. XLV. TO THE SAME. Rugby, March 7, 1832. I thank you for your last letter, and beg to assure you very sincerely, that I shall have great pleasure in placing myself under your directions with regard to this unhappy man ; and as he would probably regard me with sus- LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 195 picion, on account of my profession, I think that you would act with the best judgment in alluding to me only in general terms, as you propose to do, without mentioning my name. But I say this merely with a view to the man's own feelings towards the clergy, and not from the slightest wish to -have my name kept back from him, if you think that it would be better for him to be made acquainted with it. With respect to your concluding ques- tion, I confess that I believe conscientious atheism not to exist. Weakness of faith is partly constitutional, and partly the result of education and other circumstances ; and this may go intellectually almost as far as skepticism ; that is to say, a man may be perfectly unable to acquire a firm and undoubt- ing belief of the great truths of religion, whether natural or revealed. He may be perplexed with doubts all his days, nay, his fears lest the Gospel should not be true, may be stronger than his hopes that it will. And this is a state of great pain, and of most severe trial, to be pitied heartily, but not to be condemned. I am satisfied that a good man can never get further than this ; for his goodness will save him from unbelief, though not from the misery of scanty faith. I call it unbelief, when a man deliberately re- nounces his obedience to God, and his sense of responsibility to Him ; and this never can be without something of an evil heart rebelling against a yoke, which it does not like to bear. The man you have been trying to con- vert, stands in this predicament : — he says that he cannot find out God, and that he does not believe in Him ; therefore he renounces His service, and chooses to make a God of himself. Now, the idea of God being no other than a combination of all the highest excellences that we can conceive, it is so delightful to a good and sound mind, that it is misery to part with it ; and such a mind, if it cannot discern God clearly, concludes that the fault is in itself — that it cannot yet reach to God, not that God does not exist. You see there must be an assumption in either case, for the thing does not admit of demonstration, and the assumption that God is, or is not, depends on the degree of moral pain, which a man feels in relinquishing the idea of God. And here, I think, is the moral fault of unbelief: — that a man can bear to make so great a moral sacrifice, as is implied in renouncing God. He makes the greatest moral sacrifice to obtain partial satisfaction to his intel- lect : a believer ensures the greatest moral perfection, with partial satisfac- tion to his intellect also ; entire satisfaction to the intellect is, and can be, at- tained by neither. Thus, then, I believe, generally, that he who has reject- ed God, must be morally faulty, and therefore justly liable to punishment. But of course, no man dare to apply this to any particular case, because our moral faults themselves are so lessened or aggravated by circumstances to be known only by Him who sees the heart, that the judgment of those who see the outward conduct only, must ever be given in ignorance. XLVl. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.. Rugby, April 5, 1832. I could still rave about Rydal — it was a period of five weeks of almost awful happiness, absolutely without a cloud ; and we all enjoyed it I think equally — mother, father, and fry. Our intercourse with the Wordsworths was one of the brightest spots of all, nothing could ex- ceed their friendliness — and my almost daily walks with him were things not to be forgotten. Once, and once only, we had a good fight about the Reform Bill during a walk up Greenhead Ghyll to see " the unfinished sheepfold" recorded in " Michael." But I am sure that our political disa- greement did not at all interfere with our enjoyment of each other's society; for I think that in the great principles of things we agreed very entirely — and only differed as to the t« xa&' txaora. We are thinking of buying or renting a place at Grasmere or Rydal, to spend our holidays at constantly; 196 LIFE 0F DR. ARNCLD. for not only are the Wordsworths and the scenery a very great attraction, hut as I had the chapel atJlydal all the time of our last visit, I got acquaint- ed with the poorer people besides, and you cannot tell wnat a home-like feeling all of us entertain towards the valley of the Rotha. I found that the newspapers so disturbed me, that we have given them up, and only take one once a week ; it only vexes me to read, especially when I cannot do any tiling in the way of writing. But I cannot understand how you, apprecia- ting so fully the dangers of the times, can blame me for doing the little which I can to counteract the evil. No one feels more than I do the little fruit which I am likely to produce ; still I know that the letters have been read and liked by some of the class of men whom I most wish to influence ; and, besides, what do I sacrifice, or what do I risk ? If things go as we fear, it will make very little difference whether I wrote in the Sheffield Courant or no, whereas, if God yet saves us, I may be abused, as I have been long since, by a cer- tain party ; but it is a mistake to suppose that either I or the school suffer by that I quite think that a great deal will depend on the next three or four years, as to the permanent success of Rugby; we are still living on credit, but of course credit will not last for ever, unless there is something to warrant it. Our general style of composition is still bad, but where the fault is, I cannot say ; some of our boys, however, do beautifully ; and one copy of Greek verses (Iambics) on Clitumnus, which was sent in to me about a month ago, was one of the most beautiful school copies I ever saw. I should like to show it to you, or even to your brother Edward ; for I do not think any of his pupils could write better — tovro Si, w; ily.bq, andviov. XLVII. TO REV. G. CORNISH. Rugby, June 9, 18 2. We are again, I believe, going to the Lakes in the holi- days : to a great house near the head of Winandermere, Brathay Hall ; be- cause our dear old house at Rydal is let for a twelvemonth. We all look with delight to our migration, though the half year has gone on very happily as far as the school is concerned, and I am myself perfectly well ; but in these times of excitement the thirst for a " lodge in some vast wilderness," is almost irresistible. We are going to have a dinner here for all the town on passing the Reform Bill : — the thing was to be, and I have been labour- ing to alter its name, and to divest it of every thing political, in order that every body might join in it; but of all difficult offices, that of a peacemaker seems to me to be one of the hardest. What a delightful man we have in Grenfell — so. lively, and so warm-hearted. I thought of you and of Bagley Wood, and old times, when I walked with him the other day in the rain to a wood about four miles from here, dug up orchis roots, and then bathed on our way home, hanging our clothes on a stick under a tree, to save them from being wet in the interval. ... I do not wonder at what you say about the civility and compliance of the people with your instructions, as Rural Dean. I think it is so still, — and the game is yet in our hands if we would play it ; but I suppose we shall not play it, and five or ten years hence it will be no longer ours to play. 120,000 copies of the Penny Magazine cir- culate weekly ! We join in kindest love and regard to you all. Would that we might ever meet, before perhaps we meet in America or at sea after the Revolution. XLV1II. TO REV. J. E. TYLER. Rugby, June 10, 1832. Your letter interested me exceedingly. I have had some correspondence with the Useful Knowledge people about their Penny Magazine, and have LIFE OP DR. AR.NOLD. I97 sent them some things which I am waiting to see whether they will publish. I want to give their Magazine a decidedly Christian character, and then I think it would suit my notions better than any other ; but of course what I have been doing, or may do lor them, does not hinder me from doing what I can for you. I only suspect I should wish to liberalize your Magazine, as I wish to Christianize theirs ; and probably your Committee would recalci- trate against any such operation, as theirs may do. The Christian Know- ledge Society has a bad name for the dulness of its publications ; and their contributions to the cause of general knowledge, and enlightening the peo- ple in earnest, may seem a little tardy and reluctant. This, however, touches you, as an individual member of the Society, no more than it does myself; only the name of the Society is not in good odour. As for the thing itself, it is one on which I am half wild, and am not sure, that I shall not start one at my own expense down here, and call it the Warwickshire Magazine ; and I believe that it would answer in the long run, if there were funds to keep it up for a time ; but " experto crede," it is an expensive work to push an infant journal up hill. The objection to a Magazine is its desultoriness and vagueness — it is all scraps ; whereas a newspaper has a regular sub- ject, and follows it up continuously. I would try to do this as much as I could in a Magazine. I would have in every number one portion of the pa- per for miscellanies, but I think that in another portion there should be some subjects followed up regularly; e. g. the history of our present state of so- ciety traced backwards ; the history of agriculture, including that of inclo- sures ; the statistics of different countries, &c. &c. I suppose the object is to instruct those who have few books and little education ; but all instruction must be systematic, and it is this which the people want: they want to have ao/ai before them, and comprehensive outlines of what follows from those ao/ai ; not a parcel of detached stories about natural history, or this place, or that man, — all entertaining enough, but not instructive to minds wholly destitute of any thing like a frame, in which to arrange miscellaneous infor- mation. And I believe, if done spiritedly, that systematic information would be even more attractive than the present hodge-podge of odds and ends. Above all, be afraid of teaching nothing : it is vain now to say that questions of religion and politics are above the understanding of the poorer classes : so they may be, but they are not above their misunderstanding, and they will think and talk about them, so that they had best be taught to think and talk rightly. It is worth while to look at Owen's paper, " The Crisis," or at the " Midland Representative," the great paper of the Birmingham opera- tives. The most abstract points are discussed in them, and the very foun- dations of all things are daily being probed, as much as by the sophists, whom it was the labour of Socrates' life to combat. Phrases which did well enough formerly, now only excite a sneer ; it does not do to talk to the operatives about our " pure and apostolical church," and " our glorious constitution," they have no respect for either ; but one must take higher ground, and show that our object is not to preserve particular institutions, so much as to uphold eternal principles, which are in great danger of falling into disrepute, be- cause of the vices of the institutions which profess to exemplify them. The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save ; my fear is, that, if we do not mind, we shall come to the American fashion, and have no provision made for the teaching Christianity at all. But it is late, and I must go to bed ; and I have prosed to you enough ; but I am as bad about these things as Don Quixote with his knight-errantry, and when once I begin, I do not readily stop. XLIX. TO HIS NEPHEW, J. WARD, ESQ.., ON HIS MARRIAGE. Brathay Hall, July 7, 1832. A man's life in London, while he is single, may be very stirring, and very intellectual, but I imagine that it must have a hardening 198 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. effect, and that this effect will be more felt every year as the counter tenden- cies of youth become less powerful. The most certain softeners of a man's moral skin, and sweeteners of his blood, are, I am sure, domestic intercourse in a happy marriage, and intercourse with the poor. It is very hard, I im- agine, in our present state of society, to keep up intercourse with God with- out one or both of these aids to foster it. Romantic and fantastic indolence was the fault of other times and other countries ; here I crave more and more every day to find men unfettered by the constant excitement of the world, whether literary, political, commercial, or fashionable ; men who, while they are alive to all that is around them, feel also who is above them. I would give more than I can say, if your Useful Knowledge Society Com- mittee had this last feeling, as strongly as they have the other purely and beneficently I care not for one party or the other, but I do care for the country, and for interests even more precious than that of the country, which the present disordered state of the human mind seems threat- ening. But this mixes strangely with your present prospects, and I hope we may both manage to live in peace with our families in the land of our fathers, without crossing the Atlantic. L. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Brathay Hall, July 8, 1832. This place is complete rest, such as I wish you could enjoy after your far more anxious occupations As to the state of the country, I find my great concern about it comes by accesses, sometimes weighing upon me heavily, and then again laid aside as if it were nothing I wish that your old notion of editing a family Bible could be revived. I do not know any thing which more needs to be done, and it would be a very de- lightful thing if it could be accompanied with really good maps and engrav- ings, which might be done if a large sale could be reckoned upon. It might be published in penny numbers, not beginning with Genesis, but with some of the most important parts of the New Testament, e. g. St. John's Gospel or the Epistle to the Romans. Some of the historical books of the old Tes- tament, I should be inclined to publish last of all, as being the least impor- tant, whilst the Psalms and some of the Prophets should appear very early. I am even grand enough to aspire after a new, or rather a corrected transla- tion, for I would alter only manifest faults or obscurities, and even then pre- serving as closely as possible the style of the old translation. Many could do this for the- New Testament, but where is the man, in England at least, who could do it for the Old ? But alas ! for your being at Dublin instead of at Canterbury. Ll. TO REV. J. B. TYLER. Manchester, July 28, 1832. I am on my way to Laleham from the Lakes, to see my poor sister, whose long illness seems now at last on the point of being happily ended. And whilst waiting here for a coach, I have just bought four of the numbers of the Saturday Magazine, and think this a good opportunity to answer your last kind letter. The difficulty which occurs to me in your sermon project, is, how to make the work sufficiently systematic, or sufficiently particular. I mean this, a real sermon has very often no sort of connexion with its last week's predecessor, or next week's successor ; but then it is appropriate either to something in the service of the day, or else to something in the circumstances of the hearers, which makes it fitting for that especial season. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 199 And if it be nothing of any of these, but a mere sermon which might as well be preached on any other day, and in any other place as when and where it is actually preached, then I hold it to be, with rare exceptions, a very dull thing, and a very useless one. Now in a monthly publication of Sermons, you lose all the advantages of local and personal applicability: — you have only the applicability of time, or of matter ; that is, your month's sermons may be written on the lessons for the month, or the part of Scrip- ture then read, or on the season of the year, whether natural or ecclesiasti- cal ; or else they may form successive parts of one great whole, to be com- pleted in any given time, and to be announced in the first of the series. But if you publish a mere collection of miscellaneous sermons, I think you will be wasting your labour. Now then practically to the point. Fix on your plan, whether your arrangement be of time or of matter, or of both ; — and let me know what part you would like me to take : e. g. whether sermons on any given book of Scripture, or on the Lessons for the Sundays in Advent, or in Lent, or at any other given period ; — or Sermons for Spring or Winter, &c, adapted either to an agricultural or manufacturing population ; or, if you like the arrangement of matter, give me any subject that you choose, whether of evidence, history, or exhortation upon doctrine, and I will do my best for you ; but I cannot write sermons in the abstract. I like to have my own portion of any work to be kept to myself, and you would not thank me for copying out for you some of my old sermons out of my paper case. I am sorry for what you say about my not writing any thing startling ; because it shows how long we have been absent from one another, and that you are beginning to judge me in part upon the reports of others. There are some people whom I must startle, if I am to do any good ; and so you think too, I am sure. But to startle the majority of good and sensible men, or to startle so as to disgust at once a majority of any sort, are things which I most earnestly should wish to avoid. At the same time, I do strongly object on principle to the use of that glozing, unnatural, and silly language, (for so it is in us now,) which men use one after another, till it becomes as worn as one of the old shillings I wish your Saturday Magazine all success ; I do not quite like the in- troductory article, — but I think it improves as it goes along. The print of the departure of the Israelites was a good notion, and well executed; and I like some of your poetry. I could only do you good by sending you some- thing very radical ; for you will have enough of what is right and proper. But seriously, if I can persuade the Penny Magazine to receive things more in your tone, I think I shall do more good than by writing for you — if, as I fear, I cannot do both. In fact, I have for some time past done neither, and I know not how or when I can mend. LII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, September 6, 1832. Have you heard that the Useful Knowledge Society have resolved to publish a Bible, and asked to be editor ? Hac tamen lege, that, where doctrine is introduced, the opinions of the different sects of Christians should be fairly stated. Now Evans's Dictionary of all Religions is a useful book, but I do not want exactly to see it made a rider upon the Scriptures. We want something better than this plan I told that I must write to you before I gave him any promise of assistance. O ! for your Bible plan, or, at least, for the sanction of your name : I think I see the possibility of a true comprehensive Christian Commentary, keeping 200 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. back none of the counsel of God, lowering no truth, chilling no lofty or spir- itual sentiment, yet neither silly, fanatical, nor sectarian. Your book on Romanism shows how this may be done, and it applies to all sects alike. They are not all error, nor we all truth ; e. g. the Quakers reject the Com- munion of the Lord's Supper, thereby losing a great means of grace ; but are they not tempted to do so by the superstitions which other Christians have heaped upon the institution, and is there not some taint of these in the Exhortation even in our own Communion Service ? And with regard to the greatest truths of all, you know how Pelagianism and Calvinism have en- couraged each other, and how the Athanasian Creed, at this day, confirms and aggravates the evils of Unitarianism. I heard some time since, as a matter of fact, that, in the United States, where the Episcopal Church has expelled this creed, the character of Unitarianism is very different from what it is in England, and is returning towards high Arianism, just as here it has gone a downward course to the very verge of utter unbelief. I know how much you have on your hands and on your mind ; I, too, have my hobbies, but I know of nothing more urgent than to circulate such an edition of the Scriptures, as might labour, with God's help, to give their very express im- age without human addition or omission, striving to state clearly what is God's will with regard to us now ; for this seems to me to be one great use of a commentary, to make people understand where God spoke to their fathers, and where he speaks to them ; or rather, — since in all He speaks to them, though not after the same manner, — to teach them to distinguish where they are to follow the letter, and where the spirit. I have promised to send Tyler some sermons for his Magazine, though the abstract idea of a sermon is rather a puzzle to my faculties, accustomed as they are to cling to things in the concrete. But I am vexed to find how much of hopeless bigotry lingers in minds, blq i'jy.iata fygrj. I am sure old is personally cooled towards me, by the Essay attached to the Ser- mons, and the Sheffield Courant Letters. And another very old and dear friend wrote to me about my grievous errors and yours, praying " that I may be delivered from such false doctrines, and restrained from promul- gating them." These men have the advantage over us, UyTot and vnoniall Not to the wise and good, but to the unprincipled or fanatical partisan, who knows not what truth and goodness are. Poor Jeremy Taylor understood well this intolerance of toleration, when he thought it necessary to append to his Liberty of Prophe- sying a long argument against the truth of the Baptist opinions, because he had been 'earnestly arguing that, although untrue, they were neither punishable nor damnable. You have always heard me, and I hope I shall always be heard, to insist upon the Divinity of Christ as the great point of Christianity; but it is because I think that the Scholastic Theology has obscured and excited a prejudice against it, that I am rather thankful myself for having been enabled to receive Scripture truth in spite of the wrapping which has been but around it, than I can condemn those who throw away the wrapping, and cannot conceive that beneath a shell so worthless there can lurk so divine a kernel. Then as to " dangerousness." There is an im- mense danger in folly, or in the careless tone of a man who never seemed in earnest ; or in the trash of a fanatic. Hampden is a good man, and an able one; a lover of truth and fairness; and I should think that the whole- some air of such a man's lectures woidd tend to freshen men's faith, and assure them that it had a foundation to rest upon, when the infinite dishonesty LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 273 and foolery of such divinity, as I remember in the lecture rooms and pulpits in times past, would be enough to drive a man of sound mind into any ex- travagances of unbelief. ..... Hampden's Bampton Lectures are a great work, entirely true in their main points, and I think most useful But it is merely like the cry of Oxford a hundred and twenty years ago, when the lower House of Convocation condemned Burnet's Exposition of the Articles. So always in the course of human things, the tail labours to sting: the head. CXXVI. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ.. Rugby, March 17, 1836. The question about Hampden seems to me simple. If he has preached or published heresy, let him be tried by the proper judge or judges, either the Bishop or, as Hawkins says, the Vice-Chancellor. assisted by six Doc- tors of Divinity. What they are now doing is merely Lynch law ; and they might just as well run down any other man who is unpopular with the dominant party in Oxford, and say that they have no confidence in him, and therefore pass a privilegium against him without giving him any trial. It is making the legislative power encroach on the judicial with a vengeance, and therefore I would go up to vote for Pusey, Newman,1 Vaughan Thom- as, or any other whom I deem the most unfit man in Oxford, if a Tory ministry had appointed them, and a Whig majority in Convocation were' to press for a similar stigma against them on a charge which has never been tried, and which Convocation is not competent to try. I will add. however, that I agree for the most part with Hampden's views Hawkins has stood the storm nobly by Hampden's side. CXXVII. TO THE SAME. Rugby, June II, 1836. No man can object more than I do to the quoting Scripture language irreverently or lightly ; but I see no impropriety in referring to Scripture examples, whether of sets of men or of individuals. Hophni and Phinehas are recorded as specimens of the worst class of ministers of an established religion. The Judaizers of the New Testament exhibit in the germ all the evils which have since most corrupted the Christian Church. I cannot but think it legitimate and right to refer to these examples, when the same evils are flaming in the face of day before our eyes. I do not say or think that and are bad men. I do not think that John Gerson was a bad man ; yet he was a principal party in the foul treachery and murder com- mitted against John Huss at the Council of Constance. CXXVIII. TO THE REV. J. HEARN. (In congratulation on his appointment to a living.) Rugby, April 12, 1836. I covet rest neither for my friends nor yet for myself, so long as we are able to work ; but, when age or weakness comes on, and hard labour becomes an unendurable burthen, then the necessity of work is deeply painful, and it seems to me to imply an evil state of society wherever 1 In 1.841, he expressed his intention of fulfilling this resolution, had a condemnation of Tract 90 been proposed to Convocation. 274 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. such a necessity generally exists. One's age should be tranquil as one's childhood should be playful: hard work, at either extremity of human ex- istence, seems to me out of place ; the morning and the evening should be alike cool and peaceful ; at midday the sun may burn, and men may labour under it [After speaking of the Hampden controversy.] It is a curious case, and is completely, to my mind, a repetition of the scenes of the Reformation. When Peter Martyr went down as Divinity Professor to Oxford in Edward the Sixth's time, he was received by the Catholics with precisely the same outcry with which Hampden has been received by the High Churchmen, and on the same grounds. I think that, the Evangel- icals have in some instances been led to join in the clamour against him, from their foolish fondness for their particular phraseology, and from their want of ability to recognize the real features of any movement of opinion. About fifty or sixty years ago, when there was really a leaven of Socin- ianism in the Church, it showed itself in petitions to be relieved from the Articles, and in the absence of a strongly marked Christian character in the writings of the petitioning party. But Hampden is doing what real Chris- tian relbrmers have ever done ; what the Protestants did with Catholicism, and the Apostles with Judaism. He upholds the Articles as true in sub- stance, he maintains their usefulness, and the truth and importance of their doctrines; but he sees that the time is come when their phraseology re- quires to be protested against, as having, in fact, obstructed and embarrassed the reception of the very truths which they intend to inculcate. He is engaged in that same battle against technical theological language, to which you and I have, I believe, an equal dislike ; while he would join us thoroughly in condemning the errors against which the Articles were di- rected, and holds exactly the language and sentiments which Cranmer and Ridley. I believe, would hold if they were alive now. CXXIX. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ.. Rugby, April 27, 1836. Objections to my statement do not bring us to the point ; my view stands on four legs, and I think meets all the difficulties of the case. If you say otherwise, I want to see another view that shall also stand on four legs, and those legs good ones. I think the Roman Catholic system has the legs right in number, the system is consistent ; but it is based on one or two great falsehoods. The English High Church system, I think both false and inconsistent But I turn more gladly to a point in which I think we heartily agree. I want to petition against the Jew Bill, but I believe I must petition alone ; for you would not sign my preamble, nor would many others who will petition doubtless against the measure. I want to take my stand on my favourite principle, that the world is made up of Christians and non-Christians ; with all the former we should be one, with none of the latter. I would thank the Parliament for having done away with distinctions between Christians and Christians ; I would pray that distinctions be kept up between Christians and non-Christians. Then I think that the Jews have no claim whatever of political right. If I thought of Roman Catholicism as you do, I would petition for the Repeal of the Union to-morrow, because I think Ireland ought to have its own Church es- tablished in it ; and, if I thought that Church antichristian, I should object to living in political union with a people belonging to it. But the Jews are strangers in England, and have no more claim to legislate for it, than a lodger has to share with the landlord in the management of his house. If we had brought them here by violence, and then kept them in an inferior condition, they would have just cause to complain ; though even then, I think, we might lawfully deal with them on the Liberia system, and remove LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 275 them to a land where they might live by themselves independent; for Eng- land is the land of Englishmen, not of Jews. And in this my German friends agree with me as fully as they do in my dislike to the Protestant Es- tablishment in Ireland, which is the land of Irishmen ; and from which we ought to go, and not the Irish, if our consciences clamour against living with them according to justice. So now here is agreement with you and disagreement. CXXX. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, May 4, 1836. Your opinion of the Edinburgh Review gave me, as you may believe, very great pleasure ; but I did not think that it would be worth while to print it in a separate shape, because the more I saw of the temper of the Judaizers, the less did it seem likely to persuade any of them from their evil deeds before to-morrow's Convocation ; and because having written once agonistically, I wish next to write in another manner, and to go deeper to work with the root of error, from which all this Judaizing springs. And here I feel sadly my distance from all who might advise and co-operate in such a work. I want to get out a series of " Church of England Tracts," which, after establishing again the supreme authority of Scripture and reason, against Tradition, Councils, and Fathers, and showing that reason is not rationalism, should then take two lines, the one negative, the other positive ; the negative one, showing that the pretended unity, which has al- ways been the idol of Judaizers, is worthless, impracticable, — and the pur- suit of it has split Christ's Church into a thousand sects, and will keep it so split for ever : the other positive, showing that the true unity is most precious, practicable, and has in fact been never lost ; that at all times and in all countries, there has been a succession of men, enjoying the blessings and showing forth the fruits of Christ's Spirit ; that in their lives, and in what is truly their religion — i. e. in their prayers and hymns — there has been a won- derful unity ; that all sects have had amongst them the marks of Christ's Catholic Church, in the graces of His Spirit, and the confession of His name ; for which purpose it might be useful to give, side by side, the mar- tyrdoms, missionary labours, &c, of Catholics and Arians. Romanists and Protestants, Churchmen and Dissenters. Here is a grand field, giving room for learning, for eloquence, for acuteness, for judgment, and for a true love of Christ, in those who took part in it, — and capable, I think, of doing much good. And the good is wanted ; because it is plain that the Judaizers have infected even those who still profess to disclaim them I shall talk this matter over with Hawkins, who has behaved nobly in this matter, but who still, I think, contributed to their mischief by his unhappy sermon on Tradition. I am well satisfied that if you let in but one little finger of Tradition, you will have in the whole monster — horns, and tail, and all. I teach my children the Catechism and the Creed, not for any tradition's sake, but because the Church of England has adopted them. Each particular Church is an authority to members of that Church ; but, for any general tradition having authority from universality or antiquity, I do not believe that there is any such ; and what are called such, are, I think, only corrup- tions, more or less ancient, and more or less mischievous, of the trne Chris- tianity of the Scriptures. I have received your volume of Charges, &c, for which I am very much obliged to you. I have read your additional remarks on the Jew Bill, and grieve that there should be so much difference between us. In my Catholic Pamphlet, or rather in one place in the Postscript, there is one paragraph which I should now cancel, — that which applies St. Paul's rule about hus- bands and wives of different religions, to men of different religions in a com- monwealth. The general argument of the Pamphlet I should perfectly 276 LIFE 0F DR. ARNOLD. maintain now, — that the Irish being a Catholic people, they have a right to perfect independence, or to a perfectly equal union: if our conscience objects to the latter, it is bound to concede the former. But for the Jews I see no plea of justice whatever; they are voluntary strangers here, and have no claim to become citizens, but by conforming to our moral law, which is the Gospel. Had we brought them here as captives, I should think that we ought to take them back again, and I should think myself bound to subscribe for that purpose. I would give the Jews the honorary citizenship which was so often given by the Romans, — i. e. the private rights of citizens, jus commercii et jus connubii, — but not the public rights, jus suffragii and jus honorum. But then, according to our barbarian feudal notions, the jus commercii involves the jus suffragii ; because land, forsooth, is to be repre- sented in Parliament, just as it is used to confer jurisdiction. Then, again, I cannot but think that you over-estimate the difference between Christian and Christian. Every member of Christ's Catholic. Church is one with whom I may lawfully join in legislation, and whose ministry I may lawfully use as a judge or a magistrate ; but a Jew or heathen I cannot apply to volun- tarily, but only obey him passively if he has the rule over me. A Jew judge ought to drive all Christians from pleading before him, according to St. Paul, 1 Cor. vi. 1. CXXXI. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, BART. Rugby, May 11, 1836. I have been waiting week after week, in the hope of being able to tell you something about the new University ; but I begin to think that if I wait till the Government plans are decided, I shall not write to you at all before we meet ; and I would rather send you a letter with nothing in it, than ap- pear indifferent to the pleasure of keeping up some communication with you, — a privilege which, 1 can truly say, I value more and more after every fresh meeting with you. I meet with a great many persons in the course of the year, and with many whom I admire and like; but what I feel daily more and more to need, as life every year rises more and more before me in its true reality, is to have intercourse with those who take life in earnest. It is very painful to me to be always on the surface of things, and I think that literature, science, politics, many topics of far greater interest than mere gossip or talking about the weather, are yet, as they are generally talked about, still on the surface ; they do not touch the real depth of life. It is not that I want much of what is called religious conversation, — that, I believe, is often on the surface, like other conversation ; — but I want a sign, which one catches as by a sort of masonry, that a man knows what he is about in life, — whither tending, and in what cause engaged ; and when I find this, it seems to open my heart as thoroughly, and with as fresh a sympathy, as when I was twenty years younger. I feel this in talking to you, and in writing to you ; and I feel that you will neither laugh at me, nor be offended with me for saying it TO DR. GREENHILL. Rugby, May 9, 1836. At last I hope to redeem my credit with you, though indeed it may well be almost irretrievable. I must go back over our hurried meeting of Thurs- day last, to your two kind letters, and the report which they give of your medical studies, in which I rejoice ; as in every thing else, — and even more LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 277 than in most things that I am acquainted with. What our fathers have done, still leaves an enormous deal for us to do. The philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is almost at zero : our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less happy. The theory of life itself lies probably beyond our knowledge ; so, probably, is that of the origin of thought and perception. We talk of nerves, and we perceive their connex- ion with operations of the mind; but we cannot understand a thinking or a seeing or a hearing nerve, nor do electricity or galvanic action bring us nearer to the point. But coining down to a far lower point, how ignorant are we of the causes of disorder, of the real influence of air, and of its com- ponent parts as affecting health, of infection, and of that strange phenome- non of diseases incident generally to the human frame, but for the most part incident once only, such as measles, small pox, and the old Athenian plague, or incident only after a certain period, as the vaccine infection. Here, and in a thousand other points, there is room for infinite discoveries ; — to say no- thing of the wonderful phenomena of animal magnetism, which only English- men, with their accustomed ignorance, venture to laugh at. but which no one yet has either thoroughly ascertained or explained If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This, however, I believe cannot be, and physical science, if studied at all, seems too great to be studied iv naoioyw: wherefore, rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, and then we should see our way a little more clearly without falling into Judaism, or Toryism, or Jacobinism, or any other ism whatever. All here is going on comfortably, with much actually good, and much in promise ; with much also to make one anxious, according to the unavoidable course of human things. My mind expatiates sometimes upon Fox How, when I see the utter dulness of the country about Rugby, which certainly is beyond the reach of railways to spoil. On Saturday we went, a party of twenty, to Nuneham Wood : — Mrs. Arnold and myself, with eight children, and twelve persons besides. CXXX1II. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, May 16, 1836. I have no thought of writing any thing about the Jew Bill or Church Reform at present. If the Jew Bill comes forward, I shall perhaps petition against it, either in common with the clergy of the neighbourhood, whom I could on that question join, though not probably in my reasons for opposing it ; or else singly, to state my own views as a Liberal in being unfa- vourable to any measure of the present government. Undoubtedly, I think that up to 1795 or 6, or whenever the elective franchise was granted to the Catholics, the Protestants were de facto the only citizens of Ireland ; and that the Catholic claims could not then be urged on the same ground that they are now. Till that time one must have appealed to a higher law, and asked by what right the Protestants had become the only citizens of Ireland ; it was then a question of the jus gentium, now it is merely one of jus civile. I never have justified the practice of one race in wresting another's country from it ; I only say that every people in that country which is rightfully theirs, may establish their own institutions and their own ideas ; and that no stranger has any title whatever to become a member of that nation, un- 278 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. less he adopts their institutions and ideas. It is not what a government may impose upon its subjects, but what a people may agree upon for themselves ; and, though England does not belong to the king, yet it belongs to the Eng- lish ; and the English may most justly say that they will admit no stranger to be one of their society. If they say that they will admit him, that is, if Parliament pass the Jew Bill, I do not at all dispute their right as English- men to do so, and as an Englishman I owe obedience to their decision ; but I think they make England cease to be the ttoAk of a Christian, and we, like the old Christians, shall then become in our turn nagoixoi. Politically, if we are the minority, I see no injustice in this, but I think that we may wonder a little at those of the majority, who are Christians ; seeing that we as Eng- lishmen have a nearer claim to English citizenship than the Jews can have ; and Christians being the majority, ought, I think, to establish their own ideas in their own land. Meanwhile, I think that I shall fulfil my intention of publishing the three Pastoral Epistles, (Timothy and Titus,) with Notes and Dissertations. I should print in parallel columns, the Greek text, as correctly as I could give it ; the Latin Vulgate ; and the English authorized version corrected, notic- ing every correction by printing it in a smaller type, and marking with obeli such words or expressions in our translation as I think require amendment, but which I cannot amend to my satisfaction. The Dissertations would embrace naturally every point on which the Oxford Judaizers have set up their heresy; the priesthood, sacraments, apostolical succession, tradition, the church, — and above all would contain the positive opposite to all their idolatries, the doctrine of the Person of Christ ; not His Church, not His sacraments, not His teaching, not even the truths about Him, nor the virtues which He most enforces, but Himself; that only object which bars fana- ticism and idolatry on the one hand, and gives life and power to all morality on the other. And this is what St. Paul constantly opposes to the several idolatries of the Judaizers, see Colossians ii. and 1 Timothy iv., connecting with it the last verse of chapter hi., which has been so strangely severed from its context. I never yet. in my life made any application for preferment, nor have I desired it. But I confess, if Hampden is to be made a Bishop, I wish that they would put me in his place at Oxford. I should be a very great loser in point of income by the change, and, till lately, I have never fancied that I could be more useful any where else than at Rugby. But I think under present circumstances that I could do more good at Oxford. I could not supply your place, but I could supply it better than it is supplied now. I could have a large body of very promising young men disposed to listen to me for old affection's sake ; and my fondness for young men's society would soon bring others about me whom I might influence. I should be of weight from my classical knowledge, and I am old enough now to set down many of the men who are foremost in spreading their mischief, and to give some sanction of authority to those who think as I do, but who at present want a man to lean upon. And, though the Judaizers hate me, I believe, worse than they hate Hampden, yet they could not^get up the same clamour against me, for the bugbear of Apostolical Succession would not do, and it would puzzle even to get up a charge of Socinianism against me out of my Sermons. Furthermore, my spirit of pugnaciousness would re- joice in fighting out the battle with the Judaizers, as it were in a saw-pit; and, as my skin is tough, my wife's tougher, and the children's toughest of all, I am satisfied that we should live in Oxford amidst any quantity of abuse unhurt in health or spirits ; and I should expatiate as heretofore in Bagley Wood and on Shotover. Do not understand this as implying any weariness with Rugby ; — far from it ; — I have got a very effective position here, which I would only quit for one which seems even more effective ; but I keep one great place of education sound and free, and unavoidably gain an influence with many young men, and endeavour to make them see that they ought to LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 279 think on and understand a subject, before they take up a party view about it. I hunger sometimes tor more time for writing; but I do not indulge, the feeling; and on the other hand, I think my love of tuition rather grows upon me. CXXXIV. TO A. P. STANLEY, ESa. Rugby, May 24, 1836. Now with regard to the Newmanites. I do not call them bad men, nor would I deny their many good qualities ; I judge of them as I do commonly of mixed characters, where the noble and the base, the good and the bad, are strangely mixed up together. There is an as- cending scale from the grossest personal selfishness, such as that of Ceesar or Napoleon, to party selfishness, such as that of Sylla, or fanatical selfish- ness, that is, the idolatry of an idea or a principle, such as that of Robes- pierre1 and Dominic, and some of the Covenanters. In all these, except perhaps the first, we feel a sympathy more or less, because there is some- thing of personal self-devotion and sincerity ; but fanaticism is idolatry, and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it ; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creature of his own devices, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent self-sacrifice, for it is in fact making the parts of his nature or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values. The moral fault, as it appears to me, is in the idola- try,— the setting up some idea which is most kindred to our own minds, and then putting it in the place of Christ, who alone cannot be made an idol, and cannot inspire fanaticism, because He combines all ideas of perfection, ■ and exhibits them in their just harmony and combination. Now to my own mind, by its natural tendency, — that is, taking my mind at its best, — truth and justice would be the idols that I should follow; and they would be idols, for they would not supply all the food that the mind wants, and, whilst worshipping them, reverence and humility and tenderness might very likely be forgotten. But Christ Himself includes at once truth and justice, and all these other qualities too. In other men I cannot trace exactly the origin of the idolatry, except by accident in some particular cases. But it is clear to me that Newman and his party are idolaters ; they put Christ's Church, and Christ's Sacraments, and Christ's ministers, in the place of Christ Himself; and, these being only imperfect ideas, the unreserved worship of them una- voidably tends to the neglect of other ideas no less important ; and thence some passion or other loses its proper and intended check, and the moral evil follows. Thus it is that narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness, be- cause it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral nature, for then it would not be narrow-mindedness : and this neglect fosters the growth of evil in the parts that are so neglected. Thus a man may " give all his goods to feed the poor, and yet be nothing ;" where I do not under- stand it of giving out of mere ostentation, or with a view to gain influence, but that a man may have one or more virtues, such as are according to his favourite ideas, in very great perfection, and still be nothing ; because these ' Robespierre, he used to distinguish from Danton, and others of the revolutionary leaders, as being a sincere fanatic in the cause of Republicanism. " The life and char- acter of Robespierre has to me a most important lesson," he said once to a former pupil, with the emphasis of one who had studied it for his own profit ; " it shows the frightful consequences of making every thing give way to a favourite notion. The man was a just man, and humane naturally, but he would narrow every thing to meet his own views, and nothing could check him at last. It is a most solemn warning to us of what fanaticism may lead to in God's world." To Dominic, in allusion to his supposed share in the Albigensian crusade, and the foundation of the Inquisition, he used to apply St. Paul's words, 1 Cor. iii. 15. 280 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. ideas are his idols, and, worshipping them Avith all his heart, there is a por- tion of his heart, more or less considerable, left without its proper object, guide, and nourishment, and so this portion is left to the dominion of evil. Other men, and these the mass of mankind, go wrong either from having no favourite ideas at all, and living wholly at random, or ngoq tidovfjv— or else from having ideas but indistinctly, and paying them but little worship, so that here too the common world about them gives the impression to their minds, and thus they are evil. But the best men, I think, are those who, worshipping Christ and no idol, and thus having got hold of the true idea, yet from want of faith cannot always realize it, and so have parts of their lives more or less out of that influence which should keep them right,— -and thus they also fall into evil— but they are the best, because they have set before them Christ and no idol, and thus have nothing to cast away, but need only to impress themselves with their ideas more constantly ; " they need not save to wash the feet, and are then clean every whit." .... I have been looking through the Tracts,1 which are to me a memorable proof of their idolatry; some of the idols are better than others, some being indeed as very a " Truncus ficulnus," as ever the most degraded supersti- tion worshipped ; but as to Christianity, there is more of it in any one of Mrs. Sherwood's or Mrs. Cameron's, or indeed of any of the Tract Socie- ty's, than in all the two Oxford octavos. And these men would exclude John Bunyan, and Mrs. Fry, and John Howard, from Christ's Church, while they exalt the Non-jurors into confessors, and Laud into a martyr ! CXXXV. TO THE EARL HOW. (In reply to letter requesting as one of the Trustees of Rugby School, that Dr. Arnold would declare if he was the author of the article on Dr. Hampden in the Edinburgh Review attributed to him, and stating that his conduct would be guided by Dr. Arnold's answer )2 Rugby, June 22, 1836. MY LORD, The answer which your lordship has asked for, I have given several times to many of my friends ; and I am well known to be very little apt to disavow or conceal my authorship of any thing, that I may at any time have written. Still, as I conceive your lordship's question to be one which none but a personal friend has the slightest right to put to me or to any man, I feel it due to myself to decline giving any answer to it. CXXXVI. TO THE SAME. (In reply to a second letter, urging compliance with his request, on the grounds that he might feel con- strained by official duty to take some step in the matter in case the report were true.) June 27, 1836. MY LORD, I am extremely sorry that you should have^considered my letter as un- courteous ; it was certainly not intended to be so ; but I did not feel that I 1 From a Letter to Dr. Hawkins. — " I have been reading the Pusey and Newman Tracts, with no small astonishment ; they surpass all my expectations in point of extra- vagance, and in their complete opposition to the Christianity of the New Testament. But there are some beautiful things in Pusey's Tracts on Baptism, much that is holy and pure, and truly Christian, till, like Don Quixote's good sense in ordinary matters, it all gets upset by some outbreak of his particular superstition." * This correspondence ended in a resolution of censure moved at the Board of Trustees, which would probably have occasioned Dr. Arnold's resignation, but which was lost. See Letter cxxxix. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 281 could answer your lordship's letter at greater length without going into greater details by way of explanation than its own shortness appeared to me to warrant. Your lordship addressed me in a tone purely formal and official, and at the same time asked a question which the common usage of society regards as one of delicacy, — justified, I do not say, only by personal friendship, but at least by some familiarity of acquaintance. It was because no such ground could exist in the present case, and because I cannot and do not acknowledge your right officially, as a trustee of Rugby School, to question me on the subject of my real or supposed writings on matters wholly unconnected with the school, that I felt it my duty to decline answer- ing your lordship's question. It is very painful to be placed in a situation where I must either appear to seek concealment wholly foreign to my wishes, or else must acknowledge a right which I owe it, not only to myself, but to the master of every en- dowed school in England, absolutety to deny. But in the presnt case, I think I can hardly be suspected of seeking concealment. I have spoken on the subject of the article in the Edinburgh Review freely in the hearing of many, with no request for secrecy on their part expressed or implied. Offi- cially, however, I cannot return an answer — not from the slightest feeling of disrespect to your Lordship, but because my answering would allow a prin- ciple which I can on no account admit to be just or reasonable. CXXX VII. TO THE SAME. (In reply to a letter of thanks for the last.) June 30, 163G. MY LORD, I trust' that you will not think me intrusive, if I trouble you once again with these £ew lines, to express to you my sincere thanks for the Ia,st letter which I have had the honour of receiving from you. It is a matter'of sin- cere regret to me that any part of my conduct should fail to meet your lord- ship's approbation. If I feel it the less on the present subject than on any other, it is because I have been long compelled to differ from many of my friends whom I esteem most highly ; and I fear, considering the vehemence of party feeling at present, to incur their disapprobation also. In such cases, one is obliged to bear the pain without repining, — when a man is thoroughly convinced, as I am, that the opinions which he holds, and the manner in which he upholds them, are in the highest degree agreeable to truth, and in conformity with the highest principles of Christian duty. CXXXVIII. TO HIS SISTER MRS. BDCKLAND. # (After a visit to the Isle of Wight.) Fox How, July 23, 1836. » • • . . . I certainly was agreeably surprised rather than disap- pointed by all the scenery. I admired the interior of the island, which peo- ple affect to sneer at, but which I think is very superior to most of the scene- ry of common countries. As for the Sandrock Hotel, it was most beautiful, and Bonchurch is the most beautiful thing I ever saw on the sea coast on this side of Genoa. Slatwoods was deeply interesting ; I thought of what Fox How might be to my children forty years hence, and of the growth of the trees in that interval ; but Fox How cannot be to them what Slatwoods is to me, — the only home of my childhood,— : while with them Laleham and Rugby will divide their affections. I had also a great interest in going 19 282 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. over the College at Winchester, but I certainly did not desire to change houses with Moberly ; no, nor situation, although I envy him the downs and the clear streams, and the southern instead of the midland country, and the associations of Alfred's capital with the tombs of Kings and Prelates, as compared with Rugby and its thirteen horse and cattle fairs But when I look at the last number of the Rugby Magazine, or at Vaughan or Simpkinson at Thorney How, I envy neither him nor any man, thinking that there is a good in Rugby which no place can surpass in its quality, be the quantity of it much or little. CXXXIX. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Fox How, Ambleside, Jaly 31, 1836. It is nearly a month since you left Rugby, and yet I have not written to you nor given you any account of the result of the Trustees' meeting. The result, however, was nothing. Lord How brought forward some mo- tion, and they divided on it, four and four ; but as there is no casting vote, an equal division causes the failure of any proposal, and accordingly I should have known nothing about it, had it not been for private information. In all that passed publicly, they were all as civil as usual, and did all that I wanted about the school. So that the meeting went off peaceably, and the Exhibitions also went to those whom I could most have wished to have them. [After describing his journeys and plans in the holidays.] It gave me the greatest pleasure to hear you say, when you left Rugby, that you hoped to repeat your visit, and bring Mrs. Hawkins with you. It is indeed a long time since I have seen you in so much quiet, and life is not long enough to afford such long interruptions of intercourse. And I have also had great pleasure in thinking that the result of your visit confirmed what I had hoped, and has shown that, if we differ on some points, we agree in many more, and that the amount of difference was not so great as both, perhaps, during a long absence had been led to fancy I was amused to see the names of Pusey and some other strong High Churchmen attached to a petition against one of the Bills drawn on the Church Commissioners' Re- port. It will be difficult to legislate where the most opposite extremes of parties seem united against the government. There are few men with whom I differ more than the Bishop of Exeter ; but I cordially approve of his Amendment on the Marriage Act so far as it goes ; only I wish that he had added to the words " in the presence of God," the true sign and mark of a Christian act, " and in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." I do not believe that any Unitarian would have objected to it, nor any one else ex- cept those who seem to me to be utterly puzzled with the notions of a "civil act," and a " religious act.'' CXL. TO SIR J. FRANKLIN,^K. C. B. (Then appointed Governor of Van Diemen's Land.) Fox How, Jaly 20, 1836. I sometimes think that if the government would make me a Bishop, or principal of a college or school, — or both together, — in such a place as Van Diemen's Land, and during your government, I could be tempted to emigrate with all my family for good and all. There can be, I think, no more useful or more sacred task, than assisting in forming the moral and intellectual character of a new society ; it is the surest and best kind of Missionary labour. But our colonial society has been in general so Jaco- binical in the truest sense of the word ; — every man has lived so much to and for himself, and the bonds of law and religion have been so little ac- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 283 knowledged as the great sanctions and securities of society, — that one shrinks from bringing up one's children where they must in all human probability become lowered, not in rank or fortune, but in what is infinitely more import- ant, in the intellectual and moral and religious standard by which their lives would be guided. Feeling this, and holding our West Indian colonies to be one of the worst stains in the moral history of mankind, a convict colony seems to me to be even more shocking and more monstrous in its very conception. I do not know to what extent Van Diemen's Land is so; but I am sure that no such evil can be done to mankind as by thus sowing with rotten seed, and raising up a nation morally tainted in its very origin. Compared with this, the bloodiest exterminations ever effected by conquest were useful and good ac- tions. If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation ; that no convict or convict's child should ever be a free citizen ; and that even in the third generation, the offspring should be excluded from all offices of honour or authority in the colony. This would be complained of as unjust or invid- ious, but I am sure that distinctions of moral breed are as natural and as just as those of skin or of arbitrary caste are wrong and mischievous; it is a law of God's providence which we cannot alter, that the sins of the father are really visited upon the child in the corruption of his breed, and in the rendering impossible many of the feelings which are the greatest security to a child against evil. Forgive me for ail this ; but it really is a happiness to me to think of you in Van Diemen's Land, where you will be, I know, not in name nor in form, but in deed and in spirit, the best and chief missionary. CXLI. TO THE REV. JAMES HEARN. Rugby, September 14, 1836. I know not when I have been more delighted by any letter, than by that which I lately received from you. It contains a picture of your present state which is truly a cause for thankfulness, and speaking after the manner of men, it is an intense gratification to my sense of justice, as well as to my personal regard for you, to see a life of hard and insufficiently paid labour well per- formed, now, before its decline, rewarded with comparative rest and with comfort. I rejoiced in the picture which you gave of your house and fields and neighbourhood; there was a freshness and a quietness about it which always goes very much to my heart, and which at times, if I indulged the feeling, could half make me discontented with the perpetual turmoil of my own life. For Westmoreland itself has not to me the perfect peacefulness of the idea of a country parsonage ; the house is too new, the trees too young and small, the neighbourhood too numerous, and our stay is too short and too busily engaged, to allow of any thing like entire repose at it. It is a most delightful tonic to brace me for the coming half year ; but it does not admit of a full abandonment to its enjoyments, and it is well that it does not. I sometimes look at the mountains which bound our valley, and think how content I could be never to wander beyond them any more, and to take rest in a place which I love so dearly. But whilst my health is so entire, and I feel my spirits still so youthful, I feel ashamed of the wish, and I trust that I can sincerely rejoice in being engaged in so active a life, and in having such constant intercourse with others. Still I can heartily and lawfully re- joice that you are permitted to rest whilst your age and spirits are also yet unbroken, and that the hurry of your journey is somewhat abating, and al- lows you more steadily to contemplate its close. ...... Our own two boys have gone to Winchester, and have 284 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. taken a very good place in the school, and seem very comfortable there ; I am sure you will give them your prayers, that they maybe defended amidst the manifold temptations of their change of life. I feel as if I could draw the remaining children yet closer around me, and as if I could not enough prize the short period which passes before they go out into life, never again to feel their father's house their abiding home. I turn from public affairs almost in despair, as I think that it will be a long time before what I most long for will be accomplished. Yet I still wish entirely well to the Government, and regard with unabated horror the Conservatives both in Church and State. They are, however, I believe, growing in influence, and so they will do, until there comes a check to our present commercial prosperity, for vulgar minds never can understand the duty of Reform till it is impressed on them by the argumentum ad ventrem ; and the mass of mankind, whether in good coats or in bad. will always be vulgar-minded. CXLII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. (Then at Fox How with his family.) Rugby, September 23, 1836. If you have the same soft air that is now breathing round us, and the same bright sun playing on the trees, which are full charged with the fresh- ness of last night's rain, you must, I think, be in a condition to judge well of the beauty of Fox How. It is a real delight to think of you as at last ar- rived there, and to feel that the place which we so love is enjoyed by such dear friends, who can enjoy it fully. I congratulate you on your deliverance from Lancaster Castle, and by what you said in your last letter, you are sat- isfied, I imagine, with the propriety ol^ the verdict. Now you can not only see the mountains afar off, but feel them in eyes, lungs, and mind ; and a mio-bty influence I think it is. I often used to think of the solemn compari- son in the Psalm, " the hills stand about Jerusalem; even so standeth the Lord round about his people." The girdling in of the mountains round the valley of our home is as apt an image as any earthly thing can be of the en- circling of the everlasting arms, keeping off evil, and showering all good. But my great delight in thinking of you at Fox How is mixed with no repining that I cannot be there myself. We have had our holyday, and it was a long and most agreeable one ; and Nemesis might well be angry, if I was not now ready and glad to be at work again. Besides, I think that the school is ao-ain in a very hopeful state ; the set, which rather weighed us down during the last year, is now broken and dispersed ; and the tide is ao-ain, I trust, at flood, and will, I hope, go on so. You would smile to see the zeal with which I am trying to improve the Latin verse, and the diffi- culty which I find in doing it. But I stand in amaze at the utter want of poetical feeling in the minds of the majority of boys. They cannot in the least understand either Homer or Virgil ; they cannot follow out the strong graphic touches which,, to an active mind, suggest such infinitely varied pictures, and yet leave it to the reader to draw them for himself on the hint o-iven. But my delight in going over Homer and Virgil with the boys makes me think what a treat it must be to teach Shakespeare to a good class of young Greeks in regenerate Athens ; to dwell upon him line bv line and word by word, in the way that nothing but a translation lesson ever will enable one to do ; and so to get all his pictures and thoughts leis- urely into one's mind, till I verily think one would after a time almost give out lio-ht in the dark, after having been steeped as it were in such an atmo- sphere of brilliance. And how could this ever be done without having the process of construing, as the grosser medium through which alone all the beauty can be transmitted, because else we travel too fast, and more than half of it escapes us ? Shakespeare, with English boys, would be but a LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 285 poor substitute for Homer ; but I confess that I should be glad to get Dante and Goethe now and then in the room of some of the Greek tragedians and of Horace ; or rather not in their room, but mixed up along with them. I have been trying something of this in French, as I am now going through, with the Sixth Form, Barante's beautiful Tableau de la Litterature Fran- chise pendant le Dix huitieme Siecle. I thought of you tbe other day, when one of my fellows translated to me that splendid paragraph, comparing "Voltaire to the Babouc of one of his own romances, for I think you first showed me the passage many years ago. Now by going through Barante in this way, one gets it thoroughly ; and with a really good book, I think it is a great gain CXLIII. * TO A. P. STANLEY, ESQ. Rugby, October 21, 1£3S. . . . . As long as you read moderately, and not voraciously, I can consent that your reading should even prevent your coming to Rugby ;■ and I am glad that, by beginning in time, you will escape all excessive pressure at last. You will be rejoicing at the meeting of the scattered members of your society after the Long Vacation. I can well recall the same feeling, deeply associated in my mind with the October tints of the Nettlebed beech woods, through which my road to Oxford, from Kensington and Hampton, always lay. The separation had been long enough to make the meeting more than joyous, and some of my most delightful remembrances of Oxford and its neighbourhood are connected with the scenery of the later autumn ; Bagley Wood in its golden decline, and the green of the meadows, reviving for a while under the influence of a Martinmas summer, and then fading finally off into its winter brown. Here our society is too busy, as well as too old, to enjoy in common, though we can work in common ; but work after all is but half the man, and they who only work together do not truly live together I agree with in a great deal, .and so Newman might ask as he does about Hampden and the Socinians, where I begin to disagree with him. Politically, I do not know that I do disagree as to any principle, and in sympathy with a man's mind in argu- ment, it makes no difference whether he believes the exemplification of your common principles to be found in this party or in that party ; that is a mere question of fact, which we need not impannel a jury to try ; meanwhile we are agreed as to the law of the case But to supply the place of Conscience, with the ao/at, of Fanaticism on one hand and of Utilita- rianism on the other, — on one side is the mere sign from heaven, craved by t hose who heeded not Heaven's first sign written within them ; — on the other, it is the idea which, hardly hovering on the remotest outskirts of Christiani- ty, readily flies off to the camp of Materialism and Atheism ; the mere pared and plucked notion of*' good" exhibited by the word " useful ;" which seems to me the idea of " good" robbed of its nobleness, — the sediment from which the filtered water has been assiduously separated. It were a strange world, if there were indeed in it no one dgxi.rixTnny.bv tfdoq but that of the £v/u.(f>fgoi' ; if y.dlov were only xdXov, on £v{ixpigov. But this is one of the peculiarities of the English mind ; the Puritan and the Benthamite have an immense part of their nature in common ; and thus the Christianity of the Puritan is coarse and fanatical.; — he cannot relish what there is in it of beautiful or delicate or ideal. Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience ; but a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience ; and the needie may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction. Still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure guide, and so is the conscience ; and you can trace the deranging influence on tire latter quite as surely as on the former. Again, there is 286 LIFE 0F DR ARNOLD. confusion in some men's minds, who say that if we so exalt conscience, we make ourselves the paramount judges of all things, and so do not live by faith and obedience. But he who believes his conscience to be God's law, by obeying it obeys God. It is as much obedience, as it is obedience to fol- low the dictates of God's Spirit; and in every case of obedience to any law or guide whatsoever, there always must be one independent act of the mind pronouncing this one determining proposition, " I ought to obey ;" so that in obedience, as in every moral act, we are and must be the paramount judges, because we must ourselves decide on that very principle, " that we ought to obey." And as for faith, there is again a confusion in the use of the term. It is not scriptural, but fanatical, to oppose faith to reason. Faith is properly opposed to sense, and is the listening to the dictates of the higher part of our mind, to which alone God speaks, rather than to the lower part of us, to which the world speaks. There is no end to the mischiefs done by that one very common and perfectly unscriptural mistake of opposing faith and reason, or whatever you choose to call the highest part of man's nature. And this you Avill find that the Scripture never does ; and observing this, cuts down at once all Pusey's nonsense about Rationalism ; which, in order to be contrasted scripturally with faith, must mean the following some lower part of our nature, whether sensual or merely intellectual ; — that is, some part which does not acknowledge God. But what he abuses as Rationalism is just what the Scripture commends as knowledge, judgment, understand- ing, and the like ; that is, not the following a merely intellectual part of our nature, but the sovereign part ; that is, the moral reason acting under God, and using, so to speak, the telescope of faith, for objects too distant for its naked eye to discover. And to this is opposed, in Scriptural language, folly and idolatry and blindness, and other such terms of reproof. According to Pusey, the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah is Rationalism, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree was a humble man, who did not inquire but believe. But if Isaiah be right, and speaks the words of God, then Pusey, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree, should learn that God is not served by folly. CXLIV. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, BART. Rugby, October 29, 1836. The authority for the statement which you quote is to be found in Hallam's Constitutional History, vol. i. chap, iv., which says that " it was a common practice for several years to appoint laymen, usually mechanics, to read the service in vacant churches." This does not touch the question on the Sacraments, nor do I imagine that any layman was ever authorized in the Church of England to administer the Lord's Sup- per ; but lay baptism was allowed by Hooker to be valid, and no distinction can be drawn between one sacrament and the other. Language more to the purpose is to be found in Tertullian, — I think in the Treatise De Corona Militis, — but at any rate he states first of all that the mode of administering rather than communicating in the Sacrament was a departure from the original practice ; and then he explains the origin of the practice by using the word " Prresidentes " not "Sacerdotes" or " Presbyteri ;" — that is, the person who presided at the table for order's sake would distribute the bread and wine ; and in almost every case he would be an elder, or one invested with a share of the government of the Church, but he did it not as priest, but as president of the assembly ; which makes just the whole difference. But, after all, the whole question as to the matter of right, and the priestly power, must be answered out of the New Testament ; no one disputes the propriety of the general practice as it now stands ; but the Church of Eng- LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 287 land has not said that it adopts this practice hecause it is essential to the validity of the sacraments and is of divine institution, but leaves the ques- tion of principle open ; and this of course can only be decided out of the Scriptures. That the Scriptures are clear enough against the priestcraft notion, is to me certain ; the more so that nothing is quoted for it, but the words of St. Paul, " The bread which we break, the cup which we bless," &c. ; words which, quoted as a text, look something to the quoter's purpose, because the ignorant reader may think that " we " means St. Paul and his brother apostles ; but if any one from the text looks to the passage, he will find that the '; we "is the whole Christian congregation, inasmuch as the words immediately following are, " for we being many are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread." 1 Corinth, x. Yet this text I have both seen in books and heard in conversation quoted as a Scripture authority for the exclusive right of the clergy to administer the Communion. Wherefore I conclude, independently of my own knowledge of the New Testament, that such an argument as this would not have been used, if any thing tolerable were to be had. CXLV. * TO DR. GREENHILL. Rugby, October 31, 1836. I was very much obliged to you for your letter, and much gratified by it. It is a real pleasure to me to find that you are taking steadily to a profession, without which I scarcely see how a man can live honestly. That is, I use the term " profession " in rather a large sense, not as simply denoting cer- tain callings which a man follows for his maintenance, but rather, a definite field of duty, which the nobleman has as much as the tailor, but which he has not, who having an income large enough to keep him from starving, hangs about upon life, merely following his own caprices and fancies ; quod factu pessimum est. I can well enough understand how medicine, like every other profession, has its moral and spiritual dangers ; but I do. not see why it should have more than others. The tendency to Atheism, I imagine, exists in every study followed up vigorously, without a foundation of faith, and that foundation carefully strengthened and built upon. The student in History is as much busied with secondary causes as the student in medi- cine ; the rule " nee Deus intersit," true as it is up to a certain point, that we may not annihilate man's agency and make him a puppet, is ever apt to be followed too far when we are become familiar with man or with nature, and understand the laws which direct both. Then these laws seem enough to account for every thing, and the laws themselves we ascribe either to chance, or the mystifications called " nature," or the " anima mundi," the " spiritus intus alit " of Pantheism. If there is any thing special in the atheistic tendency of medicine, it arises, I suppose, from certain vague notions about the soul, its independence of matter, &c, and from the habit of considering these notions as an essential part of religion. Now I think that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection meets the Materialists so far as this, that it does imply that a body, or an organization of some sort, is necessary to the full development of man's nature. Beyond this we can- not go ; for, — granting that the brain is. essential to thought, — still no man can say that the white pulp which you can see and touch and anatomize can itself think, and by whatever names we endeavour to avoid acknowledg- ing the existence of mind, — whether we talk of a subtle fluid, or a wonderful arrangement of nerves, or any thing else, — still we do but disguise our ig- norance ; for the act of thinking is one sui generis, and the thinking power must in like manner be different from all that we commonly mean by matter. The question of Free Will is, and ever must be, imperfectly understood. If a. man denies that he has a will either to sit or not to sit, to write a note or 288 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. no, I cannot prove to him that he has one. If again, he maintains that th© choosing power in him cannot but choose what seems to it to be good, then this is a great tribute to the importance of good habits, and to the' duty of im- pressing right notions of good on the young mind, all which is perfectly true. And, in the last case, if a man maintains that his nature irresistibly teaches him that what we call good is evil, and vice versa, then I find at once the value of those passages in Scripture which have been so griev- ously misused, and I see before me a vessel of wrath fitted for destruction, fitted, as I believe, through its own fault; but if it denies this, then at any rate fitted for destruction and on the sure way to it. But no doubt every study requires to be tempered and balanced with something out of itself, if it be only to prevent the mind from becoming " einseitig," or pedantic ; and, ascending higher still, all intellectual study, however comprehensive, requires spiritual stiuly to be joined with it, lest our nature itself become " einseitig ; " the intellect growing ; the higher rea- son— the moral and spiritual wisdom — stunted and decaying. You will be thinking that I have been writing a sermon by mistake, instead of a letter, but your letter led me into it. I believe that any man can make himself an Atheist speedily, by breaking off his own personal communion with God in Christ; but, if he keep this unimpaired, I believe that no intellectual study, whether of nature or of man, will force him into Atheism ; but on the con- trary, the new creations of our knowledge, so to speak, gather themselves into a. fair and harmonious system, ever revolving in their brightness around their proper centre, the throne of God. Prayer, and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two great safeguards of spiritual life; — its more than food and raiment.. crxLvr. to w. w. hull, esq. Rugb)v November 10, 1836. I have begun the Thessalonians, and like the work much r but I dread the difficulty of the second chapter of the Second Epistle. You will not care to hear that I have got into the fourth Book of Gaius. But you will not, 1 hope, find it against your conscience, so far to aid my studies of law, as to get for me a good copy, if you can, of Littleton's works upon which Coke commented. Coleridge recommended it to me as illustrating the early state of our law of real property, with the iniquities of feudality and the conquest as yet in all their freshness. I am fully persuaded that he, who were to get the law of real property of any country in all its fullness, would have one of the most important indications of its political and social state. We have got Coleridge's Literary Remains, in which I do rejoice greatly. I think with all his faults old Sam was more of a great man than any one who has lived within the four seas in my memory. It is refreshing to see sueh a union of the highest philosophy and poetry, with so full a knowledge, on so many points at least, of particular facts. But yet there are marks enough that his mind was a little diseased by the want of a profession, and the consequent unsteadiness of his mind and purposes ; ft always seems to me that the very power of contemplation becomes impaired or perverted, when it is made the main employment of life. Yet I would fain have more time for contempla- tion than I have at present; so hard is it rr^t^v tov /u-tooit. CXLVII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, November 25, 1836. Thank you very much for your inclosure against neutrality, which I suspect would be repelled by the state of mind of those for whom isi LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. cjgg is designed, like a cannon ball by a woolpack. Neutrality seems to me a natural state for men of fair honesty, moderate wit, and much indolence ; they cannot get strong impressions of what is true and right, and the weak impression, which is all that they can take, cannot mrercome indolence and fear. I crave a strong mind for my children, for thi^peason, that they then have a chance at least of appreciating truth keenly ; and when a man does that, honesty becomes comparatively easy; as, for instance, Peel has an idea about the currency, and a distinct impression about it; and therefore on that point I would trust him for not yielding to clamour; but about most matters, the Church especially, he seems to have no idea, and therefore I would not trust him for not giving it all up to-morrow, if the clamour were loud enough We look forward with some yearnings to Fox How, and we much wish to know when you will all be coming over. It is but an ostrich-like feeling, but it seems as if I could fancy things to be more peace- ful when I am out of the turmoil, down in Westmoreland, and I find that I crave after peace more and more. But it is ovrtw, oW« I shall have occasion soon to set to work at the Celtic languages. Can you get for me, and send me a good Erse grammar ; and that book that you were men- tioning, about the Welsh being Picts, and not the Aborigines of Wales 1 I shall want all this for the Gallic invasion of Rome ; so beautifully does History branch out into all varieties of questions, and continually lead one into fresh fields of knowledge. I have all but finished my abstract of Gaius' Institutes of the Roman Law, and delight in it. CXLVMI. TO W. C. LAKE, ESQ. Rugby, November 18, 1836. I am well satisfied with your impressions of Germany. I never have wished to exchange my own country for it, but I feel indignant that, with all our enormous advantages, we continually let the Germans do what ought to be done by us. But I have no temptation, even for one sum- mer, to resign Fairfield for Drachenfels. I dare say that gossiping flourishes among the German women, as smoking does among the men, and I like neither the one nor the other ; and their scholars are perhaps instances of the division of labour carried into excess:1 they are not enough universal, not enough of men, of citizens, and of Christians. But then I turn and look round, and where can I find what we should most desire on this side of the water either? Where is the knowledge, where the wisdom, and where the goodness, which combine to form the great man ? I know of no man who approaches to this character except Whately, and he is taken away from the place where lie was wanted, and sent where the highest greatness would struggle in vain against the overpowering disadvantages of his position. We, in our little world, are going on much as usual, but of this you will hear from Clough more than I could tell you. For myself, I have nearly finished my abstract, or almost translation of Gaius' Institutes, which I thought it necessary to finish before I begun to write about the Twelve Tables. It has answered to me, I think, very well ; for, by the mere result of having had my mind so long engaged about the Roman Law, so left, as 1 Extract of a Letter of Chevalier Bunsen, in October, 1836. — "What a strange work Strauss' Leben Jesu appears to me, "judging of it from the notices in the ' Studien und Kritiken.' It seems to me to show the ill effects of that division of labour which prevails so much amongst the learned men of Germany. Strauss writes about history and myths, without appearing to have studied the question, but having heard that some pretended histories are mythical, he borrows this notion as an engine to help him out of Christianity. But the idea of men writing mythic histories between the time of Livy and Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking such for realities !" 290 LIFE 0F DR. ARNOLD. it were, to soak in it, I have gained a much greater familiarity with it than I could have done by a short and voracious cram of the same number of pages. It has greatly served to increase that sense of reality about the Romans, — that livina^n a manner amongst them, and having them and their life distinctlj Itarc our eyes, — which appears to me so indispensable to one who would wnte their history. This is quiet and interesting, but not exciting reading ; other points press me more nearly, and seem to have a higher claim upon me. I have translated nearly half of the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, and am disposed to prefer the plan of bringing out these two Epistles first, rather than the Pastoral Epistles. The chronologi- cal order of the Epistles is undoubtedly the natural one, and luckily the Epistles to the Thessalonians offer no very suspicious topics ; they will not be thought to have been chosen for purposes of controversy, and yet they may really be made to serve my purposes quite as well ; for every part of the New Testament gives a picture of Christianity or of some one great feature in it, and every part negatively confutes the Priestcraft heresy, be- cause that is to be found nowhere, insomuch that no man yet ever fell or could fall into that heresy by studying the Scriptures ; they are a bar to it altogether, and it is only when they are undermined by traditions and the rudiments of men that the heresy begins to make its way. And it is making its way fearfully, but it will not take the form that Newman wishes, but its far more natural and consistent form of pure Popery. . . . CXLIX. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Rugby, November 23, 1836. I am quite well again, and indeed my attack was short and slight ; only so far remarkable to me that I kept my bed one whole day for the first time since 1S07, which was as gentle a reminder as could have been given me, that my health cannot be always what it has been. We are all well, and are very glad to hear good accounts of your party I was in Laleham for five hours on Monday morning, to attend the funeral of my aunt, the last survivor of my mother's household. She was in her eightieth year, and after having been an invalid all her life, yet outlived all her own family, and reached the full age of man. I cannot tell you how solemn a thought it is to have now lost all my relations of the generation preceding our own, and to be thus visibly brought into that generation whose time for departure comes the next. I am very desirous of going fully into my views about the Church, because there is no subject which I have more studied, and none where I seem to see my way so clearly, or to sympathize more entirely with the Scriptures and with the notions of all great writers on government. I hold the Church to be a most divine institution, and eminently character- istic of Christianity, and my abhorrence of the Priestcraft and Succession doctrines, (I do not mean that they are synonymous,) is grounded on my firm conviction that they are and ever have been in theory and in practice a most formidable device of the great Enemy to destroy the real living Church, and even to drive it out of men's minds, by the false and superstitious idea of a Church which never has and never can overthrow his kingdom. And in this sense, — so far as Popery is priestcraft, — I do believe it to be the very mystery of iniquity, but then it began in the first century, and had no more to do with Rome in the outset, than with Alexandria, Antioch, or Carthage. The whole confusion of the ideas of priesthood and government, — the taking half a notion from one, and half a notion from the other, — the disclaiming a priesthood and yet clinging to conclusions which are only deducible from the notion of a priesthood, — and the want of familiarity with all political ques- tions which characterize all that I have ever seen written on English High LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 291 Church grounds, may be exposed piece by piece with the utmost ease and certainty I am for the Church, and against the priesthood ; not for individual license against the Church. CL. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ., Rugby, November 28, 1836. The state of the country interests me as much as ever. but since my correspondence with the Sheffield Courant, I have written nothing on the subject. I do not like the aspect of things at all. An extra- ordinary period of commercial enterprise threw into the shade for the time all those evils in the state of the labouring population, which I have ever dreaded as the rock fatal to our greatness ; but, meanwhile, those evils were not removed, nor in fact attempted to be lessened, except by the Poor Law Act, — a measure in itself wise and just, but which, standing alone, and unac- companied by others of a milder and more positively improving tendency, wears an air of harshness, and will, I fear, embitter the feelings of the poorer classes still more. Now we are threatened by a most unprincipled system of agitation, — the Tories actually doing their best to Jacobinize the poor, in the hope of turning an outbreak against the Whig government to their own advantage. Then there is the Currency question, full of immense difficul- ties, which no man can clearly see his way through. And withal the threat- ened schism between the Whigs and Radicals about the Reform of the House of Lords. Surely there never was such folly as talking about a re- form in the House of Lords, when it is very doubtful whether, if Parliament were dissolved, the Tories would not gain a majority even in the House of Commons. It is nonsense to talk of its being a struggle between the aris- tocracy and the people ; if it were so, it would be over in a week, provided they mean by the aristocracy the House of Lords. It is really a great con- test between the adherents of two great principles, that of preserving, and that of improving : and he must have studied history to very little purpose, who does not know that in common circumstances the former party is al- ways the most numerous and the strongest. It gets occasionally overpow- ered, when it has had rope enough given it to hang itself; that is, when it has carried its favourite Conservatism to such a height, that the mass of un- reformed evil becomes unendurable, and then there comes a grand reform. But that grand reform once effected, the Conservative instinct again regains its ascendency, and goes on upon another lease ; and so it will ever do, un- less some rare circumstances enabled a thoroughly enlightened government to remain long in power; and as such a government cannot rely on being popular; — for reform of evil in the abstract is gall and wormwood alike to men's indolence, and love of what they are used to, as to their propensities for jobbing, — so it is only accident or despotism that can keep it on its legs. This is the secret of the Tory reaction ; because men are all Tories by nature, when they are tolerably well off, and it is only some monstrous injustice or insult to themselves, or some atrocious cruelty, or some great reverses of fortune, that ever make them otherwise. Now I cannot foresee any ques- tion likely to arise on which the Government can strongly interest the public mind in England in their favour. Certainly it will not be in the Irish Church or Corporation questions, because the English people do hot care about Ireland, nor, to say truth, about any people's rights except their own, and then there is the whole fanatical feeling against the government, and fanaticism is a far stronger feeling than the love of justice, when the wrong is done not to ourselves, but to our neighbour. Therefore, I think that, as it always has been, the Reformers will be beaten by the Conservatives, and then the , Conservatives will again go on coiling the rope round their own necks, till in twenty years' time there will be another, not Reform I fear, but 292 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. convulsion. For, though the Reformers are a weak party, the Destructives are not so, and all evils, whether arising from accident or folly, or misgov- ernment, serve their purpose. A great man in the Whig government might yet save them perhaps; that is, might keep them in till the king's death, and then they would have a chance, I suppose, of being really supported by the court in a new reign. But a great man I cannot see What I have said about Tory reaction, you will find strongly confirmed in the history of the French Revolution. After the Terror was over, the Rev- olution was twice saved only by the army in Vindemiaire, 1795, and in Fructidor, 1797. Twice the counter-revolutionists had gained the ascen- dency in the nation.1 CLI. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Rugby, November 30, 1836. I wish I could sympathize with you in what you say of our old Divines.2 I quite agree as to their language ; it is delightful to my taste ; but I cannot find in any of them a really great man. I admire Tay- lor's genius, but yet how little was he capable of handling worthily any oreat question ? and. as to interpreters of Scripture, I never yet found one of them who was above mediocrity. I cannot call it a learning worth any thing, to be very familiar with writers of this stamp, when they have no facts to communicate ; for, of course, even an ordinary man may then be worth read- ing. I have left off* reading our Divines, because, as Pascal said of the Je- suits, if I had spent my time in reading them fully, I should have read a great many very indifferent books. But if I could find a great man amongst them, I would read him thankfully and earnestly. As it is, I hold John Bun- yan3 to have been a man of incomparably greater genius than any of them, and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity. His Pilgrim's I?rogress seems to be a complete reflexion of Scripture, with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up with it. I think that Mil- ton,— in his " Reformation in England," or in one of his Tracts, I forget which — treats the Church writers of his time, and their show of learning, utterly uncritical as it was, with the feeling which they deserved. 1 " I should like," he said, " to write a book on ' the Theory of Tides,' the flood and ebb of parties. The English nation are like a man in a lethargy ; they are never roused from their Conservatism till mustard poultices are put to their feet. Had it not been for the fires of Smithfield, they would have remained hostile to the Reformation. Had it not been for the butcheries of Jefferies, they would have opposed the Revolution." * Of the English Divines in general, this was his deliberate opinion : — " Why is it," he said, " that there are so few great works in Theology compared with any other sub- ject 1 Is it that all other books on the subject appear insignificant by the side of the Scriptures ? There appears to me in all the English divines a want of believing or dis- believing any thing, because it is true or false. It is a question which does not seem to occur to them. Butler is indeed a noble exception." As he excepted Butler among the Divines of a later period, so amongst those of the earlier period he excepted Hooker, whose Ecclesiastical Polity, as a whole, he regarded with great admiration, though with great dislike of parts of it. " I long to see something which should solve what is to me the great problem of Hooker's mind. He is the only man that I know, who, holding with his whole mind and soul the idea of the eternal distinction between moral and positive laws, holds with it the love for a priestly and ceremonial religion, such as appears in the Fifth Book." 3 His admiration of the Pilgrim's Progress was very great : — " I cannot trust myself," he used to say, " to read the account of Christian going up to the Celestial gate, after his passage through the river of death." And when, in one of the foreign tours of his later yeare, he had read it through again, after a long interval, " I have always," said he, " been struck by its piety : I am now struck equally, or even more, by its profound wisdom." LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. CLII. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, BART. 293 Eugby, December 14, 1836. . . . . , . . The view which you mention, is one into which I sup- pose no one ever fell, who became a Christian in earnest through the work- ings of his own mind and heart, and through the Scriptures. That is. suppose a young man, when he begins to think seriously upon life, resolving to turn to God, and studying the Scriptures to learn the way, — it is clear that all this stun" about the true Church would never so much as come into his head. He would feel and see that the matter of his soul's salvation lay between God and Christ on the one hand, and himself on the other ; and that his belonging to this or that Church had really no more to do with the matter, than his being born in France or England, in Westmoreland or in Warwickshire. The Scripture notion of the Church is, that religious soci- ety should help a man to become himself better and holier, just as civil society helps us in civilization. But in this great end of a Church all Churches are now greatly defective, while all fill it up to a certain degree, some less, others more. In proportion as they fulfil it less perfectly, so all that is said in Scripture of divisions, sects, &c, becomes less applicable. It is a great fault to introduce division into an unanimous and efficient society; but when the social bond is all but dissolved, and the society is no more than nominal, there is no such thing, properly speaking, as creating a divi- sion in it. In this simple and Scriptural view of the matter, all is plain; we were not to derive our salvation through or from the Church, but to be kept or strengthened in the way of salvation by the aid and example of our fel- low Christians, who were to be formed into societies for this very reason, that they might help one another, and not leave each man to fight his own fight alone. But the life of these societies has been long since gone ; they do not help the individuals in holiness, and this is in itself evil enouo-h; but it is monstrous that they should pretend to fetter, when they do no? assist. This view arises simply from my old enemy, the priestcraft, in this way. The Popish and Oxford view of Christianity is, that the Church is the mediator between God and die individual: that the Church (i. e. in their sense the Clergy) is a sort o*f chartered corporation, and that by belonging to this cor- poration, or by being attached to it, any given individual acquires such and 'such privileges. This is a priestcraft, because it lays the stress, not on the relations of a man's heart towards God and Christ, as the Gospel does, but on something wholly artificial and formal, — his belonging to a certain so- called society: and thus, — whether the society be alive or dead, — whether it really help the man in goodness or not,— still it claims to step in and inter- pose itself, as the channel of grace and salvation, when it certainly is not the channel of salvation, because it is visibly -and notoriously no sure chan- nel of grace. Whereas, all who go straight to Christ, without thinking of the Church, do manifestly and visibly receive grace, and have the seal of His Spirit, and therefore are certainly heirs of salvation. This, I think, applies to any and every Church, it being always true that the salvation of a man's soul is effected by the change in his heart and life, wrought by Christ's Spirit; and that his relation to any Church is quite a thing subor- dinate and secondary : although, where the Church is what it should be, it is so great a means of grace, that its benefits are of the highest value. But the heraldic or Succession view of the question I can hardly treat gravely ; there is something so monstrously profane in making our heavenly inherit- ance like an earthly estate, to which our pedigree is our title. And, really, what is called succession, is exactly a pedigree, and nothing better ; like natural descent, it conveys no moral nobleness, — nay, far less than natural descent ; for I am a believer in some transmitted virtue in a good breed, but the Succession notoriously conveys none. So that to lay a stress upon it, is to make the Christian Church worse, I think, than the Jewish : but the sons 294 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. of God are not to be born of bloods, (i. e. of particular races,) nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, (i. e. after any human desire to make out an outward and formal title of inheritance,) but of God, (i. e. of Him who can alone give the only true title to his inheritance, — the being conformed unto the image of His Son.) I have written all this in haste as to the expression, but not at all in haste as to the matter of it. But the simple point is this : Does our Lord, or do His Apostles, encourage the notion of salvation through the Church ? or would any human being ever collect such a notion from the Scriptures ? Once begin with tradition, and the so-called Fathers, .and you get, no doubt, a very different view. This the Romanists and the Oxfordists say is a view required to modify and add to that of the Scripture. I believe that because it does modify, add to, and wholly alter the view of the Scripture, that therefore it is altogether false and anti- christian. CLIII. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ. Fox How, February 4, 1837. I have to thank you for your letter, as well as for the papers which you have from time to time been kind enough to send me I do not think that I am less zealous than formerly ; but I feel that, if I write briefly, and without giving all the grounds of my opinions, I am constantly misun- derstood : and to give the grounds, requires a volume, rather than half a column in the newspaper. For instance, on this very question of Church Rates, how much really is involved in it? If the Churches are public build- ings for a national object, then how can a minority object to maintaining them ? If they are only to be maintained by those who belong to one religious deno- mination, it strikes, of course, at the very root of any Establishment, because the same principle must apply equally to tithes. I am sure that, sooner or later, what I said in the Church Reform Pamphlet will be verified ; either the Church must be more comprehensive, or, if this be impracticable, then an Establishment cannot be maintained : and the next best thing will be, to take care that all the Church property is applied to strictly public purposes, to schools, hospitals, alms-houses, or something of the sort, and that it is not stolen by the landlords. For the only possible way in which there can be a robbery of public property, is to transfer it to private uses: this is a direct robbery, committed against ourselves and our posterity ; but in varying the particular public object to which it is applied, there maybe great folly, great wickedness in the sight of God, but not the especial crime of robbery or spoliation. Your mention of the Article on the life of Christ, encourages me to allude to it. I heard it spoken of before I had the least idea of its author, and spoken of with regret, not as unorthodox, but as painful to a Christain reader from its purely historical tone. Now I think that this is a reasonable source of pain, supposing the fact to be as stated ; because, in such a case, neutrality is almost the same as hostility. To read an account of Christ, written as by an indifferent person, is to read an unchristian account of Him ; because no one who acknowledges Him can be indifferent to Him, but stands in such relations to Him, that the highest reverence must ever be predominant in his mind when thinking or writing of Him. And again.whatis the impartiality that is required ? Is it that a man shall neither be a Christian, nor yet not a Christian ? The fact is, that religious veneration is inconsistent with what is called impartiality ; which means, that as you see some good and some evil on both sides, you identify yourself with neither, and are able to judge of both. And this holds good with all human parties and characters, but not with what is divine, and consequently perfect ; for then we should identify ourselves with it, and are perfectly incapable of passing judgment upon it.1 If I think 1 On similar grounds he had a strong feeling against Goethe. " That one word at the LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 295 that Christ was no more than Socrates, (I do not mean in degree, but in kind,) I can of course speak of Him impartially; that is, I assume at once, that there are faults and imperfections in His character, and on these I pass my judgment: but, if I believe in Him, I am not His judge, but His servant and creature ; and He claims the devotion of my whole nature, because He is identical with goodness, wisdom, and holiness. Nor can I for the sake of strangers assume another feeling, and another language, because this is compromising the highest duty, — it is like denying Him, instead of confessing Him. This all passed through my mind when I heard that the Article was written in a purely historical tone, and yet stated the Resurrection as a matter of fact. Now, if the Resurrection be true, Christianity surely is true : and then how can one think of Christ except religiously ? A very able and good friend of mine, made the same objection to Victor Cousin's tone : " It was," he said, " a patronizing of Christianity ;" that is, he spoke of it as one who could judge it, and looked upon it, as it were, de loco superiori, — a condition inconsistent altogether with the relations of man to God, when once acknowledged. Will you forgive me for all this, — but there seems to me rather a vague notion prevalent about impartiality and fair judgment in some matters of religion, which is really running into skepticism as to all. There is abundant room for impartiality in judging of religious men, and of men's opinions about religion, just as of their opinions about any thing else ; but with regard to God and His truth, impartiality is a mere contradiction ; and, if we profess to be impartial about all things, it can only be that we acknowledge in none that mark of divinity which claims devout adherence, and with regard to which impartiality is profaneness. CLIV. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Fox How, February 5, 1837. I must write to you from Fox How, though it is our last evening ; and to-morrow we set out to return to Rugby. We have been here just six weeks; and six weeks of greater peace and happiness it would scarcely be possible, I suppose, for any one to pass. In this neighbourhood there has been as yet no influenza ; no snow at any time to obstruct communication ; no rains to keep us within doors, nothing more than the ordinary varieties of winter, containing among them days of such surpassing beauty, that at no time of the year could the country have been more enjoyable. You know the view from the dining room ; it was only a few mornings since, that the clouds broke away from the summit of Fairfield, while we were at breakfast, a little after eight o'clock, and the sun just threw his light upon the crest of the mountain all covered with snow, and gave it the rose colour which you have seen on the Alps ; while all the lower points of the hills, and all the side of Loughrigg, wore the infinite variety of their winter colouring of green and gray and gold. We have had two of our Sixth Form boys down here, who I thought wanted the refreshment of a mountain country, as they had been working rather too hard. Meanwhile my History has been flourishing ; I have been turning to account all my Roman law reading, in a chapter on the Twelve Tables, and I have carried on the story to the year of Rome 350. I am inclined to publish one volume, when I have got to the end of the year 365, the Gaulish invasion ; and I shall have plenty of matter for a volume r end of Faust does indeed make it to my mind a great work instead of a piece of Devilry." "Still," he said, "I cannot get over the introduction. If it had been by one without any relation to God or his fellow-creatures, it would be different — but in a human being it is not to be forgiven. To give entirely without reverence a representation of God is in itself blasphemous." 296 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. but whether I am not yielding to a movement of impatience I can hardly say. The natural divisions of the subject appear to me to be the Gaulish Invasion; the Conquest of Italy, after the repulse of Pyrrhus; the Conquest of the World, or of all that could offer any effectual resistance, in the Punic and Macedonian wars ; the Civil Wars from the Gracchi to Actium ; the Maturity of the Empire from Augustus to M. Aurelius ; the Decline of the Empire and of Paganism from Commodus to Honorius; the chaos out of which the new creation of modern society has come, from Alaric to Char- lemagne. How grand a subject, if it could be written worthily ! And how vast a variety of knowledge is required to do it worthily ! I constantly feel how overpowering the labour is, and how many advantages I want ; yet I feel, too, that I have the love of history so strong in me, and that it has been working in me so many years, that I can write something which will be read, and which I trust will encourage the love of all things noble and just, and wise and holy. The study of the Law is quite to my heart's content, as is the practice of it in your situation. I think if I were asked what station within possibility I would choose, as the prize of my son's well doing in life, I should say, the place of an English judge. But then, in proportion to my reverence for the office of a judge, is, to speak plainly, my abhorrence of the business of an advocate I have been thinking, in much igno- rance, whether there is any path to the bench except by the bar ; that is, whether in conveyancing, or in any other branch of the profession, a man may make his real knowledge available, like the juris consulti of ancient Rome, without that painful necessity of being retained by an attorney to maintain a certain cause, and of knowingly suppressing truth, for so it must sometimes happen, in order to advance your own argument. I am well aware of the common arguments in defence of the practice : still it is not what I can myself like. On the other hand, Medicine, in all its branches, I honour as the most beneficent of all professions ; but there I dread an inci- dental evil, — the intense moral and religious degradation of so many medical students, who are, if you may trust report, materialist atheists of the greatest personal profligacy ; and then if the profligacy wear out with age, the evil principle will not; and Satan will be but cast out by Satan We are going to Oxford, I believe, before we finally settle at Rugby. I do love the place after all, though I sometimes think of the fox's exclama- tion over the vizor mask — xdlov nQoamnov, a. t. L Forgive my profaneness to Alma Mater, and do not ascribe it to any academical jealousy in behalf of my new University of London, of which I am a most poor fellow. CLV. TO THE REV. G. CORNISH. Fox How, February 5, 1837. Even the bustle at Fox How is calmer than the quiet of Rugby. We are going away to-morrow morning, and it is now past ten o'clock ; yet I know not when I can sit down to write so peacefully, as I can in this last hour of our last day's sojourn at this most dear and most beautiful home. Thank you very much for your letter. I will not revive matters of dispute ; what, if spoken, would be known at once to be half in joke, seems in writing to be all meant in sober earnest ; and therefore our discussions shall wait till that day, which, I trust, will yet arrive, when we may again meet, and introduce some of our children to each other. A life of peace is one of the things which I vainly sigh after. If you can live out of the reach of con- troversy and party, it is a great gain. So a quiet, country parish is a far more attractive thing than the care of a great manufacturing town ; but my lot, and, I believe, my duty have thrown me, as it were, into the manu- facturing town ; and I must contend for what I earnestly believe to be LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 297 truth. Do you suppose that I could not resign myself with delight to the quiet of this valley, and the peace of these mountains, if so it might he 1 And we have been enjoying it for the last six weeks thoroughly. The cli- mate has been better than in almost any part of England. We had no snow here to stop communication for half an hour ; and since the snow went away from all but the mountain tops, the colouring of the country has been delicious. We have had our full share of walking ; whilst all the morning, till one o'clock, I used to sit in one corner of the drawing-room, not looking towards Fairfield, lest I should be constantly tempted from my work, and there I worked on at the Roman History and the Twelve Tables, and Ap- pius Claudius, and Cincinnatus, and all the rest of them. My wife, thank God, has been wonderfully well and strong, and climbs the mountains with the rest of us. And little Fan, who was three years old in October, went over Loughrigg with us to Rydal the other day — though her little feet looked quite absurd upon the rough mountain side, and the fern-stalks annoyed her, as Gulliver was puzzled by the Brobdignag corn- field We were, in the course of the summer, in the Isle of Man, and in Ire- land. I admired Dublin and its bay, and the Wicklow Sugar Loaf, and the blue sea of Killiney Bay. But to my astonishment, the " Emerald Isle " was a very parched and dusty isle in comparison with Westmoreland, and the Three Rock Mountain, though beautiful with its granite^ rocks and heath, had none of the thousand springs of our Loughrigg. Of the people I saw little or nothing. We expect to be in Oxford one day this week, before we settle at Rugby for our long half-year. I wonder whether I could find your tree in Bagley Wood, on which you once sat exalted. Do you ever see or hear of old Dy- son, or of Ellison ; or do you hear from Tucker ? Coleridge, as you per- haps know, was a month at this house in the summer with all his family ; — then, on their way to town, they came to us at Rugby, and there met Pro- fessor Buckland ; so that, after an interval of many years, I was again one of an old Corpus trio. It is eleven o'clock, and we are oft' at eight to-morrow, so good night. CLVI. TO THE REV. J. HEARN'. Yarrow Bridge, Chorley, Feb. 6, 1837. I call all this Judaizing a direct idolatry, — it is exalting the Church and the Sacraments into the place of Christ, as others have exalted His mother, and others in the same spirit exalted circumcision. There is something almost ludicrous, if the matter were not too serious, in the way in which speaks of Calvin and 'the best and ablest of his fol- lowers, and some of the great living writers of Germany, whom he must know, as of men labouring under judicial blindness. " This people who knoweth not the laAV," i. e. as interpreted by the tradition and doctors of the Church, " are accursed." It is vain to argue with such men, only when they ascribe a judicial blindness to Calvin and Zuingle, or to Tholuck, Nitzsch, and Bunsen, one cannot but be reminded of those who " with lies made the heart of the righteous sad, whom God had not made sad," or of those who denied St. Paul's apostleship and spirituality, because he. was not one of the original twelve Apostles, and because he would not preach circumcision. No man doubts that a strictly universal consent would be a very strong argument indeed; but then by the very fact of its being disputed, it ceases to be universal ; and general consent is a very different thing from universal. It becomes, then, the consent of the majority; and we must examine the nature of the minority, and also the peculiar nature of the opinions or practices agreed in, before we can decide whether general consent be realty an argument for or against the truth of an opinion. For it has been said, 20 298 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. " Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you ;" and then it would be equally true of" such a generation or generations, that it was, " Woe to that opinion in which all men agree." Now I believe that the Apostle's Creed may be taken as a specimen of truths held by the general consent of Christians ; for every tiling there (ex- cept the descent into Hell, which was a later insertion) is in almost the very words of Scripture. It is just like St. Paul's short creed in 1 Corinthians, xv. : " I delivered unto you that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was buried," &c. But this Creed will no more suit 's turn than the Scriptures themselves will. 1 1 says not a word of priesthood or succession, — it does not even say a word of either Sacrament. The points for which needs the consent of the Church, are points on which the principal ecclesiastical writers, from whom he gleans this consent, had all a manifest bias ; partly from their own posi- tion as ministers, and partly from the superstitious tendencies of their age. And after all how few are these writers ! Who would think of making out the universal consent of the Christian world from the language of ten or a dozen bishops or clergy who happened to be writers? Who will bear wit- ness to the opinions of the Bithynian Church, of whose practice Pliny has left so beautiful a picture ? Or who would value for any Church, or for any opinion, the testimony of such a man as Tertullian ? But, after all, consent would go for nothing where it is so clearly against Scripture. All in Asia were turned away from Paul even in his lifetime. [No wonder] then, if af- ter his death they could not bear his doctrines, and undermined them while they were obliged outwardly to honour [them]. The operation of material agency to produce a spiritual effect [is not] more opposed to reason than it is directly denied by our Lord, on grounds which would call rationalis- tic, if I were to use them. I refer to what He says of the impossibility of meat defiling a man, or water purifying him ; and the reason assigned to show that meat cannot morally defile is of course equally valid to show that it cannot morally strengthen or cleanse. I believe it might be shown that the efficacy of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper has Keen weakened directly by the superstitions about it ; that in proportion as a value was attached to the elements, as they were called, so the real Christian Sacra- mentum, — each man pledging himself to Christ and to his brethren, upon the symbols of his redemption and sanctification, — became less and less re- garded ; whilst superstitions made the Sacrament less frequent, and thus have inflicted a grievous injury on the spiritual state of every Church. CLVII. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. Bugby, March 3, 1837. About the grammars, I am inclined to think that the com- mon Eton grammars, purged of their manifest faults, would answer better than any thing else. I am more and more in favour of a Latin rather than an English Grammar, and I think that the simpler and the more dogmatical the rules are, the better. That is best in a boy's grammar which can be easiest remembered, and understood enough to be applied practically ; the explanation of the principles of grammar belongs to a more advanced age. By " manifest faults," I mean such as calling " hie, heec, hoc," an article ; or teaching boys to believe that there is such a word as irvnov, or such an Aorist to Uym as tfoyov, and other monstrosities. And I think such corrections might be made easily. But let us save " Verba dandi et reddendi," &c, and, if I dared, I would put in a word for " As in prsesenti," perhaps even for "Propria quae maribus." Is not this a laudable specimen of Toryism? Or is it that we are Reformers in our neighbours' trade and Conservatives in LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD 299 CLVIII. TO CRABBE ROBINSON, ESQ. (Who had written to him fearing he would not continue in the new University unless more were done in the examinations as to Theology, than could or would be effected.) March 15, 1837. First, be assured that I will do nothing hastily, that I wish most earnestly well to the London University, and look upon it as so great a possible means of good, that nothing but what will appear to me im- perious duty shall tempt me to leave it. Neither have I the least thought or wish of conciliating the Tories ; on the contrary, I regret nothing so much as the possibility of appearing to agree with them in any thing ; neither in fact, can I believe that I ever shall be so far mistaken. Secondly, I have no wish to have Degrees in Divinity conferred by the London University or to have a Theological Faculty ; 1 am quite content with Degrees in Arts. But then let us understand what Arts are. li'Arls mean merely logic, or grammar, or arithmetic, or natural science, then of course a degree in Arts implies nothing whatever as to a man's moral judgment or principles. But open the definition a little farther, — in- clude poetry or history or moral philosophy, — and you encroach unavoida- bly on the domain of moral education; and moral education cannot be sepa- rated from religious education, unless people have the old superstitious no- tion of religion, either that it relates to rites and ceremonies, or to certain abstract and unpractical truths. But, meaning by Religion what the Gos- pel teaches one to mean by it, it is nothing more nor less than a system di- recting and influencing our conduct, principles, and feelings, and professing to do this with sovereign authority, and most efficacious influence. If then I enter on the domain of moral knowledge, I am thereby on the domain of religious knowledge ; and the only question is, what religion am I to follow 1 If I take no notice of the authority and influences of Christianity, I unavoid- ably take a view of man's life and principles from which they are excluded, that is, a view which acknowledges some other authority and influence, — it may be of some other religion, or of some philosophy, or of mere common opinion or instinct ; — but, in any case, I have one of the many views- of life and conduct, which it was the very purpose of Christ's coming into the world to exclude. And how can any Christian man lend himself to the pro- pagating or sanctioning a system of moral knowledge which assumes that Christ's law is not our rule, nor His promises our motive of action ? This, then, is my principle, that moral studies not based on Christianity must be unchristian, and therefore are such as I can take no part in. On the other hand, I allow as fully as you can do, that the University should include Christians of every denomination without the slightest dis- tinction. The differences between Christian and Christian are not moral differences, except accidentally; and that is 'what 1 meant in that passage in the Church Reform Pamphlet which you, in common with many others, have taken in a sense which I should wholly disclaim. An Unitarian, as such, is a Christian ; that is, if a man follows Christ's law, and believes His words according to his conscientious sense of their meaning, he is a Chris- tian ; and, though I may think he understands Christ's words amiss, yet that is a question of interpretation, and no more ; the purpose of his heart and mind is to obey and be guided by Christ, and therefore he is a Chris- tian. But I believe, — if I err as to the matter of fact I shall greatly rejoice, — that Unitarianism happens to contain many persons who are only Unita- rians negatively, as not being Trinitarians ; and I question whether these follow Christ with enough of sincerity and obedience to entitle them to be called Christians. Then comes the question of practicability. Here undoubtedly I am met at a disadvantage, because the whole tendency of the last century, and of men's minds now, is to shun all notions of comprehension ; and as the knot was once cut by persecution, so it is to be cut now by toleration and omission. 300 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. But it is an experiment undoubtedly worth trying, whether for the sake of upholding the Christian character of our University, we ought not to ven- ture on ground, new indeed in England, just at present, but which is of the very essence of true Christianity. With all Christians except Roman Cath- olics the course is plain, namely, to examine every candidate for a degree in one of the Gospels and one of the Epistles out of the Greek Testament. I would ask of every man the previous question, " To what denomination of Christians do you belong 1 " and according to his answer, I would specially avoid touching on those points, on which I as a Churchman differed from him. I should probably say to him aloud, if the examination were public, " Now I know that you and I differ on such and such points, and therefore I shall not touch on them ; but we have a great deal more on which we agree, and therefore I may ask you so and so." With the Roman Catho- lics there might be a difficulty, because they might possibly object to being examined by heretics, or in the Scriptures ; but if so, where would be the difficulty of adding a Catholic to the number of Fellows, on purpose for this object ; or where would be the difficulty of requiring from the candidate, be- ing a Catholic, a certificate of proficiency in religious knowledge from his own Priest or Bishop ? What you state about doctrines might be a very o-ood argument against examining in any Articles or Creeds, but would not affect the examination in a book or books of the Scripture ; and so again with evidences, I should not care about this ; though neither do I see that your reference to Chalmers makes a valid objection ; because you will and must have Examiners who differ on fifty points of taste, of politics, and of philosophy ; but this signifies nothing, as long as they are sensible men ; and, if they are not, the whole thing must break down any way. But the comparative value of external and internal Evidence is not a point which forms the characteristic difference between any one sect and another ; it may therefore be noticed without any delicacy, just like any moot point in history ; and an Examiner may express his judgment on it. though of course with such reserve and moderation as he may think fit. If you say that all points which have ever been disputed are to be avoided, you reduce your ex- aminers to such mere ciphers as would deprive them' of all weight and dig- nity. Certainly I shall feel myself as in a certain degree appointed to mode- rate and form the minds of those who come to me for academical honours, i ouo-ht to express my judgment on many matters as that of a man qualified to instruct them, and as entitled to an authority with them. You will not suppose I mean an infallible authority. If our office be not intended to be this, it will be a great mistake, and indeed a total solecism, as far as regards- education. I am perfectly aware of the delicacy of our task as well as of its importance, and I think I would undertake to manage it discreetly; but much must be left to us. Let them choose the best men they can find, and then let them trust them fully, and turn them out if they do not like them. (.LIX. TO SIR THOMAS S. PAULEY. BART. Rugby, April 21, 1337. Our one. day's visit to Oxford was very delightful; it was full of kindlinesses without any thing of a contrary sort ; and it made me wish that I could see the place and its residents oftener. I am so thoroughly fond of it that I can quite trust myself in my earnest desire to see it reform- ed • indeed I should care about its reform much less if I did not value it so highly. From Oxford we came back to our work as usual From that time forward we have never been quite alone, and we are expecting other friends in May and June, so that our half-year will, as usual, I suppose, end in a crowd ; and then I trust we may meet in something like summer in Westmoreland, and find you established in your house, and enjoying the LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 3Q1 magnificence of the view and the snugness of that delicious glady field be- hind, which lives most vividly in my memory 1 have read nothing but books connected with my own business, so I am sadly ignorant of what is doing in the publishing world. Jacob Abbott's last work, " The Way to do Good," will I think please you very much ; with some Americanisms, not of language but of mind, it is yet delightful to read a book so good and so sensible; so zealous for what is valuable ; so fair about what is indifferent. I have also looked through some of the Duke of - Wellington's Dispatches. He is different enough certainly from Abbott, but the work gives one a favourable impression of him morally, I think, as well as intellectually:1 there is a frankness and kindliness about his letters gene- rally which is very attractive, and one admires the activity and comprehen- siveness of view which could take in so much and so exectate it. You would be interested in Sir E. Codrington's strange attack upon Sir Pulteney Mal- colm, and gratified by the strong feeling generally expressed in Sir Pulte- ney's favour, and in admiration of his character I shall like to hear your remarks on the weather. I never remember any thing to equal it ; but I find from the Gentleman's Magazine that 1799 was very nearly as bad. and from Evelyn's Memoirs that 1658 was rather worse. The wind was northerly for nearly six months, and on the second of June, old style, the season was as cold as winter. It is certainly so at present; and what is remarkable is, that the wind blows equally cold from all points of the compass. I connect the constant north-west winds with the Magnetic Pole, and as all phenomena of weather have to do with electricity and volcanic action, I should not be surprised to hear of something extraordinary in the way of earthquakes or eruptions before the end of the year. This is a sad dull letter, but my life affords but. little variety. CLX. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (C.) Rugby, April 5, 1837. I take this opportunity to answer your kind and interesting letter, for which I beg you to accept my best thanks. I can hardly answer it as I could wish, but I do not like to delay writing to you any longer. Your ac- count of yourself and of that unhealthy state of body and mind under which you have been labouring, was very touching to me. I rejoice that you were recovering from it, but still you must not be surprised if God should be pleased to continue your trials for some time longer. It is to me a matter of the deepest thankfulness, that the fears, which I at one time had expressed to you about yourself, have been so entirely groundless : we have the com- fort of thinking that, with the heart once turned to God, and going on in His faith and fear, nothing can go very wrong with us, although we may have much to suffer and many trials to undergo. I rejoice too that your mind seems to be in a healthier state about the prosecution of your studies. I am quite sure that it is a most solemn duty to cultivate our understandings to the uttermost, for I have seen the evil moral consequences of fanaticism to a greater degree than I ever expected to see them realized ; and I am satis- fied that a neglected intellect is far oftener the cause of mischief to a man, than a perverted or over-valued one. Men retain their natural quickness and cleverness, while their reason and judgment are allowed to go to ruin, and thus they do work their minds and gain influence, and are pleased at gaining it ; but it is the undisciplined mind which they are exercising, in- stead of one wisely disciplined. I trust that you will gain a good foundation 1 His impression of the Duke of Wellington's character was in fact considerably raised by this work, and a volume of the Dispatches was one of the books which most frequently accompanied him when travelling. 302 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. of wisdom in Oxford, which may minister in after years to God's glory and the good of souls; and I call by the name of wisdom, — knowledge, rich and varied, digested and combined, and pervaded through and through by the light of the Spirit of God. Remember the words, "Every scribe instructed to the kingdom of God is like unto a householder, who bringeth out of his treasure things new and old ;" that is, who does not think that either the four first centuries on the one hand, nor the nineteenth century on the other, have a monopoly of truth ; but who combines a knowledge of one with that of the other, and judges all according to the judgment which he has gained from the teaching of the Scriptures. I am obliged to write more shortly than I could wish ; let me hear from you when you can, and see you when you can, and be sure that, whether my judgments be right or wrong, you have no friend who more earnestly would wish to assist you in that only narrow road to life eternal, which I feel sure that you by God's grace are now treading. CLXI. TO BISHOP OTTER. Rugby, April 30, 1837. I venture to address you, and I trust to your forgiveness for so doing, on a subject in which we have a common interest, the new University of Lon- don ; and I am the more induced to address you particularly, as I understand that you are disposed to take an active part in the arrangements to be made ; as you have had practical experience in education ; and as you are one of the few members of our profession who happen to belong to the Uni- versity. I imagine, also, that the particular department with which I am likely to be concerned, will be that in which you too will be most interested, the Examination for Degrees in Arts. And I find that a committee was to be appointed yesterday, to draw up something of a plan on this subject. I hope to be in town very shortly, but my visit must necessarily be very brief, and I feel that I should much further my views, if I could explain them to your Lordship beforehand, and above all, if, as I hope, I shall be so happy as to find that you agree with them. I need not say that I cordially agree with the principle of the University that it recognizes no sectarian distinctions. But while I fully allow this, I also find it expressly declared in our charter, that we are founded for the advancement of " Religion and Morality." And this seems to lead to the exact conclusion which I most earnestly approve of, that we are to be a Christian University, but not a Romanist one, nor a Protestant, neither ex- clusively Church of England, nor exclusively dissenting. " Religion," in the king's mouth, can mean only Christianity ; in fact, no Christian can use it in any other sense without manifest inconsistency. — Again, must it not follow that if we enter at all upon moral science, whether it be Moral Phi- losophy or History, we must be supposed to have some definite notions of moral truth 1 Now those notions are not, I suppose, to be the notions of each individual Examiner ; we must refer to some standard. I suppose that a man could hardly get a degree in physical science if he made Aristotle's Physics his standard of truth in those matters. Now there are many views of moral truth, quite as false as those of Aristotle on physical science ; but what are we to take for our standard of truth ? We must, it seems to roe, have some standard, in whatever we profess to examine, and what can that standard be to any Christian, except what he believes to be God's revealed will ? It seems to me that we cannot recognize any other standard of moral truth without directly renouncing Christ as our Master. — Further, Mr. Lie- ber, who wrote a little book of his Reminiscences of Niebuhr, who is now engaged in one of the American colleges in Carolina, and has published some exceedingly good papers on the system there pursued, lays it down as LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 393 a matter of common sense, that, — without entering into the religious ques- tion,— a knowledge of the Christian Scriptures must form a part of the merely intellectual education of all persons in Christian countries. He says, I think most truly, that Christianity has so coloured all our institutions, and all our literature, and has in so many points modified or even dictated our laws, that no one can be considered as an educated man who is not acquainted with its authoritative documents. He considers that a liberal education without the Scriptures, must be, in any Christian country, a contradiction in terms. My conclusion is, that we are bound in some way or other to recognize this truth. We may, indeed, give Degrees in Law and Medicine, without acknowledging it; so we may also in physical science; so we may also in pure science and philology. None of these things, nor all of them together, constitute education But if we profess to give Degrees in Arts, we are un- derstood, I think, as giving our testimony that a man has received a liberal education. And the same result follows from our examining on any moral subject, such as History or Moral Philosophy ; because it is precisely moral knowledge, and moral knowledge only, which properly constitutes educa- tion. The University of Bonn, — the only one of the Prussian universities with the system of which I happen to be acquainted, — is open, as you know, to Catholics and Protestants equally. But both have their Professors and their regular courses of religious instruction. Now as we do not teach at present, but only examine, and as we confer no degrees in Theology, our difficulty will be of a far simpler kind. It may be met, I think, perfectly easily in two or three different manners. I suppose that, for any of the reasons stated above, our Bachelor of Arts' Degree must imply a knowledge of the Christian Scriptures. But then, as we are not to be sectarian, neither you and I on the one hand, nor any of our Dissenting colleagues on the other, have any right to put their own construction on this term, " know- ledge of the Scriptures." I think that an Unitarian knows them very ill, and he would think the same of us. But we agree in attaching an equal value to a " knowledge of the Scriptures," each of us interpreting the phrase in his own way. I would propose, then, two or three modes of ascertaining every candi- date's knowledge of the Scriptures, in his own meaning of the term. First, in imitation of the University of Bonn, there might be members of the Senate of different denominations of Christians to examine the members of their own communions. Practically, this would involve no great multitude ; I doubt if it would require more than three divisions, our own Church, Ro- man Catholics, and Unitarians. I doubt if the orthodox Dissenters, as they are called, would have any objection to be examined by you or me in such books of the New Testament as they themselves chose to bring up, when they were required to subscribe to no Articles or Liturgy, and were ex- amined as persons whose opinions on their own peculiar points of difference were not tolerated merely, but solemnly recognized ; so that there would be neither any suspicion of compromise on their part, nor of attempts at pros- elytism on ours. Secondly, we might even do less than this, and merely require from every candidate for a Degree in Arts, a certificate, signed by two ministers ofhis own persuasion, that he was competently instructed in Christian knowledge as un derstood by the members of their communion. This is no more than every young person in our own Church. now gets, previously to his Confirmation. I think this would be a very inferior plan to the former, inasmuch as the certificates might in some cases be worth very little ; but still it completely saves the principle recognized in our Charter, and indispensable, I think, to every plan of education, or for the ascertaining of the sufficiency of any one's education, in a Christian country, — that Christian knowledge is a necessary part of the formation and cultivation of the mind of every one. •304 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. Thirdly, we might, I am sure, do what were best of all, and which might produce benefits in the course of time, more than could be told. All Pro- testants acknowledge the Scriptures as their common authority, and all desire their children to study them. Let every candidate for a Degree bring up at his own choice some one Gospel, and some one Epistle in the Greek Testa- ment. Let him declare, on coming before us, to what communion he belongs. We know what are the peculiar views entertained by him as such, and we would respect them most religiously. But on all common ground we might examine him thoroughly, and how infinite would be the good of thus proving, by actual experience, how much more our common ground is than our pe- culiar ground. I am perfectly ready to examine to-morrow in any Unita- rian school in England, in presence of parents and masters. I will not put a question that should offend, and yet 1 will give such an examination as should bring out, or prove the absence of what you and I should agree in consider- ing to be Christian knowledge of the highest value. I speak as one who has been used to examine young men in the Scriptures for twenty years nearly, and I pledge myself to the perfect easiness of doing this. Our examinations, in fact, will carry their own security with them, if our char- acters would not ; they will be public, and we should not and could not venture to proselytize, even if we wished it. But the very circumstance of our having joined the London University at the risk of much odium from a large part of our profession, would be a warrant for our entering into the spirit uf the Charter with perfect sincerity. .1 have no sufficient apology to offer for this long intrusion upon your patience, but my overwhelming sense of the importance of the subject. It depends wholly, as I think, on our deci- sion on this point, whether our success will be a blessing or a curse to the country. A Christian, and yet not sectarian University, would be a bless- ing of no common magnitude. An University that conceived of education as not involving in it the principles of moral truth, would be an evil, I think, no less enormous. CLXII. TO THE REV. H. HILL. (In answer to questions about Thucydides.) Rugby, May 25, 1837, My experience about Thucydides has told me that the knowledge required to illustrate him may be taken at any thing you please? from Mitford up to omne scibile. I suppose that the most direct illustrations are to be found in Aristophanes, the Acharnians, the Peace, the Birds, and the Clouds ; as also in the speech of Andocides de Mysteriis. For the Greek, Bekker's text, in his smaller edition of 1832, and a good Index Ver- borum, though bad is the best, are, I think, the staple. You may add, in- stead of a Lexicon, Reiske's Index Verborum to Demosthenes, and Mitch- ell's to Plato and Isocrates, with Schweighauser's Lexicon Herodoteum. Buttman's larger Greek Grammar is the best thing for the forms of the Verbs ; as for Syntax, Thucydides, in many places, is his own law. We talk about going to Rome, which will be a virtuous effort if I do go, for my heart is at Fox How. Yet I should love to talk once again with Bunsen on the Capitol, and to expatiate with him on the green upland plain of Algidus. I congratulate you — and I do not mean it as a mere faqon de parler — on your Ordination. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 395 CLXIII. *TO C. J. VAUGHAN, ESO.. Rugby, September 13, 1837. The first sheet of the History is actually printed, and I hope it will he out before the winter. But I am sure that it will disappoint no one so much as it will myself; for I see a standard of excellence before me in my mind, which I cannot realize ; and I mourn over the deficient -knowledge of my book, seeing how much requires to be known in order to write History well, and how soon in so many places the soil of my own knowledge is bored through, and there is the barren rock or gravel which yields nothing. I could write on much, but my time presses. I am anxious to know your final decision as to profession ; but I do not like to attempt to influence you. Whatever be your choice, it does not much matter, if you follow steadily our great common profession, Christ's service. Alas ! when will the Church ever exist in more than in name, so that this profession might have that zeal infused into it which is communicated by an '• Esprit de Corps ;" and, if the " Body" were the real Church, instead of our abomi- nable sects, with their half priestcraft, half profaneness, its " Spirit" would be one that we might desire to receive into all our hearts and all our minds. CLXIV. TO THE REV. J. HEARN. Rugby, September 25, 1837. I have to thank you for two very kind letters, as also for a volume of C 's Sermons Do you know that C was an old Oxford pupil of mine in 1815? and a man for whom I have a great regard, though I am afraid he thinks me a heretic, and though he has joined that party which, as a party, I think certainly to be a very bad one. But, i( you ever see C , I should be much obliged to you if you would give him my kind remembrances. It grieves me to be so parted as I am from so many men with whom I was once intimate. I feel and speak very strongly against their party, but I always consider the party as a mere abstraction of its peculiar character as a party, and as such I think it detestable ; but take any individual member of it, and his character is made up of many other elements than the mere peculiarities of his party. He may be kind-hearted, sensible on many subjects, sincere, and a good Christian, and therefore I may love and respect him, though his party as such, — that is, the peculiar views which constitute the bond of union amongst its members, — I think to be most utterly at variance with Christianity. But I dare say many peo- ple, hearing and reading my strong condemnations of Tories and Newman- ites, think that I feel very bitterly against all who belong to these parties ; whereas — unless they are merely Tories and Newmanites — I feel no dislike to them, and in many instances love and value them exceedingly. Hamp- den's business seemed to me different, as there was in that something more than theoretical opinions ; there was downright evil acting, and the more I consider it, the more does my sense of its evil rise. Certainly my opinion of the principal actors in that affair has been altered by it towards them per- sonally ; I do not say that it should make me forget all their good qualities, but I consider it as a very serious blot in their moral character But I did not mean to fill my letter with this, only the thought of C made me remember how much I was alienated from many old friends, and then I wish to explain how I really did feel about them, for I believe that many people think me to be very hard and very bitter; thinking so, I hope and believe, unjustly. 306 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. CLXV. * TO DR. GREENHILL. Rugby, September 18, 1837. I shall be anxious to hear what you think of Homoeo- pathy, wh'ich my wife has tried twice with wonderful success, and I once with quite success enough to try it again. Also I shall like to hear any thing fresh about Animal Magnetism, which has always excited my curiosi- ty. But more than all, I would fain learn something of malaria, and about the causes of pestilential disease, particularly the Cholera. It is remarkable, that while all ordinary disease seems to yield more and more to our increas- ed knowledge, pestilences seem still to be reserved by God for his own pur- poses, and to baffle as completely our knowledge of their causes, and our power to meet them, as in the earliest ages of the world. Indeed, the Cholera kills more quickly than any of the recorded plagues of antiquity ; and yet a poison so malignant can be introduced into the air, and neither its causes nor its existence understood ; we see only its effects. Influenza and Cholera, I observe, just attack the opposite parts of the system ; the former fastening especially on the chest and censorium, which are perfectly unaf- fected, I believe, in Cholera. As to connecting the causes of either with any of the obvious phenomena of weather or locality, it seems to me a pure folly to attempt it ; as great as the folly of ascribing malaria to the mias- mata of aquatic plants. I shall be very much interested in hearing your reports of the latest discoveries in these branches of science ; Medicine, like Law, having always attracted me as much in its study as it has re- pelled me in practice ; not that I feel alike towards the practice of both ; on the contrary, I honour the one as much as I abhor the other ; the physician meddles with physical evil in order to relieve and abate it; the lawyer med- dles with moral evil rather to aggravate it than to mend Yet the study of Law is, I think, glorious, transcending that of any earthly thing. CLXVI. TO W. EMPSON, ESQ.. Rugby, November 18, 1837. I trust that I need not assure you that I feel as deeply interested as any man can do in the welfare of our University, and most deeply should I grieve if any act of mine were to impair it. But then I am interested in the University, so far as it may be a means towards effecting certain great ends ; if it does not promote these, it is valueless ; if it obstruct them, it is actually pernicious. So far I know we are agreed ; but then to my mind the whole good that a University can do towards the cause of general educa- tion depends on its holding manifestly a Christian character ; if it does not hold this, it seems to me to be at once so mischievous, from giving its sanc- tion to a most mischievous principle, that its evil will far outweigh its good. Now the education system in Ireland, which Jias yet been violently con- demned by many good men, is Christian, though it is not Protestant or Catholic ; their Scripture lessons give it the Christian character clearly and decisively. Now are we really for the sake of a few Jews, who may like to have a Degree in Arts, — or for the sake of one or two Mahomedans, who may possibly have the same wish, or for the sake of English unbeliev- ers, who dare not openly avow themselves, — are we to destroy our only chance of our being either useful or respected as an institution of national education? There is no difficulty with Dissenters of any denomination ; what we have proposed has been so carefully considered, that it is impossi- ble to pretend that it bears a sectarian character ; it is objected to merely as being Christian, as excluding Jews, Turks, and misbelievers. Now, — considering the small numbers of the two first of these divisions, LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 397 and that the last have as yet no ostensible and recognized existence, and that our Charter declares in the very opening that the end of our institution is the promotion of religion and morality, — I hold myself abundantly justi- fied in interpreting the subsequent expressions as relating only to all denom- inations of Her Majesty's Christian subjects, and in that sense I cordially accede to them. Beyond that I cannot go, as I have not the smallest doubt that it is better to go on with our present system, with all its narrowness and deficiencies, than to begin a pretended system of national education on any "other than a Christian basis. As to myself, therefore, my course is perfectly clear. If our report be rejected on Wednesday, — I mean as to its Christian clauses, — I certainly will not allow my name to be affixed to it without them ; nor can I assist any farther in preparing a scheme of Examination which I should regard as a mere evil. It would be the first time that educa- tion in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodat- ing Jews or unbelievers ; and as, on the one hand, I do not believe that either of these are so numerous as to be entitled to consideration even on points lar less vital, so, if they were ever so numerous, it might be a very good reason why the national property should be given to their establish- ments and taken away from ours, but nothing could ever justify a compro- mise between us and them in such a matter as education I am quite sure that no earnest Christian would wish the Gospels and Acts, and the Scripture History, to be excluded, because they were in some instances understood differently. It was a sure mark of the false mother when she said, " let the child be neither mine nor thine, but divide it ;" the real mother valued the child very differently. I can see, therefore, in this question, no persons opposed to us whom I should wish to conciliate, — no benefits in the University, if it bears no mark of Christianity which I should- think worth preserving. It will grieve me very much if we in the last result take a different view of this matter. CLXVII. TO THE REV. TREVENEN PENROSE. (His brother-in-law.) Rugby, November 20, 1837. I have long since purposed to write to you, and at last I hope I shall be able to do it. I always read your additions to the Journal with great inter- est, and they never fail to awaken in me many thoughts of various kinds, but principally, I think, a strong sense of the blessing which seems to follow your father's house, and of the true peace, which, for seventeen years, I can testify, and I believe for many more, has continually abided with it. And this peace I am inclined to value above every other blessing in the world ; for it is very far from the " Otium " of the Epicurean, and might indeed be enjoyed any where ; but in your case outward circumstances seem happily to have combined with inward, and other people have rarely, I believe, so large a portion of the one or of the other. I am not disposed to quarrel with my own lot, nevertheless, it is not altogether peaceful, and this great con- cern oppresses me more as I grow older, and as I feel more deeply the evils I am powerless to quell. You see much hardness, perhaps, and much igno- rance, but then you see also much softness, if nowhere else, yet amongst the sick ; and you see much affection and self-denial amongst the poor, which are things to refresh the heart ; but I have always to deal Avith health and youth, and lively spirits, which are rarely soft or self-denying. And where there is little intellectual power, as generally there is very little, it is very hard to find any points of sympathy. And the effect of this prevalent medi- ocrity of character is very grievous. Good does not grow, and the fallow- ground lies ready for all evil. 308 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. CLXVIII. TO W. EMPSON, ESd- Rugby, November 28, 1837. The whole question turns upon this : — whether the country understood, and was meant to understand, that the University of London was to be open to all Christians without distinction, or to all men without distinction. The question which had been discussed with regard to Oxford and Cambridge, was the admissibility of Dissenters ; which in common speech does not mean, I think, Dissenters from Christianity : no one argued, so far as I know, for the admission of avowed unbelievers. I thought that the University of London was intended to solve this question, and I there-- fore readily joined it. I thought that whatever difficulties were supposed to exist with respect to the introduction of the Greek Testament, related to Dissenters only, and, as such, I respected them ; and our plan, therefore, waiving the Epistles, requires only some one Gospel and the Acts ; that is, any one who is afraid of the Gospel of St. John, may take up St. Luke, or St. Mark ; and St. Luke and the Acts have been translated by the Irish Board of Education, and are used in the Irish schools with the full consent of Catholics and Protestants ; nor do I imagine that any Protestant Dissent- ers could consistently object to either. I do not see the force of the argu- ment about the College in Gower Street; because we admit their students to be .examined for degrees, we do not sanction their system, any more than we sanction the very opposite system of King's College. Nor does it follow, so far as I see, that University College must have a Professor of Theology, because we expect its members to have a knowledge of the elements of Christianity. University College hopes — or has not yet ventured to say it does not hope — that its students are provided with this knowledge before they join it. But I should protest, in the strongest terms, against its being supposed that our University is to be merely an University College with a Charter : if so, undoubtedly I would not belong to it for an hour. You say that we are bringing in the Greek Testament by a side wind, in putting it in amongst the Classical writers : but, if by Classics we mean any thing more than Greek and Latin Grammar, they are just the one part of our Ex- amination which embraces points of general education : for instance, we have put in some recommendations about Modern History, which, if Classics be taken to the letter, are just as much of a departure from our pro- vince as what we have done about the Greek Testament. On the whole, I am quite clear as to my original position, namely, that if you once get off from the purely natural ground of physical science, Philology, and pure Lo- gic,— the moment, in short, on which you enter upon any moral subjects, — Avhether Moral Philosophy or History, — you must either be Christian or Antichristian, for you touch upon the ground of Christianity, and you must either take it as your standard of moral judgment, — or you must renounce it, and either follow another standard, or have no standard at all. In other words, again-, the moment you touch on what alone is education, — the form- ing the moral principles and habits of man, — neutrality is impossible ; it would be very possible, if Christianity consisted really in a set of theoretical truths, as many seem to fancy ; but it is not possible, inasmuch as it claims to be the paramout arbiter of all our moral judgments ; and he who judges of good and evil, right and wrong, without reference to its authority virtually, denies it. The Gower Street College I therefore hold to be Antichristian, inasmuch as it meddles with moral subjects, — having lectures in History, — and yet does not require Professors to be Christians. And so long as the Scriptures were held to contain divine truth on physical science, it was then impossible to give even physical instruction neutrally ; — you must either teach it, according to God's principles, (it being assumed that God's word had pronounced concerning it,) or in defiance of them. I hope we may meet on Saturday : I know that you are perfectly sincere, and that LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 399 L is so : nevertheless, I am persuaded that your argument goes on an over-estimate of the theological and abstract character of Christianity, and an under-estimate of it as a moral law ; else how can L talk of a clergy- man being in a false position in belonging to the University, if he does not think that the position is equally false for every Christian : if it be false for me it is false for you, except on the priestcraft notion, which is as unchris- tian, in my opinion, as the system in Gower Street. Indeed, the two help one another well. CLXIX. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ.. Rugby, December 6, 1837. I am afraid that I did no service to the Hertford Re- former ; for what I sent them was, I knew, too general and discursive for a newspaper : but they would insert all my articles, and I felt that they would not thank me for any more such, and I thought that I could not manage to write what really would be to their purpose. You must not misunderstand me, as if I thought my writings were too good for a newspaper ; it is very much the contrary, for I think that a newspaper requires a more condensed and practical style than I am equal to, — such, perhaps, as only habit and mixing more in the actual shock of opinions can give a man. My writing partakes of the character of my way of life, which is very much retired from the highway of politics, and of all great discussions, though it is engag- ed enough with a busy little world of its own I was much gratified in the summer by going over to France for about ten days, at the end of the holidays, with my wife and three eldest children. Seven years had elapsed since I had been in France last, so that many things had quite an appearance of novelty, and I fancied that I could trace the steady growth of every thing from the continuance of peace, and the ab- sence of most of those evils which in times past so interfered with national prosperity. We went to Rouen, Evreux, and Chartres, and then came back through Versailles and Paris. I admired Paris as I always had done, and we had very fine weather ; but I had no time to call on any body, even if all the world had not been in the country. This litte tour I owed to the elec- tion, which brought me up from Westmoreland to Warwickshire to vote, and it was so near the end of the holidays, that it did not seem worth while to go back again. I watched the elections with great interest, but not with much surprise. In 1831, when I wrote for the Sheffield Courant, I shared the common opinion as to the danger which threatened all our institutions from the force of an ultra-popular party. But the last six years have taught me, — what the Roman History ought indeed to have shown me before, — that when an aristocracy is not thoroughly corrupted, its strength is incalculable ; and it acts through the relations of private life, which are permanent, whereas the political excitement, which opposes it, must always be short- lived. In fact, the great amount of liberty and good government enjoyed in England, is the security of the aristocracy; there are no such pressing and flagrant evils existing, as to force men's attention from their own domestic concerns, and make them cast off their natural ties of respect or of fear for their richer or nobler neighbours ; and as for Ireland, the English care not for it one groat. , CLXX. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Rugby, December 8, 1837. I have asked Hull to send you the two first printed sheets of my History. You had promised to look at the manuscript, and, if you agree with me, you 310 LIFE 0F DR ARNOLD. will find it pleasantcr to read print than writing. Specially will you notice any expressions in the Legends which may seem to you to approach too near to the language of our translation of the Bible. I have tried to avoid this, but, in trying to write in an antiquated and simple language, that model with which we are most familiar will sometimes be followed too closely; and no one can deprecate more than I do any thing like a trivial use of that language which should be confined to one subject only. I hope and believe that i have kept clear of this; still I would rather have your judgment on it; I think you will at the same time agree with me that the Legends ought to be told as Legends, and not in the style of real history. We had a four hours' debate at the University, and a division in our favour with a majority of one. But the adversary will oppose us still step by step ; and they are going to ask the Attorney-General's opinion, whether we can examine in the Greek Testament without a breach of our charter ! ! ! A strange charter surely for the Defender of the faith to grant, if it forbids the use of the Christian Scrip- tures. CLXXI. f TO REV. T. J. ORMEROD. (After speaking of the affair of the Archbishop of Cologne.) Fox How, December 18, 1837. Certainly there is no battle in which I so entirely sympathize as in this of the Christian Church, against the Priestcraft- Antichrist. And yet this is not quite true, for I sympathize as cordially in its battle against the other Antichrist ; the Antichrist of Utilitarian unbelief, against which I am fighting at the London University. If persuades the government to sanction his views, it will be a wrench to me to separate from the only party that hitherto I have been able to go along with ; and to be obliged to turn an absolute political Ishmaelite, condemning all parties, knowing full well what to shun, but finding nothing to approve or sympathize with. But so I suppose it ought to be with us, till Christ's kingdom come, and both the Antichrists be put down before him. CLXXII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Fox How, December 20, 1837. We have been here since Saturday afternoon, and I think it has rained almost ever since; at this moment Wansfell and Kirkstone and Fairfield are dimly looming through a medium which consists, I suppose, as much of water as of air ; the Rotha is racing at the rate of eight or nine miles an hour, and the meadows are becoming rather lake-like. Notwithstanding, I believe that every one of us, old and young, would rather be here than any where else in the world. I thank you very heartily for your letter, and, in this present leisure time of the holidays, I can answer it at once and without hurry. Your judg- ment as to the Legends, determines me at once to recast that whole first chapter. I wish, however, if it is not giving you too much trouble, that you would get the manuscript, and read also the chapter about the banishment of the Tarquins and the battle by the Lake Regillus. I think that you would not find it open to the same objections; at least Wordsworth read it through with a reference merely to the language, and he approved of it ; and I think that it is easier and more natural than the first chapter. But I have not, and I trust I shall not, shrink from any labour of alteration, in order to make the work as complete as I can ; it will, after all, fall infinitely short of that model which I fancy keenly, but vainly strive to carry out into execution. With LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 31 1 regard to the first chapter, you have convinced me that it is faulty, because it is not what I meant it to be. But as to the principle, I am still of opinion, that the Legends cannot be omitted without great injury, and that they must not be told in my natural style of narrative. The reason of this appears to me to be, the impossibility of any man's telling such stories in a civilized age in his own proper person, with that sincerity of belief, nay even with that gravity which is requisite to give them their proper charm. If I thought that they contained really an historical skeleton, disguised under fabulous additions, it would of course be easy to give the historical outline as history in my own natural language, and to omit, or to notice with a grave remark as to their fabulousness, the peculiar marvels of the stories. This was done by Goldsmith, Rollin, &c. But I wish to give not the supposed facts of the stories, but the stories themselves in their oldest traceable form ; I regard them as poetry, in which the form is quite as essential as the substance of the story. It is a similar question, and fraught with similar difficulties, to that which regards the translation of Homer and Herodotus. If I were to translate Herodotus, it were absurd to do it in my common English, because he and I do not belong to analogous periods of Greek and English litera- ture ; I should try to translate him in the style of the old translation of Comines rather than of Froissart ; in the English of that period of our na- tional cultivation which corresponds to the period of Greek cultivation at which he wrote. I might and probably should do this ill : still I should try to mend the execution Avithout altering my plan ; and so I should do with these Roman stories. For instance, the dramatic form appears to me quite essential ; I mean the making the actors express their thoughts in the first person, instead of saying what they thought or felt as narrative. This, no doubt, is the style of the Bible : but it is not peculiar to it ; you have it in Herodotus just the same, because it is characteristic of a particular state of cultivation, which all people pass through at a certain stage in their pro- gress. If I could do it well, I would give all the Legends at once in verse, in the style and measure of Chapman's Homer ; and that would be the best and liveliest way of giving them, and liable to no possible charge of paro- dying the Bible. The next best way is that which I have tried and failed in executing; but I will try again; and if it is not too much trouble, I will ask you to look at the new attempt. I feel sure, and I really have thought a great deal upon this point, — that to give the story of the white sow, of the wolf suckling the twins, of Romulus being carried up to heaven, &c, in my own language, would be either merely flat and absurd, or else would contain so palpable an irony, as to destroy the whole effect which one would wish to create by telling the stories at all. For the other and greater matter of the University, I think it is very probable that I shall have to leave it ; but I cannot believe that it is other- wise than a solemn duty to stand by it as long as I can hope to turn it to good. Undoubtedly we must not do evil that good may come ; but we may and must bear much that is painful, and associate with those whom we dis- approve of, in order to do good. What is the evil of belonging to the Uni- versity k priori ? There is no avowed principle in its foundation which I think wrong ; the comprehension of all Christians, you know, I think most right ; if more be meant, I think it most wrong ; but this is the very point which I am trying to bring to issue ; and, though my fears of the issue out- weigh my hopes, yet while there is any hope I ought not to give up the bat- tle. CLXXIII. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Fox How, January 23, 1838. I had intended to answer your kind letter of the 21st of November long before this time ; I reserved it for the leisure of Fox How, and I have found, 312 LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. as is often the case, the less I have to do, the less I do of any thing. Now our holidays are fast wearing away, and in little more than a week we shall leave this most delightful home ; a home indeed so peaceful and so delightful, that it would not be right to make it one's constant portion; but after the half-years at Rugby, which now begin to be quite as much as I can well bear, the rest seems to be allowed ; and I drink it in with intense enjoyment, and t hope with something of the thankfulness which it claims To London I must go, on account of our meeting of the London Univer- sity on the 7th, when the question of Scriptural Examination will again be discussed. It was curious to me, knowing my character at Oxford, to hear myself charged, at our last meeting in December, with wishing to engross the University of London for the Established Church, as the other Univer- sities were engrossed by it already. The opposition is very fierce. . . . . . . I could not examine a Jew in a history of which he would not ad- mit a single important fact, nor could I bear to abstain systematically from calling our Lord by any other name than Jesus, because I must not shock the Jew by implying that He was the Christ. The pre- vailing evils in the University of Oxford are, to be sure, rather of a differ- ent character from those of the University of London . . But you have done much good with the statutes, and I delight to hear about the prospect of the six scholarships. I have been engaged in tiresome disputes about my History with the booksellers, and they are only just settled. The first volume will now, I suppose, go to press speedily, and I have begun the second. It is delightful work, when I can get on with it without interruption, as is the case here. Besides this, I have done little except reading Newman's book about Ro- manism and Protestantism, and Bishop Sanderson's work on the Origin of Government, which Pusey refers to in the Preface to his Sermons. The latter work does not raise my opinion of its author ; it contains divers startling assertions, admirably suited to the purposes of text qvioters, which appear to advocate pure despotism ; but then they are so qualified, that at last one finds nothing surprising in them, except the foolishness or the unfairness of putting them out at first in so paradoxical a form.1 I think, by what I hear, the cold in Oxford must have been more severe than with us. I have not seen our thermometer lower than 14, at which it stood, at 9 a. m. last Saturday, in a northern aspect. But we have had no snow in the valleys till Sunday, and the water in the house has never been frozen. The hills have been very hard to walk on, all the streams being hard frozen, and the water which generally is steeping all the surface of the slopes being now sheets of ice. But the waterfalls and the snowy mountain summits, backed by the clear blue sky, have been most beautiful. CLXXIV. TO THE CHEVALIER BUNSEN. (On the affair of the Archbishop of Cologne.) Fox How, January 27, 1838. When I consider the question I am more and more at a loss to guess how it can be satisfactorily solved. How can truth and error be brought into harmony 1 This Marriage question is admirably fitted for showing the absurdity of the favourite distinction between spiritual things and secular. Every voluntary moral action is to a Christian both the one and the other. " Spiritual " and " ritual " differ utterly. Mere ritual ob- servances may be separated from secular actions, but ritual observances are not a Christian's religion. A Christian's religion is co-extensive with his 1 Of Mr. Newman's book he says, in another letter, " Parts of it I think very good, parts as bad as bad can be." LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 3^3 life, and how can he, in the general tenor of his life, obey two masters, the King and the Pope ; how can he at once obey the rightful authorities of the Christian Church and the usurped authority of Priestcraft '? I lament the very expressions in which the actual dispute is described. It is represented as a contest between the Church and the Government, or between the Church and the State ; in which case 1 think that all Christians would be bound to obey the Church, and, if the State's commands are incompatib e with such obedience, to submit to martyrdom. But, in truth, you are the Church, and the Archbishop of Cologne represents the Church's worst ene- my, the spirit of priesthood. It is Korah the Levite, falsely pretending to be a priest, and in that false pretension rebelling against Moses. But this mingled usurpation and rebellion, — this root of anarchy, fraud, and idolatry, — is the very main principle of all popery, whether Romish or Oxonian, whether of the Archbishop of Cologne, or of Pusey and Newman. How either you or we can preserve the Church from it, I do not see ; but from the bottom of my heart do I " wish you good luck in the name of the Lord," in this most holy cause. Connected with this is Rothe's book, which I have read with great inte- rest. His first position, — that the State and not the Church, (in the common and corrupt sense of the term,) is the perfect form under which Christianity is to be developed, — entirely agrees with my notions. But his second posi- tion,— that the Church in the corrupt sense, that is, a priestly government, transmitted by a mystical succession from one priest to another, is of apos- tolical origin, — seems to me utterly groundless. It may be, that the Apostles, after the destruction of Jerusalem, if any of them survived it, made the government of the Church more monarchical, and less popular ; and that they were very anxious to commit it to persons of their own choice, or chosen by those who had been so. But this does not touch the point. Different states of society require governments more or less despotic, and that the Church should be governed according to the principles of Chris- tianity as set forth by the Apostles, is most certain. The mischief of the false Church notion consists in its substitution of the idea of priesthood for that of government, and as a consequence, deriving the notion of a mystical succession throughout all time, which does not and cannot preserve the spirit of the Apostles' principles, but paralyzes the free action of the Church, and introducing a principle incompatible with all sound notions of law and government, at one time crushes the church with its tyranny, and at another distracts it with its anarchy. I am convinced that the whole mischief of the great Antichristian apostacy has for its root the tenet of " a priestly govern- ment transmitted by a mystical succession from the Apostles." CLXXV. * TO A. H. CLOUGH, ESa. Fox How, January 29. I hope to see you before another week is over: still, as in my short visits to Oxford I see every body in some hurry, I wish to send these few lines by Hill to thank you for a very kind letter which I received from you in November, and which you might perhaps think I had altogether forgot- ten. I was very much obliged to you for it, and pray believe that, whenever you can write to me, your letters will give me the greatest interest and pleasure. I delight in your enjoyment of Oxford, and in what you say of the union amongst our Rugby men there. But I cannot think that you are yet thoroughly acquainted with the country about Oxford, as you prefer the Rugby fields to it. Not to mention Bagley Wood, do you know the lit- tle valleys that debouche on the Valley of the Thames behind the Hinkseys ; do you know Horspath, nestling under Shotover ; or Elsfield, on its green slope, or all the variety of Cumnor Hill ; or the wider skirmishing ground 21 314 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. by Beckley, Stanton St. John's, and Foresthill, which we used to expatiate over on whole holidays ? As for the school, Tickell's success was most welcome and most benefi- cial ; the railway and the multitude of coaches will I suppose bring with them their anxieties ; but it is of no use to anticipate them beforehand. I trust with God's blessing we shall continue to go on doing some good, re- straining some evil, but we shall ever do too little of the former, and leave too much of the latter in vigour, to allow of any feeling of self-satisfaction. But I have an unmixed pleasure in thinking of many of those who have been and who are still with us : and this pleasure more than makes up for many cares. I was very glad to have Burbidge here, and delighted to see how he enjoyed the country. You may be sure that we shall be very glad to have you and him in our neighbourhood in the summer, if his castle is ever built. I have been at work steadily, and have begun the second volume of my History : the first will I suppose now go to press without any farther delays. We are all well, and unite in kindest regards to you. CLXXVI. TO SIR T. S. PASLEY, BART. Rugby, February 16, 1S3S. You may perhaps have seen in the papers an account of our meeting at the London University ; but at any rate I will keep my promise, and give you my own report of it. Every single member of the Senate except my- self was convinced of the necessity, according to the Charter, of giving the Jews Degrees ; all were therefore inclined to make an exemption in their favour as to the New Testament Examination, and thus to make that Ex- amination not in all cases indispensable. Most were disposed to make it altogether voluntary, and that was the course which was at last adopted. The examination is not to be now restricted to any one part of the New Testament, and it is to be followed by a certificate of a man's having simply passed it, and a class paper for those who are distinguished in it. I think that it will be passed so generally, as to mark very much those who do not pass it ; and in this way it will do good. It also saves the University from the reproach of neglecting Christianity altogether. But it does not maintain the principle which I wished ; and as on the one hand I think it neither fair nor of any use to go on agitating the question with every one against me, bo, on the other, I have no satisfaction in belonging to a body whose views are so different from mine ; and I should leave them at once, were I not anxious to see something of the working of our Scriptural Examination, and, if possible, to try to settle it on a good footing. After we left you at Bowness, we had no further adventures. When we came to Lyth,.the snow was all gone, and between Lancaster and Preston the roads were quite dirty. We slept at Yarrow Bridge, embarked on the railway the next day at War- rington, and got safe home by about ten o'clock. Our visit to Oxford was very delightful; we saw great numbers of my old pupils, and met with a very kind reception from every one. Have you yet got Pusey's Sermon, or seen the review of it in the Edinburgh Review? That article was written, I am told, by Merivale, the Political Economy Professor ; I have looked at it, and like its tone and ability, though I do not think that it takes the ques- tion on the highest ground. From Oxford we went to London, where my two days were passed, one at the University, and the other at Mr. Phillips's room, where I sat for my portrait. Then we went down to Laleham, from whence I paid a visit to Eton, a place which has always a peculiar interest for me. And now we are as regularly settled at our work as if we had never stirred from Rugby, and looking forward to the speedy opening of the rail- way to Birmingham, to effect which, we have six hundred men working night and day, as hard as the frost will let them. I rejoice in the prospect LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 315 of a peaceful settlement of the affair of the Caroline ; it is not easy to make out the facts exactly, nor, if I knew the truth, am I quite sure as to the law. But one is glad to find the American Government disposed to act justly and in a friendly spirit ; and the Buffalo and the Canada Orangemen will not, if this be the case, be able to involve the two countries in war. Alas, for all our evergreens, if these biting east winds last much longer. Poor Murphy's reputation must be pretty well at an end now. CLXXVIl. TO THE BISHOP OF NORWICH. Rugby, February 17, 183S. The result of the meeting of the London University, on the 7th, has placed me personally in a situation of great embarrassment ; and I venture to apply to you, to learn whether you, on your own part, also feel the same difficulty. On the one hand, the Senate were so unanimous in their opinion. that the admission of unbelievers of all sorts to Degrees in Arts could not be resisted under the terms of the Charter, that I should not think it becom- ing to agitate the question again. And I think that the voluntary examina- tion which we have gained is really a great point, and I am strongly tempted to assist, so far as I can, towards carrying it into effect. But, on the other hand, the University has solemnly avowed a principle to whicb I am totally opposed, — namely, that education need not be connected with Christianity ; and I do not see how I can join in conferring a degree on those who, in my judgment, cannot be entitled to it ; or in pronouncing that to be a com- plete education, which I believe to be no more so than a man without his soul or spirit is a complete man. Besides, my continuing to belong to the University, may be ascribed to an unwillingness to offend the Government from interested motives ; all compliances with the powers that be being apt to be ascribed to unworthy considerations. Yet, again, you will believe me, though probably would not, when I say, that I feel exceedingly. unwil- ling to retire on such grounds as mine, while three Bishops of our Church do not feel it inconsistent with their duty to remain in the University ; it seems very like presumption on my part, and a coming forward without au- thority when those, who have authority, judge that there is no occasion for any protest. My defence must be, that the principle to which I so object, and which appears to me to be involved by a continuance in the University, may not appear to others to be at stake on the present occasion: that I am not professing, therefore, or pretending to be more zealous for Christianity than other members of the Senate, but that what appears to me to be dan- gerous appears to them to be perfectly innocent ; and that they naturally, therefore, think most of the good which the University will do, while I fear that all that good will be purchased by a greater evil, and cannot, therefore, take any part in the good, as I should wish to. do, because, to my appre- hension, it will be bought too dearly. On the whole, my leaning is towards resigning; and then I think that I ought to do it speedily, as my own act, and not one into which I may seem to have been shamed by the remon- strances or example of others — of King's College, for instance ; if, as seems possible, they may renounce all connexion with us after our late decision. CLXXVIII. TO REV. J. E. TYLER. February 17, 1838. You will feel, I think, the exceedingly difficult situation in which I am placed. I. am personally very anxious to resign ; but the engine is so pow- erful, that I hardly dare to abandon all share in the guidance of it, while 316 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. there is any chance of turning it to good. I feel also, that the decision of King's College would greatly assist in determining me how to act. If they break oft' all connexion with us, and thus leave us wholly in the con- dition of an University for men of one party only, I should be in haste to be gone : but if they stay on, and are willing to avail themselves of our religious Examination, I should like to stay on too, to make that Examination as good as I could. If you know what Hugh Rose's sentiments are on this point, will you have the goodness to write me a few lines about it? Your Conse- cration Sermon for the Bishop of Salisbury never reached me. or otherwise I hope that I should have had the grace to thank you for it long ere now. I used to think that we agreed well, but I heard that you had been shocked by my Church Reform Pamphlet ; and many men with whom I once agreed have been scared in these later days, and have, as I think, allowed their fears to drive them to the wrong quarter for relief. I could tell you readily- enough with what parties I disagreed — namely, with all. My own tfhiora- rov Tf'Ao? I shall never see fulfilled, and what is the least bad, 6ivTf\>oq nXoiit;, I hardly know I heard of your bad illness, and was glad to find that you were recovered again. I, too, have felt lately that I am not so young as when we skirmished in the common room at Oriel, or speared on Shotover ; but God gives me still so much health and strength, that I have no excuse for not serving Him more actively. CLXXIX. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (D.) Rugby, February 28, 1838. Some passages of your letter have, I confess, alarmed me, as seeming to show that you do not enough allow for the effect of the local in- fluences around you ; that questions assume an unreal importance in your eyes, because of their accidental magnitude within the immediate range of your own view ; that you are disposed to dispute great truths, because in the society into which you happen to be thrown, it has become the fashion to assail them. Now, I remember that in Henry Martyn's Journal, written when he was in Persia, there is a passage to this effect : " I reviewed the evidence in proof of the falsehood of Mahommedanism, and found it clear and convincing." It was natural that to him, living in Persia, Mahomme- danism should have acquired an importance of which we in Europe can form no idea ; it was natural that he should endeavour to satisfy himself of the falsehood of that which we in England may dismiss from our minds with little hesitation. But I think it would have startled us, had we found him attaching so much weight to the goodness and the ability of the Persian Imaums around him, as to conceive it possible that they might be right, and that he might find himself obliged to abandon his faith in Christ, and adopt Islam. Now, you will forgive me for saying that a passage in your letter did startle me nearly as much, when — impressed as it seems by the local and present authority of Newmanism — you imagined the possibility that you might be forced to look elsewhere than in the" New Testament for the full picture of Christianity ; that you might, on the supposed result of reading through certain books, written in the second and third centuries, be inclined to adopt the views of St. Paul's Judaizing opponents, and reject his own. j think that you state the question fairly — that it does in fact involve a choice between the Gospel of Christ, as declared by himself and by his Apostles, and that deadly apostacy which St. Paul in his lifetime saw threatening,— nay, the effects of which, during his captivity, had well nigh supplanted his own Gospel in the Asiatic Churches, and which, he declares, would come speedily with a fearful power of lying wonders. The Newmanites would not, I think, yet dare to admit that their religion was different from that of he New Testament ; but I am perfectly satisfied that it is so, and that what LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 317 they call Ecclesiastical Tradition, contains things wholly inconsistent with the doctrines of our Lord, of St. Paul, of St. Peter, and of St. John. And it is because I see these on the one side, and on the other not the writings merely of fallible men, but of men who, even in human matters, are most unfit to be an authority, from their being merely the echo of the opinions of their time, instead of soaring far above them into the regions of eternal truth ; (the unvarying mark of all those great men who are and have been — not infallible indeed — but truly an authority, claiming a priori our deference, and making it incumbent on us to examine well before we pro- nounce in the peculiar line of their own greatness against them) — because the question is truly between Paul and Cyprian ; and because all that is in any way good in Cyprian, which is much, is that which he gained from Paul and from Christianity, — that I should not feel myself called upon, except from local or temporary circumstances, to enter into the inquiry. And, if I did enter into it, I should do it in Martyn's spirit, to satisfy myself, by a re- newed inquiry, that I had unshaken grounds for rejecting the apostacy, and for cleaving to Christ and to His Apostles ; not as if by possibility I could change my Master, and having known Christ and the perfections of His Gospel, could ever, whilst life and reason remained, go from Him, to bow down before an unsightly idol. And what is there a priori to tempt me to think that this idol should be a god ? This, merely, — that in a time of much excitement, when popular opinions in their most vulgar form were very noisy, and seemed to some very alarming, there should have arisen a strong reaction, in which the common elements of Toryism and High Church feeling, at all times rife in Oxford, should have been moulded into a novel form by the peculiar spirit of the place, — that sort of religious aristocratical chivalry so catching to young men, to students and to members of the aristocracy, — and still more, by the revival of the spirit of the Nonjurors in two or three zealous and able men, who have given a systematic character to the whole. The very same causes produced the same result after the Reformation in the growth and spread of Jesuitism. No man can doubt the piety of Loyola and many of his followers ; yet, what Christian, in England at least, can doubt that, as Jesuitism, it was not of God ; that it was grounded on falsehood, and strove to propagate falsehood % So, again, the Puritans led to the Nonjurors ; zealous, many of them, and pious, but narrow-minded in the last degree, fierce and slanderous ; and even when they were opposing that which was very wrong, meeting it with something as wrong or worse. Kenn, and Hickes, and Dodwell, and Leslie, are now historical characters ; we can see their party in its beginning, middle, and end, and it bears on it all the marks of an heresy and of a faction, whose success would have obstructed good, and preserved or restored evil. Whenever you see the present party acting as a party, they are just like the Nonjurors, — busy, turbulent, and narrow-minded ; with no great or good objects, but something that is at best fantastic, and generally mischievous. That many of these men, as of the Nonjurors and of the Jesuits, are far better than their cause and principles I readily allow ; but their cause is ever one and the same — a violent striving for forms and positive institutions, which, ever since Christ's Gospel has been preached, has been always wrong, — wrong as the predominant mark of a party ; because there has always been a greater good which needed to be upheld, and a greater evil which needed to be combated, even when what they upheld was good, and what they combated was bad. And if this same spirit infected the early Church also, as from the circumstances of the times and the position of the Church it was exceedingly likely to do, — if it infected all the eminent ecclesiastical leaders, whose power and influence it was so eminently fitted to promote, — if they by their credit, (in many respects most deserved,) persuaded the Church to adopt it, — shall we dignify their error by the specious name of the " Consent of Antiquity, '^and call it an " Apostolical Tradition," and think that it should guide us in the interpretation of Scripture ; when we see distinctly in the Scripture itself 318 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. that this very same spirit was uniformly opposed to our Lord and His Apostles, and when it is one of the commonest sophisms which History exposes, that the principle of error which a great truth had dislodged, should disguise itself in the outward form, and borrow the nomenclature of the system which had defeated it ; and then assert that its nature is changed, and that the truth no longer condemns it, but approves it ? " If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers in the blood of the Prophets." " Paul rightly condemned trusting to circumcision, but baptism is quite another thing?" Whereas all the Newmanite language about bap- tism might be, and probably was, used by the Jews and Judaizers about cir- cumcision ; the error in both is the same ; i. e. the teaching that an outward bodily act can have a tendency to remove moral evil ; or rather, the teach- ing that God is pleased to act upon the spirit through the body, in a way agreeable to none of the known laws of our constitution ; a doctrine which our Lord's language about meats not defiling a man, " because they do not go into the heart, but into the belly," puts down in every possible ibrm un- der which it may attempt to veil itself. CLXXX. * TO C. J. VAUGHAN, ESQ. ' Rugby, Mai ch 4, 1838. You have my most hearty congratulations on your success in the Ex- amination, which I believe few will more rejoice at than I do. I cannot re- gret your being bracketed with another man ; for, judging by my own feel- ings about you, his friends would have been much grieved if he had been below you ; and when two men do so well, there ought, according to my notions, to be neither a better nor a worse of them. Thank you much for your kindness in sending the Class paper, and for your Declamation, which I like very much. How glad shall I be to see you when your Medal Exam- ination is over, and when, the preparation for life being ended, you will be- gin to think of life, its actual self. May it be to us both, my dear Vaughan, that true life which begins and has no end in God. My wife and the chil- dren fully share in our joy on your account, and join in kindest remem- brances. CLXXXI. TO THE EARL OF BURLINGTON, (Chancellor of the University of London.) Rugby, March 17, 1838. I fear that I may be too late in offering the following suggestions, but I had not observed the progress of the Committees, till I found by the reports, which I received this morning, that a resolution had been passed, but not yet, I believe, confirmed, to adopt the recommendation of the Vice-Chan- cellor, that the Examinations should be conducted entirely through the me- dium of printed papers. I think that is a point on which the experience of Oxford, entirely confirmed in my judgment by my own experience here, is well deserving of consideration, — because we habitually use and know the value of printed papers, and we know also the advantages to be derived from a viv& voce examination, of which Cambridge' has made no trial. I think that these advantages are much too great to be relinquished by us altogether. 1st. The exercise of extempore translation is the only thing in our sys- tem of education, which enables a young man to express himself fluently and in good language without premeditation. Wherever it is attended to, LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 319 it is an exercise of exceeding value ; it is, in fact, one of the best possible modes of instruction in English composition, because the constant compari- son with the different idioms of the languages, from which you are translat- ing, shows you in the most lively manner the peculiar excellences and defects of our own ; and if men are tried by written papers only, one great and most valuable talent, that of readiness, and the very useful habit of re- taining presence of mind, so as to be able to avail oneself without nervous- ness of all one's knowledge, and to express it at once by word of mouth, are never tried at all. 2nd. Nothing can equal a viva voce examination for trying a candidate's knowledge in the contents of a long history or a philosophical treatise. I have known men examined for two hours together viva voce in Aristotle, and they have been thus tried more completely than could be done by printed papers : for a man's answers suggest continually further questions ; you can at once probe his weak points ; and, where you find him strong, you can give him an opportunity of doing himself justice, by bringing him out especially on 'those very points. 3rd. Time is saved, and thereby weariness and exhaustion of mind, to both parties. A man can speak faster than he can write, and he is relieved by the variety of the exercise. 4th. The eclat of a viva voce examination is not to be despised. When a clever man goes into the schools at Oxford, the room is filled with hearers of all ranks in the University. His powers are not merely taken on trust from the report of the examiners ; they are witnessed by the University at large, and their peculiar character is seen and appreciated also. I have known the eloquence of a man's translations from the poets and orators and historians, and the clearness and neatness of his answers in his philosophi- cal examination, long and generally remembered, with a distinctness of im- pression very different from that produced by the mere knowledge that he is in the first class. And in London, the advantages of such a public viva voce examination would be greater of course than any where else, because the audience might be larger and more mixed. 5th. Presence of mind is a quality which deserves to be encouraged — nervousness is a d efect which men feel painfully in many instances through life. Education should surely attach some reward to a valuable quality which may be acquired in great measure by early practice, and should impose some penalty or some loss on the want of it. Now, if you have printed papers, you effectually save a man from suffering too much from his nervousness ; but if you have printed papers only, you do not, I think, encourage as you should do the excellence of presence of mind, and the power of making our know- ledge available on the instant. 6th. It is an error to suppose that no exact judgment of a man can be formed from a viva voce examination. Like all other things, such an exa- mination requires some attention and some practice on the part of those who conduct it; but all who have had much experience in it are well aware that, combined with an examination on paper, it is entirely satisfactory. In fact, either system, of papers or of viva voce examination, if practised ex- clusively, does but half try the men. Each calls forth faculties which the other does not reach equally. As it is not in my power to be present at the next meetings of the Uni- versity, I have ventured to say thus much by letter. I trust that I shall not be thought presumptuous in having done so. CLXXXII. *TO DR. GREENHILL. Rugby, May 15, 1838. I have been lately writing and preaching two sermons on the subject of prophecy, embodying some views which you may perhaps have heard from 320 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. me six years since, for they have been long in my mind, although I never put them out fully in writing. I have some thoughts of publishing them now, in Oxford, with something of a Preface, developing the notions more fully. But, ere I do this, as I have never found any thing satisfactory on the subject, I wish to learn from one who admires and knows pretty thor- oughly, the writings both of the early Christian writers and of those of the Church of England, what he would recommend, as containing a good view of the nature and interpretation of prophecy. This I know you can learn from Pusey, and I should be much obliged to you to ask him ; nor should I object to your saying that you are asking for me ; only you need not say any thing of my intended publication, which indeed is a very hypothetical intention after all. I wish sincerely to read what Pusey, and those who think with him, consider as good on any subject; on this particular one, I do not know that their views would differ from mine. My small respect for those writers whom Pusey admires has been purely the result of experi- ence : whenever I have read them, I have found them wanting. I should be very honestly glad to find some one amongst them who would give me the knowledge which I want. We are all tolerably well, but the weather is almost painful to me ; — it seems to inflict such suffering on all nature. CLXXXIII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Rugby, May 18, 1838. The first volume of Rome will be out on Wednesday, and you will re- ceive your copy, I hope, immediately. I ask for your congratulations on the termination of this part of my labours, whatever may be the merits or success of the book. One object of publishing it in separate volumes, is, that the sensible criticisms on the first may be of use to its successors. I hope that I shall have some such, and I shall receive them very thankfully. I want hints as to points which require examination, for I may pass over things through pure ignorance, because I may know nothing about them ; but as to the great point, — the richness and power of the narrative. — to that no criticism can help me ; my own standard, I believe, is as high as any man's can be, and my inability to come up to it or near it in my execution constantly annoys me. Yet I hope and think that you will on the whole like the book ; you will not sympathize with all the sentiments about Aris- tocracy, but I think, if you ever see the subsequent volumes, you will find that I have not spared the faults of Democracy. Still I confess that Aristoc- racy as a predominant element in a government, whether it be aristocracy of skin, of race, of wealth, of nobility, or of priesthood, has been to my mind the greatest source of evil throughout the world, because it has been the most universal and the most enduring. Democracy and tyranny, if in themselves worse, have been, and I think ever will be, less prevalent, at least in Europe ; they may be the Cholera, but aristocracy is Consumption ; and you know that in our climate Consumption rs a far worse scourge, in the long run than Cholera. The great defect of the volume will be the want of individual characters, which was unavoidable, but yet must lower the interest and the value of the history. The generalities on which I have been obliged to dwell, from the total want of materials for painting portraits, are a sad contrast to those inimitable living pictures with which Carlyle's History of the French Revolution abounds. [After speaking of the London University.] What the end will be I can scarcely tell, but I have no pleasure in remaining in the University, and yet I do not like to leave it till the very last moment. It makes me feel very lovingly to Rugby, where I seem to have, in principle at least, what I most like, — that is, a place neither like the University of London, nor yet like Ox- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 321 ford, .... where we are not ashamed of Christianity or of the Church of England, while we have no sympathy with those opinions and feelings which possess the majority of the clergy, from Archbishop Howley down- wards. CLXXXIV. TO THE BISHOP OF NORWICH. Rugby, June 7, 1838 I am much obliged to you for the information contained in your letter. I have always objected to the Rule which you have marked A ; whereas I agree with Rule B, if by " peculiarity of doctrinal views " be meant the peculiar opinions of any denomination of Christians. But Rule A seems to me to be needlessly offensive. As the theological examination is not neces- sary to the Degree, no one surely but Christians would wish to pass it ; and why should we say that we do not intend it to imply any man's belief in Christianity? I, for one, could never examine any man in the New Testa- ment, if I thought that he did not believe it, 'or was not in a state of mind in which he was honestly and respectfully acquiring a knowledge of it with a view to his religious belief. I have always thought that to examine in it merely as a matter of curious information was a very great profaneness. Again, have you thought any thing more of what Archbishop Whately suggested to Dr. Jerrard through Dr. Dickenson, that the certificate of a man's Degree should notice his having passed the theological Examination ? Now I see that the theological Examination is to follow the Degree, so that this cannot be done ; and the degree is to all intents and purposes complete before the theological Examination even comes into question. And, when I find from Hugh Rose's letter to Hare, in answer to some inquiries of mine, that he will care little whether the students of King's College pass our Ex- amination in theology or no, I am greatly afraid that our Examination will fail practically, as well as in principle, to make a marked distinction between the Christian and unchristian students of our University: — the one great point which Warburton dreads, and I deem essential. I cannot disguise from myself that the University of London, in its public capacity, cannot be considered as a Christian institution, although it may happen that all its branches individually may be Christians; and therefore I must withdraw from it. Living at such a distance as I do, I can be of no practical use ; and, if I could, I feel that the practical good to the extent which alone would be possible, would be dearly bought by my acquiescence in a principle which I so strongly disapprove. To see my hopes for this new University thus frustrated, is one of the greatest disappointments I have ever met with'. But I cannot be reconciled to such a total absence of all confession of the Lord Jesus, and such a total neglect of the command to do all things in His name, as seems to me to be hopelessly involved in the constitutfon of our University. As to the manner of my resignation, I would fain do it in the quietest manner possible, consistent with the simple declaration of the reasons which led me to it. I suppose that the proper way would be to write a short letter to the Chancellor. CLXXXV. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (D.)— ON DIFFICULTIES IN SUBSCRIPTION. Fox How, June 22, 1838. My own answer must be clear to you from my own prac- tice. I do not believe the damnatory clauses in the Anthanasian Creed, under any qualification given of them, except such as substitute for them propositions of a wholly different character. Those clauses proceed on a false notion, which I have1 elsewhere noticed, that the importance of all 322 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. opinions touching God's nature is to be measured by His greatness ; and that therefore erroneous notions about the Trinity are worse than erroneous notions about Church Government, or pious frauds, or any other disputed point on which there is a right and a wrong, a true and a false, and on which the wrong and the false may indeed be highly sinful ; but it does not follow that they must be ; and their sinfulness does not depend upon their wrongness and falsehood, but on other circumstances in the partic- ular mind of the person holding them. But I read the Athanasian Creed, and have and would again subscribe the Article about it, because I do not conceive the clauses in question to be essential parts of it, or that they were retained deliberately by our Reformers after the propriety of retain- ing or expunging them had been distinctly submitted to their minds. They retained the Creed, I doubt not, deliberately; to show that they wished to keep the faith of the general Church in matters relating to the Arian, Macedonian, Nestorian, Eutychian, and Socinian controversies; and as they did not scruple to burn Arians, so neither would they be likely to be shocked by the damnatory clauses against them ; but I do not imagine that the Article about the Creed was intended in the least to refer to the clauses, as if they supposed that a man might embrace the rest of the Creed, and yet reject them. Nor do I think that the Reformers, or the best and wisest men of the Church since, would have objected to any man's subscription, if they had conceived such a case ; but would have said, " What we mean you to em- brace is the belief of the general Church, as expressed in the Three Creeds, with regard to the points, — many of them having been much disputed, — on which those Creeds pronounce ; — the degree of blamableness in those who do not embrace this belief is another matter, on which we do not intend to speak particularly in this Article." I do not think that there is any thing evasive or unfair in this. I do not think that it even requires in its defence, — what is yet most true. — that Church subscriptions must be taken in their widest rather than in their strictest sense, except on points where they were espe- cially intended to be stringent, and to express the opposite of some suspected opinion. Yet, when you speak of others throwing your subscription in your teeth, you may surely say that, it does indeed require the utmost laxity of interpretation to reconcile Newmanism with a subscription 1o our Articles, because there, on points especially disputed, such as the Authority of Tra- dition, and the King's Supremacy, the Church of England and the New- manites are directly at variance. As far as Keble or Newman are con- cerned, the most decided Socinian might subscribe the Articles as consist- ently as they do ; but this of course is not the point, and my opinion as to the damnatory clauses, as it is much older than the rise of Newmanism, so it stands on grounds far different than a mere argumentum ad hominem, and is, I think, perfectly right, considered simply on the merits of the case. When the faults of the London University revive all my tenderness for Oxford, then the faults of Oxford repel me again, and make it impossible to sympathize with a spirit so uncongenial. Wherefore I wish the wish of Achilles, when he looked out upon the battle of the ships, and desired that the Greeks and Trojans might destroy one another, and leave the field open for better men. We had a very prosperous journey, and arrived here yesterday evening about nine o'clock. The place is most beautiful ; but the rain is falling thick. CLXXXVI. TO T. F. ELLIS, ESQ. Rugby, August 29, 1838. Independently of the real pleasure which it would give me to be of any ser- vice to a friend of yours, I have that admiration of Mr. Macaulay's writings, 1 Postscript to " Principles of Church Reform." p, 9. For the limitation to this statement, see, amongst other passages, Sermons, vol. iii. p. 140. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 323 and have derived so much pleasure from them, that it would be but a mat- ter of simple gratitude to do any thing in my power towards facilitating his observations during his stay at Rome. I was there myself so very short a time, that I was able only to look at the mere outline of things ; and it was my object to go to as many of the higher points as I could, in and about Rome, that by getting the landscape from a number of different points I might better understand the bearings of vts several parts to one another. For instance, I went to the top of the dome of St. Peter's ; to that of the tower of the Capitol; to the Monte Mario ; the terrace of the Church of St. Pietro in Montorio, (on the old Janiculum,) that of the Convent of S. Gre- gorio, I think it is, on the Ccelian, (from which you look upon the reverse of the Esquiline, just at the place where the street of the Carina? ran along,) to the old mound of Ser. Tullius ; to the summits of the Aventine and Pala- tine, &c; by which I always fancy that I have retained a more distinct and also a more lively and picturesque image of Rome than I could otherwise have gained within the same space of time ; and if I were to go again, I think I should do the same thing. Out of Rome I should recommend, as near objects, Tivoli, of course, and the Alban hills, and especially Palestrina (Prseneste). If I could get there again, I should wish especially to take the upper road from Rome to Naples, by Palestrina, Anagni, Frosinone, and the valley of the Garigliano. This is every way a most interesting line, and it might easily include Arpino. I am not sure where you would best come out upon the plain of Naples. I should try to get by S. Germano and Monte Cassino, into the great road from Naples, across to the Adriatic ; and so to descend by the Valley of the Voltorno, either upon Capua or straight by Carazzo and Caserta. Much must depend on the state of the banditti, which is always known on the spot. If they are well put down, as I believe they are, the upland valleys in the central Apennines are most attractive. I had a plan once of turning off from the great road at Terni, then ascending the valley of the Velino to Rieti, and making my way through what they call the Cicolano, — the country of the Aborigines of Cato, — down upon Alba and the Lake Fu- cinus ; from thence you can go either to Rome or Naples, as you like. The neighbourhood of Alba is doubly interesting, as it is close by the field of Scurzola, the scene of Conradin's defeat by Charles of Anjou. In Etrurial would make any efforts to get to Volterra, which is accessible enough, either from Leghorn or from Sienna. If Mr. Macaulay is going into the kingdom of Naples, he will find Keppel Craven's recent book, " Travels in the Abruz- zi," &c, exceedingly useful, — as a regular guide, I have not met with a bet- ter book. Does he know Westphal's book on the Campagna ? lengthy, but full of details, which are carefully done CLXXXVII. TO THE REV. DR. HAWKINS. (Two letters, as being closely connected with each other, are here joined.) (A.) Fox How, August 5, 1838. Just before the holidays, I had a letter from Cardwell, in which he mentioned that there was some scheme for enlarging the sphere of the Degree Examination. I should rejoice at this, but I more desire your old plan of an Examination at entrance, which would be so great a benefit at once to you and to us. With regard to the Examinations, I hear a gen- eral complaint of the variableness of the standard ; that new Examiners lay the main stress on the most different things ; with some Scholarship is every thing, with others History, with others the Aristotle, &c. Now it is a very good thing that all these should have their turn, and should all be insisted upon ; but I think that some notice should be given beforehand, and that a 324 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. new Examiner should state, like the Praetors at Rome, what points he intend- ed particularly to require ; for at present, the men say that they are often led to attend to one thing, from the experience of the last Examination, and then a new Examiner attaches the greatest importance to. something else. (B.) I hear that you think of extending the range of your Examina- tions at Oxford, at which I wish you all manner of success. I do not think that you need in the least to raise the standard of your classes, hut a pass little go, or even great go, is surely a ridiculous thing, as all that the Uni- versity expects of a man after some twelve or fourteen years of schooling and lecturing. I think, too, that physical science can nowhere be so well studied as at Oxford, because the whole spirit of the place is against its undue ascendency ; for instance, Anaiomy, which in London is dangerously, as I think, made one of the qualifications for a degree, might be, I imagine, profitably required at Oxford, where you need not dread the low morals and manners of so many of the common medical students. . . . I have read Froude's volume1, and I think that its predominant character is extraordinary impudence. I never saw a more remarkable instance of that quality than the way in which he, a young man, and a clergyman of the Church of England, reviles all those persons whom the accordant voice of that Church, without distinction of party, has agreed to honour, even per- haps with an excess of admiration. CLXXXVIII. | TO THE REV. W. K. HAMILTON. Rugby, October 5, 1838. Will you thank Wordsworth for his specimen of his Grammar when you write to him ? I am glad that he writes it in Latin, being fully convinced that an English Grammar will never be remembered with equal tenacity. You are indeed too much of a stranger to us, and it would delight us to see you here again, or still more to see you in Westmoreland. But I know the claims of your parish upon your time ; as well as those of your relations. Only, whenever you can come to us, let me beg that you will not let slip the opportunity There seems to me to be a sort of atmosphere of unrest and paradox hanging around many of our ablest young men of the present day, which makes me very uneasy. I do dot speak of religious doubts, but rather of questions as to great points in moral and intellectual matters ; where things which have been settled for centuries seem to be again brought into discussion. This restless love of paradox, is, I believe, one of the main causes of the growth of Newmanism ; first, directly, as it leads men to dis- pute and oppose all the points which have been agreed upon in their own country for the last two hundred years ; and to pick holes in existing reputa- tions ; and then, when a man gets startled at the excess of his skepticism, and finds that he is cutting away all the ground-under his feet, he takes a desperate leap into a blind fanaticism. I cannot find what I most crave to see, and what still seems to me no impossible dream, inquiry and belief go- ing together, and the adherence to truth growing with increased affection, as follies are more and more cast away. But I have seen lately such a specimen of this and of all other things that are good and wise and holy, as I suppose can scarcely be matched again in the world. Bunsen has been with us for six days with his wife and Henry. It was delightful to find that my impression of his extraordinary excellence had not deceived me ; that the reality even surpassed my recollection of what he was eleven years ago. 1 i. e. the first volume of the first part of Froude's Remains. The other three volumes he had not read. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 325 CLXXXIX. TO THE EARL OF BURLINGTON, (Chancellor of the University of London.) Rugby, November 7, 1838. It is with the greatest regret that, after the fullest and fairest deliberation which I have been able to give to the subject, I feel myself obliged to resign my Fellowship in the University of London. The Constitution of the University seems now to be fixed, and it has either begun to work, or will soon do so. After the full discussion given to the question, on which I had the misfortune to differ from the majority of the Senate, I felt that it would be unbecoming to agitate the matter again, and it only remained for me to consider whether the institution of a voluntary Examination in Theology would satisfy, either practically or in theory, those principles which appeared to me to be indispensable. I did not wish to decide this point hastily, but after the fullest considera- tion and inquiry, I am led to the conclusion that the voluntary Examination will not be satisfactory. Practically I fear it will not, because the members of King's College will not be encouraged by their own authorities, so far as I can learn, to subject themselves to it; and the members of University Col- lege may be supposed, according to the principles of their own society, to be averse to it altogether. But, even if it were to answer practically better than I fear it will do, still it does not satisfy the great principle that Christianity should be the base of all public education in this country. Whereas with us it would be no essential part of one system, but merely a branch of know- ledge which any man might pursue if he liked, but which he might also, if he liked, wholly neglect, without forfeiting his claim, according to our esti- mate, to the title of a completely educated man. And further, as it appeared, I think, to the majority of the Senate, that the terms of our Charter positively forbade that which in my judgment is indispensable ; and as there is a painfullness in even appearing to dispute the very law under which our University exists; there seems to me an addi- tional reason why, disapproving as I do very strongly of that which is held to be the main principle of our Charter, I should withdraw myself from the University altogether. I trust I need not assure your Lordship or the Senate, that I am resign- ing my Fellowship from no factious or disappointed feeling, or from any personal motives whatever. Most sincerely shall I rejoice if the University does in practice promote the great interests to which the principle appears to me to be injurious. Most glad shall I be if those whose affection to those interests is, I well know, quite as sincere and lively as mine, shall be found to have judged of their danger more truly as well as more favourably. CHAPTER IX. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, NOVEMBER 1838 TO SEPTEMBER 1841. It is impossible to mistake the change which once more passed over his state of mind during these last years of life — the return, though in a more chastened form, of the youthful energy and se- renity of the earlier part of his career at Rugby — the Martinmas summer succeeding to the dreary storms with which he had been so long encompassed ; and recalling the more genial season, which had preceded them, yet mellowed and refined by the experience of the intervening period. His whole constitution seemed to have received a new spring. "The interest of life," to use his own description of middle age,1 " which had begun to fade for himself, revived with vigour in be- half of his children." The education of his own sons in the school, — his firmer hold of the reins of government, — his greater familiarity with the whole machinery of the place, — the increasing circle of pupils at the Universities, who looked upon him as their second father ; — even the additional bodily health which he gained by resuming in 1838 his summer tours on the continent, — removed that sense of weariness by which he had been at times oppressed amidst his heavy occupations, and bound him to his work at Rugby with a closer tie than ever. But it was not only in his ordinary work that a new influence seemed to act upon him in the determination which he formed to dwell on those positive truths on which he agreed with others, rather than to be always acting on the defensive or offensive. To this various causes had contributed, — the weariness of the contest of the last four years, — the isolation in which he found himself placed after his failure in the London University, — the personal intercoure, now, after an interval of eleven years, renewed with his friend the Chevalier Bunsen, — the recoil which he felt from the skeptical tone of mind which struck him as being at once the cause and effect of the new school of Oxford Theology. It was in this spirit that he struck out all the political allusions of his 1 Sermons, vol. i v. p. 115. LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 327 notes on Thucydides, which were now passing through a second edition. " not as abhorring the evils against which they were directed, less now than I did formerly, but because we have been all of us taught by the lessons of the last nine years, that, in politi- cal matters more especially, moderation and comprehensiveness of views are the greatest wisdom."1 So, again, in the hope of giving a safer and more sober direction to the excitement then prevailing in the country on the subject of National Education, he published a Lecture delivered in 1838 before the Mechanics' Institute at Rugby, on the Divisions of Knowledge ; "feeling that while it was desi- rable on the one hand to encourage Mechanics' Institutes on ac- count of the good which they can do, it was no less important to call attention to their necessary imperfections, and to notice that great good which they cannot do." His " Two Sermons on Prophecy, with Notes," which were published in the same year, and which form the most complete and systematic of any of his fragments on Exegetical Theology, he regarded as a kind of peace offering, " in which it was his earnest desire to avoid as much as possible all such questions as might engender strife, — that is to say, such as are connected with the peculiar opinions of any of the va- rious parties existing within the Church. And it must have been a pleasure to him to witness the gradual softening of public feeling towards himself, not the least perhaps in that peaceful visit of one day to Oxford, to see his friends the Chevalier Bunsen and the aged Poet Wordsworth receive their degrees at the Commemora- tion of 1839, when he also had the opportunity of renewing friendly connexions, which the late unhappy divisions had inter- rupted. His wish for a closer sympathy and union of efforts amongst all good men was further increased, when, in 1839-40, his atten- tion was again called to the social evils of the country, as betraying themselves in the disturbances of Chartism, and the alarm which had possessed him in 1831-32 returned, though in a more chas- tened form, never to leave him. " It haunts me," he said, " I may almost say night and day. It fills me with astonishment to see anti-slavery and missionary societies so busy with the ends of the earth, and yet all the worst evils of slavery and of heathenism are existing amongst ourselves. But no man seems so gifted, or to speak more properly so endowed by God, with the spirit of wis- dom, as to read this fearful riddle truly ; which most Sphinx-like, if not read truly, will most surely be the destruction of us all." To awaken the higher orders to the full extent of the evil, was accordingly his chief practical aim, whether in the Letters which he addressed to the " Hertford Reformer," or in his attempts to or- ganize a Society for that purpose, as described in the ensuing cor- 1 The whole passage in which this occurs (noticing a severe attack upon him intro- duced into an article in the Quarterly Review by " a writer for whom he entertained a very sincere respect ") well illustrates his feeling at this time. (Note on Thucyd. ii. 40, 2nd ed.) 328 LIFE °F DR. ARNOLD. respondence. " My fear with regard to every remedy that involves any sacrifices to the upper classes, is, that the public mind is not yet enough aware of the magnitude of the evil to submit to them. ' Knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed,' was the question, put to Pharaoh by his counsellors ; for unless he did know it, they were aware that he would not let Israel go from serving him." Most of all were these feelings exemplified in his desire, now more strong than ever, for the revival of what he believed to be the true idea of the Church. " I am continually vexed," he writes in 1840, " at being supposed to be a maintainer of negatives — an enemy to other systems or theories, with no positive end of my own. I have told you how it wearies me to be merely opposing Newmanism, or this thing or that thing ; we want an actual truth, and an actual good. I wish to deliver myself, if I can, of my pos- itive notions, — to state that for which I long so eagerly ; that glo- rious Church which Antichrists of all sorts hate and are destroying. If any one would join me in this, I should rejoice ; many more, I feel sure, would agree with me, if they saw that the truth was not destructive nor negative, but most constructive, most positive." His desire for removing any particular grievances in the ecclesi- astical system was proportiouably diminished. The evil to be abated, the good to be accomplished, appeared to him beyond the reach of any single measure; and though in 1840 he signed a Petition for alteration in the subscription to the Liturgy and Arti- cles, yet it had so little bearing on bis general views as not to be worth mention here, except for the purpose of explaining any mis- apprehension of his doing so. It was planned and drawn up en- tirely without his participation, and was only brought to his notice by the accident of two of the principal movers being personal friends of his own. Whatever scruples' he had once had on the 1 This seems the fittest place for noticing a previous passage in his life, connected with the subject of subscription. The graver difficulties, which Mr. Justice Coleridge has noticed as attending his first Ordination, never returned after the year 1820, when he seems to have arrived at a complete conviction both of his conscience and under- standing, that there was no real ground for entertaining them. But, during the inquiries which he prosecuted at Laleham, there arose in his mind scruples on one or two minor questions, which appeared to him for a long time to present insuperable obstacles to his taking any office which should involve a second subscription to the Articles. " I attach," he said, " no importance to my own difference, except that, however trifling be the point, and however gladly I would waive it altogether, still, when I am required to acquiesce in what 1 think a wrong opinion upon it, I must declifie compliance." On these grounds he long hesitated to take Priest's Orders, at least unless he had the opportunity of ex- plaining his objections to the Bishop who ordained him ; and it was in fact on this con- dition that, after his appointment to Rugby, while still in Deacon's orders, he consented to be ordained by the Bishop of his diocese, at that time Dr. Howley ; as appears from the following extracts from letters, of which the first states his intention with regard to another situation in 1826,which he fulfilled in 1828, in the interval between his election at Rugby, and his entrance upon his office. 1. "As my objections turn on points which all, I believe, would consider immaterial in themselves, I would consent to be ordained, if any Bishop would ordain me on an explicit statement of my disagreement on those points. If he would not, then my course would be plain ; and there would be an end of all thought of it at once." 2. " I shall, I believe, be ordained Priest on Trinity Sunday, being ordained by the Bishop of London. I wished to do this, because I wished to administer the Sacrament LIFE OF DR, ARNOLD. 329 subject, had been long since set at rest ; and it was merely from his unwillingness to let others bear alone what he conceived to be an unjust odium, that he joined in a measure, from which he would at this period have been naturally repelled, both by his desire to allay those suspicions against him which he was now so anxious to remove, and by his conviction that the objects which he most wished to attain lay entirely in another direction. But in proportion to the strength of his belief that these objects, whether social or religious, lay beyond the reach of any single measure, or of any individual efforts, was the deep melancholy which possessed him, when he felt the manifold obstacles to their accomplishment. His favourite expression lydiniri dSvvrj nolla yQovt'ovTct TifQ ntjdwog xQarmv, — "the bitterest of all griefs, to see clearly and yet to be able to do nothing," — might stand as the motto of his whole mind, as often before in his life, so most emphatically now. The Sermon on " Christ's Three Comings," in the fifth vol- ume, preached in 1839, truly expresses his sense of the state of public affairs ; — and in looking at I he general aspect of the reli- gious world, " When I think of the Church," he wrote in 1839, "1 could sit down and pine and die." And it is remarkable to observe the contrast between the joyous tone of his sermons on Easter Day, as the birthday of Christ's Religion, and the tone of subdued and earnest regret which marks those, on Whit Sunday, as the birthday of the Christian Church :— "Easter Day we keep as the birthday of a living friend ; Whit Sunday we keep as the birthday of a dead friend." Of these general views, the fourth volume of Sermons, entitled " Christian Life, its Course, its Helps, and its Hindrances," pub- lished in May, 1841, is the most complete expression. It is true,- indeed, that in parts of it the calmer tone of the last few years is disturbed by a revival of the more polemical spirit, which, in the close of 1840, and the beginning of 1841, was agained roused against the Oxford school of Theology. Tbmt school had in the interval made a rapid progress, and in some important points to- tally changed its original aspect : many of those who had at first welcomed it with joy, were now receding from it in dismay ; many of those who had at first looked upon it with contempt and repug- in the chapel at Rugby, and because as I shall have in a manner the oversight of the chaplain, I thought it would be scarce seemly for me as a Deacon to interfere with a Priest ; and after a long conversation with the Bishop of London, I do not object to be ordained." This was the last time that he was troubled with any similar perplexities ; and in later years, as appears from more than one letter of this period, he thought that he had, in his earlier life, overrated the difficulties of subscription. The particular subject of his scru- ples arose from his doubt, founded chiefly on internal evidence, whether the Epistle to the Hebrews did not belong to a period subsequent to the Apostolical age, It may be worth while to mention, that this doubt was eventually removed by an increased study of the Scriptures, and of the early Christian writers. In the ten last years of his life he never hesitated to use and apply it as one of the most valuable parts of the New Testa- ment : and his latest opinion was inclining to be the belief that it might have been written, not merely under the guidance of St. Paul, but by the Apostle himself. 22 330 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. nance, were now become its most active adherents. But he was not a man whose first impressions were easily worn off; and his feelings against it, though expressed in a somewhat different form, were not materially altered ; he found new grounds of offence in the place of old ones that were passing away ; and the Introduc- tion to this volume, — written at a time when his indignation had been recently roused by what appeared to him the sophistry of the celebrated Tract 90, and when the public excitement on this ques- tion had reached its highest pitch, — contains his final and delibe- rate protest against what he regarded as the fundamental errors of the system. Yet, even in this, he brought out more strongly than ever the positive grounds on which he felt himself called upon to oppose it. " It is because my whole mind and soul repose with intense satisfaction on the truths taught by St. John and St. Paul, that I abhor the Judaism of the Newman ites, — it is because I so ear- nestly desire the revival of the Church that T abhor the doctrine of the priesthood." And this volume, as a whole, when taken with the one which has been already noticed as preceding it a few years before, may be said to give his full view of Christianity in its ac- tion,— not on individuals, as in the first volume, or on schools as in the second, — but on the world at large. But whereas the Ser- mons selected from the ordinary course of his preaching, in the Third volume, speak rather of the Christian Revelation in itself, — of its truths, its evidences, and its ultimate objects, — so the Fourth, as its title expresses, was intended to convey the feeling so strongly impressed on his mind during this last period, that these objects would be best attained by a full development of the Church or Christian society, whether in schools, in parishes, or in States. CXC. TO THE REV. J. HEARN. Rugby, November 23, 1838. It would be a great shame if I were to put off writing to you till the holidays, and especially after the long and kind letter which I have received from you. .1 was purposing to write long ago, and to return both to you and Mrs. Hearn my wife's and my own sincere thanks for your kind hospitality to us at Hatford, and to assure you that we both enjoyed our visit exceed- ingly, and have often since recalled it to our memories ; sometimes, I fear, with almost a disposition to envy you the peacefulness and the comfort of your very delightful Parsonage ; the image of which, as I knew it would, has haunted me at times almost painfully, like the phantoms of green fields which visit the sailor when he is attacked with sickness far out at sea. When one is well, there is a kindling pleasure in being borne rapidly over the great sea, and living in all the stir of the great highway of nations. But when health fails, then what before was pleasantly exciting becomes ha- rassing ; and one indulges in a fond craving for rest. Here, thank God, I have not suffered from Jailing health, but I have been much annoyed with the moral evils which have come under my notice ; and then a great school is very trying. It never can present images of rest and peace ; and when the LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 331 spring and activity of youth is altogether unsanctified by any thing pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is as dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, amongst the poor, whatever of sin exists, there is sure also to be enough of sud'ering ; poverty, sickness, and old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But, with boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health, and youth ; and these are really awful to behold, when one must feel that they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful, than when one does see all holy and noble thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of pain or infirmity or priva- tion ; but springing up as by God's immediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh and beautiful ; full of so much hope for this world as well as for Heaven. All this has very much driven the Newmanites out of my head ; and indeed, while I am here, I see and hear very little of them, but I quite think they are a great evil, and I fear a growing one ; though on this point I find that opinions differ. I could not express my sense of what Bunsen is without seeming to be exaggerating; but I think if you could hear and see him. even for one half hour, you would understand my feeling towards him. He is a man in whom God's graces and gifts are more united than in any other person whom I ever saw. I have seen men as holy, as amiable, as able ; but I never knew one who was all three in so extraordinary a degree, and combined with a knowledge of things new and old, sacred and profane, so rich, so accurate, so profound, that I never knew it equalled or approached by any man. November 28th. — This letter has waited for five days, and I must now manage to finish it. I have been much distressed, also, by the accounts of the alarming agitation which is going on in the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire ; an agitation not political merely, but social, complaining of the unequal reward of labour, and inveighing against capi- tal and capitalists in no gentle terms. Believing this to be peculiarly our sore spot, any irritation in it always disturbs me ; and I have been tempted to write again on the subject, as I did in 1831 in the Sheffield Letters. One man's writing can do but little, I know ; but there is the wish, '• liberare animam meam," and the hope that all temperate and earnest writing on such a subject must do good as far as it is read, — must lead men to think and feel quietly, if it be but for a moment. My history gets on but slowly, but still it does make some progress, as much as I can expect here. I am trying to learn a little Hebrew, but I do not know whether I shall be able to make much of it ; it is so difficult to find time to learn, and so irksome to remember the minute rules about the alteration of the vowels. But I should like on many accounts, to make some progress in it. Is it not marvellous that they can now read the old Egpytian readily, and understand its gram- mar? It combines, as I hear, some of the characteristic peculiarities of the Semitic languages with others belonging to the Indo-Germanic family, as if it belonged to a period previous to the branching off" of these two great families from their common stock. But these Egyptian discoveries are likely to be one of the greatest wonders of our age. What think you of actual papyrus MSS. as old as the reign of Psammitichus 7 and these, too, in great numbers, and quite legible. CXCI. TO THE CHEVALIER BUNSEN. Rugby, November 9, 1838. . . . . . .1 thank you very much for your valuable notes on my MS. about the Church. I am sure you will believe me when I say that on 332 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. such a matter especially, "paene religio mihi est alitor ac tu sentire." And in one main point you agree with the Archbishop of Dublin, who is a man so unlike you, and yet so able, that your agreement on any point is of very great weight. You interpret, I think, as he does, our Lord's words, " that His kingdom was not of this world," and you hold that the Church may not wield the temporal sword. This is undoubtedly the turning point of the whole question ; and if you are right in these positions, it follows undoubt- edly that the Church never can be a sovereign society, and therefore can never be identical with a Christian State. Now I want to know what principles and objects a Christian State can have, if it be really Christian, more or less than those of the Church. In whatever degree it differs from the Church, it becomes, I think, in that exact proportion unchristian. In short, it seems to me that the State must be " the world," if it be not " the Church :" but for a society of Christians to be " the world" seems monstrous. Nor can I understand, if this be so, how any Christian can take a part, otherwise than as passively obeying, in the concerns of Government. If i\ no).nf(a fj/naiv lv ovoavw, then we are in the world as livot or (iitowoi,, and should not be " curiosi in aliena republica." I think, then, that St. Paul's command to the Christians of Corinth would apply to us, and that we ought never to carry a cause into any other than ecclesiastical courts ; for, if the civil courts are not really Church courts, they are not the courts of the ayioi, but of the world ; and the world cannot and ought not to judge between Christian and Christian. When Christ said, that his kingdom was not of this world, and forbade James and John to call down fire from heaven, &c, His meaning seems to me to have been this, that moral and religious superiority, i. e. the being Christians, did not confer any title to physical and external dominion.1 The saints, as such, are not to claim to exercise power ; and this, I think, is the bar to religious persecution, because it is not the possession of religious su- periority that warrants us in exercising physical power over other men. This bars the fanatical doctrine, that the earth belongs to God's saints ; it bars also, as I think, all minor phases of the same doctrine ; and especially, I think, it condemns the maintaining by force a Protestant Establishment in a Roman Catholic country, as we do in Ireland. But, — government being in itself good, and declared to be God's instru- ment for the punishment of evil and the advancement of good, — what possi- ble objection can there be to its being exercised by Christians, when they become possessed of it according to the ordinary laws of human society ? And if Christians exercise it they must do it either on the principles of the world, or of the Church ; but it can be only on the latter, for otherwise they would be false Christians. Again, the I'oyov of a Christian State and Church is absolutely one and the same ; nor can a difference be made out which shall not impair the Christian character of one or both ; as, e. g. if the i\>yov of the State be made to be merely physical or economical good, or that of the Church be made to be the performing of a ritual service. It is said that the State can never be kept-sufficiently pure to be worthy of being considered as the Church ; but this to me is a confusion. Purity and extent, whether as Church or State, are to a certain degree incompati- ble. A large church relaxes discipline, and for this very reason, F will not belong to the Church of England. On the other hand, States can and have enforced the greatest strictness of life, as at Sparta ; and the law can always insist upon any thing which is called for by public opinion. To make public opinion really Christian is difficult ; but it is a difficulty which 1 " Was Theodosius right or wrong in changing the temples into churches ? Wrong, if he did it because in his belief Christianity was the only true faith, — right, if he did it because the Roman world was become Christian, and chose to have its public worship Christian also." — MS. Comments on Archbishop Whateley's Kingdom of Christ. LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 333 exists as much in a Church as in a Christian state ; those who are nominal Christians in one relation will be so in the other. I could add much more on this point; but this will be enough to show you that I do not differ from you without consideration. But, as the book is in no danger of being pub- lished yet, there will be ample time to go over the question again fully, and also to add those explanations which the naked statements in the MS. seem to require. Another point, on which I do not seem as yet fully to enter into your views, relates to what you say of the Sacraments. I do not quite under- stand the way in which you seem to connect the virtue of external. ordinan- ces with the fact of the Incarnation. My own objection to laying a stress on the material elements, — as distinct from the moral effect of the Communion, or of the becoming introduced into the Christian Society,— is very strong, because I think that such a notion is at variance with the essential character of Christianity. I am sure that in this we agree ; but yet I think that we should express ourselves differently about the Sacraments, and here I be- lieve that you have got hold of a truth which is as yet to me dark ; just as I cannot understand music, yet nothmg doubt that it is my fault, and not that of music. CXCII. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Fox How, January 12, 1839. When I found how entirely I agreed with your Sermon on Private Judgment, it struck me that I had taken rather too indifferently the sort of vague odium which has been attached to my opinions, or supposed opinions, for the last ten years in Oxford ; that I had forfeited a means of influence which I might have had, and which would have been a valuable addition to what I have enjoyed among my own pupils at Rugby. I do not mean any thing political, nor indeed as to the right or the wrong of my opinions on any matter, because I have held them decidedly and expressed them openly, and people who differ from me will of course think me wrong. But I think I have endured too quietly a suspicion affecting me more directly professionally ; a suspicion of heterodoxy such as was raised against Hamp- den, and which would exclude me from preaching before the University; an office to which otherwise I think I should have a fair claim, from my standing, and from my continued connexion with the University through the successive generations of my pupils. Now this suspicion is, I contend, per- fectly unfounded in itself, and at the present moment it is ridiculous ; because the Newmanites are far more at variance with the Articles, Liturgy, and Constitution of the Church of England than any clergymen have been within my memory ; and yet even those who most differ from them do not endea- vour, so far as I know, to hinder them from preaching in Oxford. I am per- fectly aware that my opinion about the pretended Apostolical succession is different from that of most individual clergymen, but I defy any man to show that it is different from the opinion of the Church of England ; and, if not, it is fairly an open question on which any man may express his own opinion peaceably ; and he is the schismatic who would insist upon determining in his own way what the Church has not determined. But in what is commonly called doctrine, as distinct from discipline, I do not think that any thing can be found in any of my sermons, published or not published, which is more at variance with the doctrines of the Church than what is to be found in the sermons of any other man who has written as many ; and not only so, but I think there is no negative difference; that is, I think there would be found no omission of any points which the Reformers would have thought essen- tial, bating some particular questions which were important then, and are now gone by. I am perfectly willing to bear my portion of odium for all that 334 LIFE °F DR. ARNOLD. I really have written, and the Newmanites may fairly speak against my opinions as I do against theirs. But a vague charge of holding, not wrong, but technically unorthodox opinions, affects a man's professional usefulness in a way that in any other profession would be thought intolerable ; and, in fact, in other professions men would be ashamed or afraid to breathe it. I have gone on with it quietly for a long time, partly because no charge has ever, been brought against me which I could answer, and partly because, whilst I was so fully engaged at Rugby, I was not practically reminded of it. But as I grow older, and the time is approaching more and more when I must, in the natural course of things, be thinking of leaving Rugby, and when I see a state of things in Oxford which greatly needs the help of every man interested about the University, — when I see that you are doing a great deal of good, and without any question of your orthodoxy, so far as I know, and yet know that in my constant preaching there is as little that any body could call heterodox as in yours, — it makes me feel that I ought not silently to bear a sort of bad name, which to man or dog is little better than hang- ing ; and that it would be desirable, if there really is a similar feeling against me to that which exists against Hampdeti, to get it if possible into some tan- gible shape. I wish you would think of this matter a little, and give me your judgment. We are all well and enjoying this rest, which enables me to work and to gain refreshment at the same time. CXCIII. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ. Fox How, January 20, 1839. I have often- thought of you and the Courant during this new excitement of the operative population. Most gladly would I join in any feasible attempt to check this terrible evil, which men seem to regard as so hopeless that they would rather turn their eyes away from it, and not look at it till they must. But that " must " will come, I fear, but too soon ; simply because they will not look at it now I am inclined to think, that the Poor Law, though I quite believe it to be in itself just in its principle, has yet done more moral harm, by exasperating the minds of the poor, than it can possibly have done good. I am very far, however, from wishing to return to the old system ; but I think that the Poor Law should be accompanied by an organized system of Church charity, and also by some acts designed in title, as well as in substance, for the relief of the poor, and that by other means than by driving them into economy by terror. Economy itself is a virtue which appears to me to imply an existing pre- vious competence ; it can surely have no place in the most extreme poverty ; and for those who have a competence to require it of those who have not, seems to me to be something like very mockery I shall be in London, I hope, on the 6th, and shall be staying at No. 1, Tavistock Square. If I can see you either there, or by calling on you in Ludgate Street, it will give me much pleasure. CXCIV. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE. Rugby, February 25, 1839. I read and have got Gladstone's book, and quite agree with you in my admiration of its spirit throughout ; I also like the sub- stance of about half of it; the rest of course appears to me erroneous. But it must be good to have a public man writing on such a subject, and it de- lights me to have a good protest against that wretched doctrine of Warbur- ton's, that the State has only to look after body and goods. " Too late," LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 335 however, are the words which I should be inclined to affix to every plan for reforming society in England ; we are engulphed, I believe, inevitably, and must go down the cataract; although ourselves, i. e. you and I, may be in Hezekiah's case, and not live to see the catastrophe. I thank you very much for your truly kind offer of assistance about the Roman History. If any man were reading Augustine or any other writer for his own purposes, and took notes of such points as you mention, there is no doubt that his notes would be very useful to me ; but there is this objec- tion against asking any body to read for my purposes, that the labour saved to me might not be in proportion to that which I was imposing on him. Such notes as you suggest would be like an exceedingly good index ; but they must rather guide my own researches than supersede them ; for it is, I think, absolutely necessary to look through for oneself all the most important works which relate to one's period of history. I shall save myself many or most of the Byzantine writers by stopping at any rate in the eighth century, and confining myself chiefly to the Latin empire. I think that, hard as the Agrarian questions are, they connect themselves with one almost harder, namely, " How can slavery be really dispensed with ?" It is, of course, perfectly easy to say that we will have no slaves, but it is not quite so easy to make all the human inhabitants of a country what free citizens ought to be ; and the state of our railway navigators and cotton operatives is scarcely better for themselves than that of slaves, either physically or morally, and is far more perilous to society. It is when I see all these evils, which I believe the Church was meant to remove, that I groan over that fatal system which has so utterly destroyed it ; that system of substituting unrealities for realities, which Newman and his party are striving to confirm and to propagate. But -I feel also, that even a sham is better to most minds than nothing at all ; and that New- manism ought not to be met with negatives, by trying to prove it to be false, but by something positive, such as the real living Church would be. And how is the Church to be revived? So Nevvmanism, I suppose, will grow and grow, till it provokes a reaction of infidelity, and then infidelity will grow and grow, till up starts Newmanism again in such form as it may wear in the twentieth or twenty-first century. CXCV. * TO A. P. STANLEY, ESQ. Rugby, February 27, 1839. The stir about. Church matters, of which Gladstone's book is a symptom, interests me, of course, and on the whole delights me. Any thing on such a point is, I believe, better than the mere ignorance of inditference. But I am more and more anxious to organize, I do not say a party, for I dislike all parties ; but a system of action for those who ear- nestly look to the Church as the appointed and only possible means of all earthly improvement for society, whether in its larger divisions or in its smaller. Nothing can or ought to be done by merely maintaining negatives ; I will neither write nor talk if I can help it against Newmanism, but for that true Church and Christianity, which all kinds of evil, each in its ap- pointed time, have combined to corrupt and destroy. It seems to me, that a great point might be gained by urging the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which has been long, quoad the reality, dead. In large towns many worthy men might be found able and willing to undertake the office out of pure love, if it were understood to be not necessarily a step to the Presbyterial order, nor at all incompatible with lay callings. You would get an immense gain by a great extension of the Church, — by a softening down that pestilent distinction between clergy and laity, which is so closely linked with the priestcraft system, — and by the actual benefits, temporal and 336 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. spiritual, which such an additional number of ministers would ensure to the whole Christian congregation. And I believe that the proposal involves in it nothing which ought to shock even a Newmanite. The Canon Law, I think, makes a very wide distinction between the Deacon and the Presbyter ; the Deacon according to it, is half a Layman ; and could return at any time to a lay condition altogether ; and I suppose no one is so mad as to maintain that a minister abstaining from all secular callings is a matter of necessity, seeing that St. Paul carried on his trade of tentmaker even when he was an Apostle. Of course the Ordination Service might remain just as it is ; for in fact no alteration in the law is needed ;— it is only an alteration in cer- tain customs which have long prevailed, but which have really no authority. It would be worth while, I think, to consult the Canon Law and our own Ecclesiastical Law, so far as we have any, with regard to the Order of Deacons. I have long thought that some plan of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist might hereafter be burst asun- der like the Dragon of Bel's temple. CXCVI. * TO J. P. GELL, ESQ.. Rugby, March 15, 1839. I have just received a letter from Sir John Franklin, who, as you know, is Governor of Van Diemen's Land, accompanied by one from the Colonial Office, asking me to recommend some man as Head Master of a great school in Van Dtemen's Land, which it is wished to establish on the very highest scale, in the hope that it may hereafter become a College or Uni- versity for that part of the world. [After stating the nature of the situation.] He enters at length and with all his heart into the plan ; and from what he tells me of the capabilities and the wants of the situation, I know of no man whom I could so much wish to see intrusted with it as yourself, if you should feel disposed to let me name you to Lord Normartby. It is a most noble field, and in Franklin himself you will have a fellow labourer, and a Governor with and under whom it would do one's heart good to work. He wants a Christian, a gentleman, and a scholar, — a member of one of our Universities, — a man of ability and of vigour of character, — to become the father of the education of a whole quarter of the globe; and to assist, under God's blessing, and with the grace of Christ's Spirit, in laying the founda- tions of all good and noble principles, not only in individual children, but in an infant nation, which must hereafter influence the world largely for good or for evil. And I think that, if you could feel disposed to undertake this great missionary labour, you would work at it in the spirit of Christ's servant, and would become the instrument of blessings, not to be numbered, to thousands, and would for yourself obtain a y.donov l\>yov, such as can rarely be the fortune of the most ambitious. Let me know your mind as soon as you can decide on a matter which you, I am sure, will not treat lightly. Give my kindest regards to your father, towards whom I feel more guilty than towards any one else ; for I am afratd that he and your mother will not thank me for making such a proposal. But I believe you to be so eminently the man for such an undertaking, that I could not acquit myself of my commission to the Government, without naming it to you. Your brother is very well, and writing Greek verse close by my side, seeing that it is Fourth Lesson. I hope that you can give me good accounts of your brother Charles. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 337 CXCVII. TO THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE. (Relating to the College in Van Dieinen's Land.) Rugby, March 19, 1839. Some expressions in your letter lead me to ask whether, if the person appointed to the school were not in orders, there would be an "objection on the part of the Government to his entering into them before he left England 1 Because, I think that many persons best fitted to carry on the work of education, would be actually unwilling to engage in it unless they were allowed to unite the clerical character with that of the teacher. This feeling is, I confess, entirely my own. Even in a far lower point of view, as to what regards the position of a schoolmaster in society, you are well aware that it has not yet obtained that respect in England, as to be able to stand by itself in public opinion as a liberal profession ; it owes the rank which it holds to its connexion with the profession of a clergyman, for that is acknow- ledged universally in England to be the profession of a gentleman. Mere teaching, like mere literature, places a man, I think, in rather an equivocal position ; he holds no undoubted station in society by these alone ; for nei- ther education nor literature have ever enjoyed that consideration and gen- eral respect in England, which they enjoy in France and in Germany. But a far higher consideration is this, that he who is to educate boys, if he is fully sensible of the importance of his business, must be unwilling to lose such great opportunities as the clerical character gives him, by enabling him to address them continually from the pulpit, and to administer the Com- munion to them as they become old enough to receive it. And in a remote colony it would be even more desirable than in England, that the head of a great institution for education should be able to stand in this relation to his pupils ; and I am quite sure that the spirit of proselytism, which some persons appear so greatly to dread, would no more exist in a good and sensible clergyman, than in a good and sensible layman. Your master must.be a member of some Church or other, if he is not a minister of it ; if he is a sincere member of it, and fitted to give religious instruction at all, he must be anxious to inculcate its tenets ; but, if he be a man of judgment and hon- esty, and of a truly Catholic spirit, he will find it a still more sacred duty not to abuse the confidence of those parents of different persuasions who m ay have intrusted their children to his care, and he will think besides that the true spirit of a Christian teacher is not exactly the spirit of proselytism. I must beg to apologize for having trespassed on your time thus long. CXCVIII. * TO E. WISE, ESQ.. Rugby, March 20, 1839. Your letter gave me very great pleasure, and I was really obliged to you for writing at such length, and giving me a full account of all the circum- stances of your present situation. Every thing in a position like yours de- pends on the disposition and character of the family ; and where these are good and kind, the life of a tutor may be as pleasant, I think, as it is useful and respectable I trust that your health is completely restored, and that you will be able to read gently, without feeling it a matter of necessity ; a sensation which I suppose must aggravate the pressure greatly when a man is reading, and feels himself not strong. But, on the other hand, you need not think that your own reading will now have no object, because you are engaged with young boys. Every improvement of your own powers and knowledge, tells immediately upon them : and indeed I hold that a man is only fit to teach so long as he is himself learning daily. If the mind once becomes stagnant, 338 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. it can give no fresh draught to another mind ; it is drinking out of a pond, instead of from a spring. And whatever you read tends generally to your own increase of power, and will be felt by you in a hundred ways hereafter. CXCIX. * TO J. P. GELL, ESQ. (On the death of his brother, Charles Gell.) Rugby, April 5, 1839. Your letter ought not to grieve me, but it was a shock for which I was not prepared, as I had not dreamed that your brother's departure was so near. The thoughts of him will be amongst the most delightful of all my thoughts of Rugby pupils ; so amiable and so promising here, and so early called to his rest and glory. I do feel more and more for my pupils, and for my children also, that I can readily and thankfully see them called away, when they are to all human appearance assuredly called home. This is a lesson which advancing years impress very strongly. We can then better tell how little are those earthly things of which early death deprives us, and how fearful is the risk of this world's struggle. May God bless us through His Son, and make us to come at last, be it sooner or later, out of this strug- gle conquerors. CC. TO THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE. July 1, 1839. Nothing can be more proper than that the Head Master or Principal of the proposed School should be subject to the control of the Governor, or of the Bishop, should there be one in the colony. I am only anxious to understand clearly whether he is to be in any degree under the control of any local Board, whether lay or clerical ; because, if he were, I could not conscientiously recommend him to take an office which I am sure he would shortly find himself obliged to abandon. Uniform experience shows, I think, so clearly the mischief of subjecting schools to the ignorance and party feelings of persons wholly unacquainted with the theory and practice of education, that I feel it absolutely necessary to understand fully the intentions of the Government on this question. CCI. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Rugby, May 8, 1839. [After speaking of a decision respecting the Foundationers in Rugby School.] The world will not know that it makes no earthly difference to me in a pecuniary point of view, whether a boy is in the lower school or the upper ; and that if I had discouraged the lower school, and especially the Foundationers, who do not interfere with the number of boarders, I should have been quarrelling with my own bread and butter. Lord Lang- dale did not understand the difference which I had always made between Non-foundationers and Foundationers, as I have indeed always advised people not to send their sons as boarders under twelve, but have never ap- plied the same advice to Foundationers living under their parents' roof. But it is so old a charge against masters of Foundation Schools, that they dis- courage the Foundationers, in order to have boarders who pay them better, that fdare say Lord Langdale and half the world will believe that I have been acting on this principle ; and my old friends of the Tory newspapers are quite likely to gibe at me as liking a little jobbing in my own particular LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 339 case, as well as other pretended Reformers. Even you, perhaps, do not know that I receive precisely as much money for every Foundationer, if he be only a little boy in the first form, as I do for any Non-foundationer at the head of the school ; so that I have a direct interest — since all men are sup- posed to act from interest — in increasing the number of Foundationers, and no earthly interest or object in diminishing them. I think you will not won- der at my being a little sensitive on the present occasion, for a judge's deci- sion is a very different thing from an article in a common newspaper ; and as I believe that nothing of the latter sort has ever disturbed my equanimity, so I should not wish to regard the former lightly. So I should very much like to hear from you what you think is to be done, — if any thing. After all, I could laugh heartily at the notion of my being suspected of a little snug corruption, after having preached Reform all my life. CCII. TO SIR T. S. PASLEY, BART. Rugby, May 10, 1839. Your absence will be a sad blank in our Westmoreland visits, if we are still allowed to continue them. But seven years is a long term for human life, and so long have we been permitted to go down sum- mer and winter, and return with all our family entire and in good health ; so that I cannot but fancy that something or other may happen to break this happy uniformity of our lives. The state of public affairs is not inviting, and I rejoice that we take in no daily paper. It is more painful than enough to read of evils which one can neither cure nor palliate. The real evil which lies at the bottom of the Chartist agitation, is, I believe, too deep for any human remedy, unless the nation were possessed with a spirit of wisdom and of goodness, such as I fear will never be granted to us after we have for so many centuries neglected the means which we have had. So far from find- ing it hard to believe that repentance can never be too late, my only wonder is that it should ever be otherwise than too late, so instantaneous and so lasting are the consequences of any evil once committed. I find itf very hard to hinder my sense of this from quite oppressing me and making me forget the many blessings of my own domestic condition. But perhaps it comes from my fondness for History, that political things have as great a reality to my mind, as things of private life, and the life of a nation becomes distinct as that of an individual. We are going to have a confirmation here, by the Bishop of Worcester, next month in the chapel, as I wished to have one every two years at least, for otherwise many of the boys go abroad and are never confirmed at all. And I think 'that we shall have a third painted window up in the chapel, before the holidays. CCIII. TO ARCHDEACON HARE. Fox How, June 21, 1839. I am sure that you will have sympathized' with me in the delight which I have felt in reading Niebuhr's Letters; t^tat letter in particular to a Young Student in Philology, appears to me invaluable. I think that you and Thirlwall have much to answer for in not having yet completed your translation of the third volume of the History. It is only when that volume shall have become generally known, that English readers will learn to appreciate Niebuhr's excellence as a narrator. At present I am continually provoked by hearing people say, that he indeed prepared excellent materials for an historian, but that he did not himself write His- tory. 340 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. I am obliged to superintend a new edition of my Thucydides, which in- terferes rather with the progress of my History. And the first volume of Thucydides is so full of errors, both of omission and commission, that to re- vise it is a work of no little labour. You would rejoice in the good that Lee is doing at Birmingham ; I do not think that there is, in all England, a man more exactly in his place than he is now. CCIV. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (E.) Fox How, June 22, 1839. I was much obliged to you for your last kind letter, and I would have answered it immediately had it not arrived just at our most busy time, at the close of the summer half-year. I do not wonder at your interest about the friend whom you speak of, and should be very glad to be of any assistance to you in the matter. Priestley's statements, as you probably know, were answered by Horsley, and I believe sufficiently answered; but neither of the controversialists was very profound, or, as I should fear, very fair ; and but little real benefit can be derived from the works of either. Priestley's argu- ments now would be repeated nowhere, I suppose, but in England, and in England only amongst a sect so destitute of theological and critical learning as the Unitarians. It goes on two assumptions : first, that the Christian Church of Jerusalem held Unitarian opinions ; and secondly, that the Church of Jerusalem was the standard by which the tenets of the other churches were to be measured. Now the second of these assumptions is clearly wrong, and the first is probably so ; but we have very small evidence as to the opinions of the Church of Jerusalem, and so a dispute may be maintained for ever on that point, by those who would confine their attention to it, and who do not see that the real stress of the question lies elsewhere. But the Epistles of Ignatius are a decided proof that neither he nor the Churches of Asia were Unitarian ; and his language is the more to be valued, because it is evidently not controversial, nor does he ever dream of dwelling on Christ's Divinity as a disputed point, but as a thing taken by all Christians for granted. I do not understand, however, how an Unitarian can consist- ently transfer the argument from the Scripture to the opinion of the early Church. As he rejects the authority of the Church, without scruple, where it is clearly to be ascertained, and where it speaks the opinions of Christians of all parts of the world, through more than seventeen centuries, it is idle to refer to the single Church of Jerusalem during a period of twenty or thirty years, unless he can show that that Church was infallible, and its decisions of equal weight with those of the Scripture. If he says that St. Paul and St. John corrupted the purity of the true Gospel, which was kept only by St- James and the Church of Jerusalem, — that no doubt would be an intelligible argument ; but to accept St. Paul and St. John as inspired Apostles, and then to plead the opinions of theJChurch of Jerusalem against them, is an absurdity. And as for the Unitarian interpretations of St. Paul and St. John, they are really such monstrosrties of extravagance, that to any one used to the critical study of the ancient writers, they appear too had to have been ever maintained in earnest. And thus, wherever Unitarianism has existed, together with any knowledge of criticism or philology, as in Germany, it has at once assumed that the Apostles were not infallible, and that they overrated the dignity of Christ's Person. So impossible is it to doubt what St. John meant in so many passages of his Gospel, and what St. Paul meant in so many passages ol his Epistles. It gives me the greatest pleasure to find that you still enjoy your situation, and that being the case, you are likely, I think, to find it more and more agreeable, the longer you hold it. LIFE OF DR. ARXOLD. 341 CCV. TO REV. G. CORNISH. Fox How, July 6, 1839. As I believe that the English universities are the best places in the world for those who can profit by them, so I think for the idle and self-indulgent they are about the very worst, and I would far rather send a boy to Van Diemen's Land, where he must work for his bread, than send him to Oxford to live in luxury, without any desire in his mind to avail himself of his advantages. Childishness in boys, even of good abilities, seems to me to be a growing fault, and I do not know to what to ascribe' it, except to the great number of exciting books of amusement, like Pickwick and Nickleby, Bentley's Magazine, &c. &c. These completely satisfy all the intellectual appetite of a boy, which is rarely very voracious, and leave him totally palled, not only for his regular work, which I could well excuse in comparison, but for good literature of all sorts, even for History and for Poetry. I went up to Oxford to the Commemoration, for the first time for twenty- one years, to see Wordsworth and Bunsen receive their degrees ; and to me, remembering how old Coleridge inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Wordsworth, when his name was in general a by-word, it was strik- ing to witness the thunders of applause, repeated over and over again, with which he was greeted in the theatre by Under-graduates and Masters of Arts alike. CCVI. TO CHEVALIER BUNSEN. Eugby, August 2^, 1839. I intend this letter to reach you on the 25th of August, a day which has a double claim on my remembrance ; for it is my little Susy's birthday also, and I wish it to convey to you, though most inadequately, my congratula- tion to Mrs. Bunsen and all your family on the return of that day, and my earnest wishes for all happiness for you and lor them ; and, so far as we may wish in such matters, my earnest desire that you may be long spared to your friends, your family, your country, and above all to Christ's Holy Catholic Church, in whose cause I know you are ever labouring, and which at this hour needs the utmost service of all her true members, amidst such various dangers as now threaten her from within and from without. I am glad to think that this one birthday more you will pass in England. We shall see you and all your family, I confidently trust, ere very long. Meanwhile you will be glad to hear that and I enjoyed our journey freatly, and, although we saw but little of _ Italy, yet that the South of 'ranee even surpassed our expectations, and the physical benefit to my health and strength was as complete as I could desire. Aries interested me exceedingly ; it was striking to see the Amphitheatre and Theatre so close to each other, and the two marble pillars still standing in the proscenium of the theatre, reminded me of the Forum at Rome. I was also much struck with the deserted Port of Frejus, and the mole and entrance tower of the old harbour, rising now out of a plain of grass. The famous plain of stones or plain of Crau, was very interesting, for it lies now in precisely the same state as it was 2300 years ago, or more, when it was made the scene of one of the adventures of Hercules ; and the remarkably Spanish character of the town, population, and neighbourhood of Salon, between Aries and Aix, was something quite new to me. In Italy we only went from Nice to Turin, by the Col di Tenda, and certainly in my recollections of this year's tour, all images of beauty and interest are connected with France, rather than with Italy. The intense drought had spoiled every thing, and the main 1 See Sermons, vol. iv. pp. 39-41. 342 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. Alps themselves, as seen in a perfectly clear morning from the neighbour- hood of Turin, exhibited scarcely more than patches of snow on their sum- mits ; the eifect of a long range of snowy summits was completely gone. Still I had a great delight in setting foot once more, if it was but in a mere corner of Italy ; sights which I had half forgotten have taken again a fresh place in my memory; the style of the buildings — the " congesta manu prge- ruptis oppida saxis " — the cultivation of the valleys — the splendour of the churches — nay, the very roguery and lying of the people, and their marvel- lous ignorance — rose up before me again as something which I did not wish to lose altogether out of my memory. I paid a long visit to Letronne at Paris, and Peyrou at Turin. Both were very civil and agreeable, and gave me several of their works. Peyrou had received many letters from Niebuhr, which he showed to me with seeming pleasure — but he had never seen him. It was sad to me to find that he too had a lively sense of the grievous ignorance of English writers on points of philology. He mentioned to me with dismay, and read to me extracts from a Coptic dictionary lately published, proh pudor ! at Oxford, which I had never seen, or even heard of the writer's name, nor do I remember it now — but it was worthy to rank with Sir W. Bethani's extravagances about the Keltic languages. I tried hard at Provence to find a Provencal Grammar, but I could not succeed, and they told me there was no such thing ; they only showed me a grammar for teaching French to Provencals, whch they wanted to persuade me was all the same thing. It seems that the Provenqal language is less fortunate than the Welsh, in having wealthy and educated persons desirous of encouraging it. I could not find that it was at all used now as a written language, although it seemed to me to be as distinct from French as Italian is. [After questions relating to Sillig's Edition of Pliny.] I have read your speech at Oxford, and admire your indefatigable exertions to see and hear every thing in England. But I feel the state of public affairs so deeply that I cannot bear either to read, or hear, or speak, or write about them. Only I would commend them to God's care and deliverance, if the judgment is not now as surely fixed as that of Babylon. CCVII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Kugby, September 25, 1839. I do not know where this letter may find you, but I hope that it may be at Ottery ; and that you may be enjoying to the full your rest from work, and the society of your family, and the actual beauty and the old recollec- tions of your home. We have been at work now nearly seven weeks, so that the holidays live but in remote memory, and I am very far from wishing them to come again very speedily ; for they imply that a half year is gone, and there is so much that I would fain do, that I cannot wish time to pass away very quickly. The South of France put me into the best bodily condition in which I can almost ever remember to have been ; and happily the effect of such a medicine does not immediately evaporate; it really seems to wind up the machine for three or four months The Roman remains at Aries, the papal remains at Avignon, and the Spanish-like char- acter of the country between Aries and Aix were exceedingly interesting. I thought of old days when I used to read Southey's raptures about Spain and Spaniards as I looked out on the street at Salon, where a fountain was playing under a grove of plane trees, and the population were all in felt hats, grave and quiet, and tlieir Provencal language sounding much more like Spanish than French. Then we had the open heaths covered with the dwarf ilex and Roman pine, and the rocks actually breathing fragrance from the number of their aromatic plants. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 343 We arrived at Rugby from London in the afternoon of the day on which the school opened ; and when we reached the station, we found there my wife and all her party from Fox How, who had arrived barely five minutes before us, so that we actually all entered our own house together. We had a very large admission of new boys, larger than I ever remember since I have been at Rugby, so that the school is now, I believe, quite full. And since that time we have gone on working much as usual ; only Thucydides is still upon hand, and interferes with the History, and will do so, I fear, for another month. I have just got the fourth volume of your Uncle's Literary Remains, which makes me regard him with greater admiration than ever. He seems to hold that point which I have never yet been able to find in any of our English Divines, and the want of which so mars my pleasure in reading them. His mind is at once rich and vigorous, and comprehensive and critical ; while the rjd-oq is so pure and so lively all the while. He seems to me to love Truth really, and therefore Truth presented herself to him not negatively, as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received ; but she filled him, as it were, heart and mind, embuing him with her very self, so that all his being comprehended her fully and loved her ardently ; and that seems to me to be true wisdom It was just at the foot of the Col di Tenda that I got hold of an English newspaper containing a charge of yours, in which the Chartists were noticed. I was glad to find that your mind had been working in that di- rection ; and that you spoke strongly as to the vast importance of the sub- ject. I would give anything to be able to organize a Society "for drawing public attention to the state of the labouring classes throughout the kingdom." Men do not think of the fearful state in which we are living ; if they could once be brought to notice and to appreciate the evil, I should not even yet despair that the remedy may be found and applied ; even though it is the so- lution of the most difficult problem ever yet proposed to man's wisdom, and the greatest triumph over selfishness ever yet required of his virtue. . A society might give the alarm, and present the facts to the notice of the public. It was thus that Clarkson overthrew the slave trade; and it is thus, I hope, that the system of Transportation has received its death blow. I have desired Fellows to send you one of the copies of a Lecture which 1 once showed you, about the Divisions of Knowledge, and which I have just printed, in the hope of getting it circulated among the various Mechanics' Institutes, where something of the kind is, I think, much wanted. Let me hear from you when you can. CCVIII. TO SIR T. S. PASLEY. Rugby, September 9, 1839. Our tour was most delightful, and put me into such a per- fect state of health as I never can gain from any thing but travelling abroad, where one can neither read nor write, nor receive letters ; and therefore the mind is perfectly at rest, while the body is constantly enjoying air and exercise, light food, and early hours. I never before saw so much of the Mediterranean, and the weather was so perfect that it never could have been more enjoyable. I thought of you particularly when we were out in a boat in the midst of Toulon Harbour, and rowing under the stern of the Montebello, which seemed to me a very fine looking three-decker. We went over the Arsenal, which I thought very inferior to Portsmouth, but the magnificence of the harbour exceeds any thing that I had ever seen ; — how it would stand in your more experienced, as well as better judging eyes, I know not Provence far sur- 344 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. passed my expectations ; the Roman remains at Aries are magnificent ; and the prisons in the Pope's Palace, at Avignon, were one of the most striking things I ever saw in my life. In the self-same dungeon the roof was still black with the smoke of the Inquisition fires, in which men were tortured or burnt ; and, as you looked down a trap-door into an apartment below, the walls were still marked with the blood of the victims whom Jourdan Coupe Tete threw down there into the Ice-house below in the famous massacre of 1791. It was very awful to see such traces of the two great opposite forms of all human wickedness, which I know not how to describe better than by calling them Priestcraft and Benthamism, or, if you like, White and Red Jacobinism. I am still in want of a master, and I shall want another at Christmas, but I cannot hear of a man to suit me We are also in almost equal distress for a pony for my wife ; and there, too, we want a rare union of qualities ; that he should be very small, very quiet, very surefooted, and able to walk more than four miles an hour. If you hear of any such mar- vel of a pony in your neighbourhood, I would thankfully be at the expense of its transit from the Isle of Man to Rugby ; for to be without a pony for my wife interferes with our daily comlbrt more than almost any other external inconvenience could do. I was over at Birmingham twice during the meeting of the British Asso- ciation, and James Marshall was there the whole week. Murchison con- vinced Greenough and De la Beche, on the spot, that they must recolour all their geological maps ; for what were called the Grey Wackes of North Devon, he maintains to be equivalent to the coal formation ; and the lime- stones on which they rest are equivalent to the old Red Sandstone, which now is to be sandstone no more, — seeing that it is often limestone, — but is to be called the Devonian System. Lord Northampton, as Chairman, wound up the business on the last day in the Town Hall by a few Christian sen- tences, simply and feelingly put, to my very great satisfaction. CCIX. * TO J. L. HOSKYNS, ESQ. (In answer to a question on the Preface to the third volume of Sermons.) Rugby, September 22, 1839. It is always a real pleasure, to me to keep up my intercourse with my old pupils, and to be made acquainted not only with what is happening to them outwardly, but much more with what is going on in their own minds ; and in your case I owe you especially any assistance which it may be in my power to render, as I appear to have unconsciously contributed to your present difficulty. If you were going into the Law, or to study Medicine, there would be a clear distinction between your professional reading and your generel reading ; between that reading which was designed to make you a good lawyer or physician, and that which was to make you a good and wise man But it is the peculiar excellence of the Christian ministry, that there a man's professional reading and" general reading coincide, and the very studies which would most tend to make him a good and wise man, do therefore of necessity tend to make him a good clergyman. Our merely professional reading appears to me to consist in little more than an acquaint- ance with such laws, or Church regulations, as concern the discharge of our ministerial duties, in matters external and formal. But the great mass of our professional reading is not merely professional but general ; that is to say, if I had time at my command, and wished to follow the studies winch would be most useful to me as a Christian, without reference to any one particular trade or calling. 1 should select, as nearly as might be, that very same course of study which to my mind would also be the best preparation for the work of the Christian ministry. LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 345 That the knowledge of the Scriptures is the most essential point in our studies as men and Christians, is as clear to my mind as that it is also the most essential point in our studies as clergymen. The only question is, in what manner is this knowledge to be best obtained. Now, — omitting to speak of* the moral and spiritual means of obtaining it, such as prayer and a watchful life, about the paramount necessity of which there is no doubt what- ever,— our present question only regards the intellectual means of obtaining it, that is, the knowledge and the cultivation of our mental faculties, which may best serve to the end desired. Knowledge of the Scriptures seems to consist in two things, so essen- tially united, however, that I scarcely like to separate them even in thought; the one I will call the knowledge of the contents of the Scriptures in themselves ; the other the knowledge of their application to us, and our own times and circumstances. Really and truly I believe that the one of these cannot exist in any perfection without the other. Of course we cannot apply the Scriptures properly without knowing them ; and to know them merely as an ancient book, without understanding how to apply them, ap- pears to me to be ignorance rather than knowledge. But still in thought we can separate the two, and each also requires in some measure a different line of study. The intellectual means of acquiring a knowledge of the Scriptures in themselves are, I suppose, Philology, Antiquities, and Ancient History ; but the means of acquiring the knowledge of their right application are far more complex in their character, and it is precisely here, as I think, that the com- mon course of theological study is so exceedingly narrow, and therefore the mistakes committed in the application of the Scriptures are, as it seems to me, so frequent and so mischievous. As one great example of what I mean, I will instance the questions, which are now so much agitated, of Church authority and Church government. It is just as impossible for a man to un- derstand these questions without a knowledge of the great questions of law and government generally, as it is to understand any matter that is avow- edly political ; and therefore the Politics of Aristotle and similar works are to me of a very great and direct use every day of my life, wherever these questions are brought before me ; and you know how often these questions are mooted, and with what vehemence men engage in them. Historical reading it appears that you are actually engaged in, but so much of History is written so ill. that it appears to me to be desirable to be well acquainted with the greatest historians, in order to learn what the defects of common History are, and how we should be able to supply them. It is a rare quality in any man to be able really to represent to himself the picture of another age and country ; and much of History is se vague and poor that no lively images can be gathered from it. There is, actually, so far as I know, no great ecclesiastical historian in any language. But the flatnesses and meagreness and unfairness of most of those Who have written on this subject may not strike us, if we do not know what good history should be. And any one very great historian, such as Thucydides, or Tacitus, or Niebuhr, throws a light backward and forward upon all history ; for any one age or country well brought before our minds teaches us what historical knowledge really is, and saves us from thinking that we have it when we have it not. I will not cross my writing, so I must continue my say in another sheet. The accidental division of my paper suits well with the real division of my subject. I have stated what appears to me to be the best means of ac- quiring a knowledge of the Scriptures, both in themselves, and in their application to ourselves. And it is this second part which calls for such a variety of miscellaneous knowledge ; inasmuch as, in order to apply a rule properly, we must understand the nature and circumstances of the case 23 346 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. to which it is to he applied, and how they differ from those of the case to which it was applied originally. Thus there are two states of the human race which we want to understand thoroughly ; the state when the New Testament was written, and our own state. And our own state is so con- nected with, and dependent on the past, that in order to understand it thor- oughly we must go backwards into past ages, and thus, in fact, we are obho-ed to co back till we connect our own time with the first century, and in many points with centuries yet more remote. You will say then, in another sense from what St. Paul said it, " Who is sufficient for these things ?" and I answer, "No man;" but, notwithstanding, it is well to have a good model before us, although our imitation of it will fall far short of it. But you say, how does all this edify 1 And this is a matter which I think it is very desirable to understand clearly. If death were immediately before us, — say that the Cholera was in a man's parish, and numbers were dying daily,— it is manifest that our du- ties — our preparation for another life by conforming ourselves to God's will respecting us in this life, — would become exceedingly simple. To preach the Gospel, that is, to lead men's faith to Christ as their Saviour by His death and resurrection ; to be earnest in practical kindness ; to clear one's heart of all enmities and evil passions ; this would be a man's work, and this only; his readino- would, I suppose, be limited then to such parts of the Scriptures as were directly strengthening to his faith, and hope and charity, to works of prayers and hymns, and to such practical instructions as might be within his reach as to the treatment of the prevailing disease. Now can we say, that in ordinary life our duties can be made thus sim- ple 1 Are there not, then, matters of this life which must be attended to 1 Are there not many questions would press upon us in which we must act and advise, besides the simple direct preparation for death ? And it being God's will that we should have to act and advise in these things, and our service to Him and to His Church necessarily requiring them ; is it right to say, that the knowledge which shall teach us how to act and advise rightly with respect to them is not edifying ? But may not a man say, " I wish to be in the Ministry, but I do not feel an inclination for a long course of reading ; my tastes, and I think my duties, lead me another way V This may be said, I think, very justly. A man may do immense good with nothing more than an unlearned familiarity with the Scriptures, with sound practical sense and activity, taking part in all the business of his parish, and devoting himself to intercourse with men rather than with books. I honour such men in the highest degree, and think that they are among the most valuable ministers that the Church possesses. A man's reading, in this case, is of a miscellaneous character, consisting, be- eides the Bible and such books as are properly devotional, of such books as chance throws in his way, or the particular concerns of his parish may lead him to take an interest in. And, though he may not be a learned man, he may be that which is far better than mere learning, — a wise man, and a good man. All that I would entreat of every man with .whom I had any influence is, that if he read at all — in the sense of studying — he should read widely and comprehensively ; that he should not read exclusively or principally what is called Divinity. Learning, as it is called, of this sort, — when not properly mixed with that comprehensive study which alone deserves the name, — is, I am satisfied, an actual mischief to a man's mind ; it impairs his simple com- mon sense, and gives him no wisdom. It makes him narrow-minded, and fills him with absurdities ; and, while he is in reality grievously ignorant, it makes him consider himself a great divine. Let a man read nothing, if he will, except his Bible and Prayer Book and the chance reading of the day ; but let him not, if he values the power of seeing truth and judging soundly, let him not read exclusively or predominantly the works of those who are called divines, whether they be those of the first four centuries, or those of LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 347 the sixteenth, or those of the eighteenth or seventeenth. With regard to the Fathers, as they are called, I would advise those who have time to read them deeply, those who have less time to read at least parts of them ; but in all cases preserve the proportions of your reading. Read along with the Fathers, the writings of men of other times and of different powers of mind. Keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend upon it that a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one ; — as far as it goes, the views that it gives are true, — but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only narrow but false. Adjust your proposed amount of reading to your time and incli- nation— this is perfectly free to every man, but whether that amount be large or small, let it be varied in its kind and widely varied. If I have a confi- dent opinion on anyone point connected with the improvement of the human mind, it is on this. I have now given you the principles, which I believe to be true with respect to a clergyman's reading. If you can come to Rugby in your way to Oxford, I will add any thing in my power to the details; at any rate I shall be delighted to see you here, and I shall have great pleasure in giving you an introduction to Hamilton, who, I am sure, would value your acquaintance much. CCX. * TO T. BURBIDGE, ESQ. (Travelling in Switzerland.) Rugby, October 2, 1639. Vaughan has just got his fellowship at Trinity, and Howson, I am sorry to say, has not. Freeman has been staying with us for some days, and we all like him more and more. And in the course of the next fortnight, I suppose that we shall see several of our friends from Oxford and Cam- bridge, just before the time of their gathering. Our weather has been. sadly capricious : for the last ten days it has been much better, and I bathed in the Waterfall yesterday; but to-day it is again broken, and is cold and rainy. I watch with a most intense interest the result of the harvest, believ- ing that the consequences of a bad crop maybe most serious; and having also a belief that there are many symptoms about of one of those great pe- riods of judgment which are called the Comings of our Lord : periods which I could bear with far greater equanimity if the distracted state of the Church, or rather the non-existence of the Church for very many of its highest objects, did not make it so hard to find sympathy. Those men at Oxford look upon me as a heretic, — and though 1 hope and believe that I could feel almost entire sympathy with them, if we were together in mere suffering, or death, yet in life and in action I necessarily shrink from them when 1 see them labouring so incessantly, though I doubt not so ignorantly, to enthrone the very Mystery of falsehood and iniquity in that neglected and dishonoured Temple, the Church of God. And then those who are called Liberals ! And the Zurich Government putting Strauss forward as an instructor of Chris- tians ! It is altogether so sad, that if I were to allow myself to dwell much upon it, I think it would utterly paralyze me. I could sit still and pine and die. You have heard that the school is flourishing outwardly ; as to its inward state, I fear that Walrond's account is too favourable, although there is I think no particular ground of complaint, and there is much to like and think well of. The Latin verse altogether in the Form is much bet- ter than it was ; the Latin prose I think not so. I have nearly finished Thucydides, and then I hope to turn again to Rome. The second edition of the first volume is now printing. Pray call on Amadee Peyrou at Turin, with my respects to him ; he will be very civil to you, and you will, I think, 348 LIFE 0F DR ARNOLD. like him. He which it would get it for me ? like him. He will tell you if any thing has come out since I was at Turin, which it would concern me to get ; and if there is, will you be so kind as to CCXI. TO CHEVALIER BUNSEN. Rugby, October 4, 1833. When I think of you as really going to leave England, it makes me think how much there still is on which I want to talk to you more fully. Particularly, I must get you some day to answer for me in writing certain questions as to the Lord's Supper. I think that you and Samuel Coleridge both agree with one another and differ from me, and this of course makes me suspect the justness of my own views, while it makes me sure that what you and Coleridge hold can be nothing superstitious or unchristian. I see clearly the wide difference between what you hold and the opinions which I so dread and condemn. But, plainly, I cannot arrive at even your notion of the Communion, or what I believe to be your notion, from the Scriptures, without interpreting them by what is called the Concensus Ec- clesiee. Now this so called Consensus Ecclesise is in such a matter to me worth nothing, because such a view of the Communion was precisely in unison with the tendencies of the prevailing party in the Church whose writings are now called Consensus Ecclesise. And if I follow this pretended Consensus in forming my views of the Sacraments, I appear to myself to be undoing St. Paul's and our Lord's work in one great point, and to be introducing that very Judaism, to which Christianity is so directly opposed, and which consists in ascribing spiritual effects to outward and bodily actions. It seems to me historically certain that the Judaism which upheld Circumcision and insisted on the differences of meats, after having vainly endeavoured to sap the Gospel under its proper Judaic form, did, even with- in the first century, transfuse its spirit into a Christian form; and substi- tuting Baptism for Circumcision, and the mystic influence of the Bread and Wine of the Communion for the doctrine of purifying and defiling meats, did thereby, as has happened many a time since, pervert Christianity to a fatal extent, and seduced those who would have resisted it to the death under its own form, because now, though its spirit was the same, its form was Christian. Now I am sure that you are not Judaic either in form or spirit, and therefore there may he a real Christian element in the doctrine which I do not perceive, or am not able to appreciate. And if so, it would be my earnest wish to be permitted to see it and to embrace it ; and it would also be no light pleasure to find myself here also in complete sympathy with you. About the Christian sacrifice we agree, I believe, fully ; but as to the Communion, as distinct from the Sacrifice, there is something in you and in Coleridge, as there is of course in Luther also, which I do not find in my- self, and' with which, as yet. to say the very truth, I cannot bring myself to agree. CCXH. TO JAMES MARSHALL, ESQ. Rugby, October 30, 1839. You will think, I am afraid, that my zeal has cooled away to nothing, since I had last the pleasure of seeing you ; but it was only last week, that I received an answer, partly direct and partly indirect, with regard to some of those whose co-operation we had wished to gain 's an- swer is, that he thinks a Society would be impracticable, for that men will not agree as to the remedy, and unless some remedy is proposed, there will LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 349 be no good, lie thinks, in merely laying bare the disease. And he thinks that will take the same view of the question with himself. So far, then, there is a rebuff for us ; but I think that we must not be discouraged, and that efforts may be made in other quarters ; if these also fail, then I think that publication must be tried, and the point noticed, if possible, in some of the leading reviews and newspapers ; but for this details are wanted ; details at once exact and lively, which I imagine it will be difficult to pro - cure for the whole kingdom, except through the mechanism of a Society. For "Manchester there is, I believe, a Statistical Society which would afford some good materials. At present people are still so scattered about, many being on the Continent, that it is difficult to get at them. But in the vacation I hope to be moving about to different parts of England, and then I may be able to find somebody who may be useful. And meantime I shall do what alone lies in my power, viz., write one or two articles on the subject in the Hertford Reformer, in which I have written more than once already. I shall be delighted to hear from you, and to learn whether you have made any progress, and whether you have any suggestions to communicate. CCXIII. *T0 H. BALSTON, ESQ. Rugby, Nov 21, 1839. With regard to the questions in your letter, I hold that to a great degree in the choice of a profession, " sua cuique Deus fit dira cupi- do," a man's inclination for a calling is a great presumption that he either is or will be fit for it. And in education this holds very strongly, for he who likes boys has probably a daily sympathy with them ; and to be in sympathy with the mind you propose to influence is at once indispensable, and will enable you to a great degree to succeed in influencing it. Another point to which I attach much importance is liveliness. This seems to me an essential condition of sympathy with creatures so lively as boys are naturally, and it is a great matter to make them understand that liveliness is not folly or thoughtlessness. Now I think the prevailing manner amongst many very valuable men at Oxford is the very opposite to liveli- ness ; and I think that this is the case partly with yourself; not at all from affectation, but from natural temper, encouraged, perhaps, rather than check ed, by a belief that it is right and becoming. But this appears to me to be in point of manner the great difference between a clergyman with a parish and a schoolmaster. It is an illustration of St. Paul's rule, " Rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep." A clergyman's inter- course is very much with the sick and the poor, where liveliness would be greatly misplaced ; but a schoolmaster's is with the young, the strong, and the happy, and he cannot get on with them unless in animal spirits he can sympathize with them, and show them that his thoughtfulness is not con- nected with selfishness and weakness. At least, this applies, I think, to a young man; for when a teacher gets to an advanced age, gravity, I suppose, would not misbecome him. for liveliness might then seem unnatural, and his sympathy with boys must be limited, I suppose, then, to their great interests rather than their feelings. You can j udge what truth may be in this notion of mine generally ; and if true, how far it is applicable to your own case ; but, knowing you as I do, my advice to you would be to follow that line for which you seem to have the most evident calling ; and surely the sign of God's calling in such a case is to be sought in our own reasonable inclination, for the tastes and faculties which he gives us are the marks of our fitness for one thing rather than another. 350 LIFE OF DR- ARNOLD. CCXIV. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (D.) Fox How, December 20, 1839. It is just one and twenty years ago this very day that I was ordained Deacon at Oxford, and I wish this letter to reach you on Sunday, when I suppose you will be ordained at the same place to the same office. I had enough and more than enough of scruples and difficulties, not before only, but afterwards for a long time But I have been satisfied now for many years, — and wonder almost that I ever could have been otherwise, —that Ordination was never meant to be closed against those who, having been conscientious members of the Church before, and wishing in earnest to be ministers of the Church now, holding its truths and sympathizing in its spirit, yet cannot yield an active belief to the words of every part of the Articles and Liturgy as true, without qualification or explanation. And I think so on historical as well as on a priori grounds ; on historical, — from the fact that the subscriptions were made more stringent in their form to meet the case of those whose minds, or rather tempers, were so uncomplying, that they would use in the service of the Church no expressions which they did not approve of; and therefore the party in power, to secure the conformity, required a pledge of approbation ; — and also from the expressed opinion of Bull, Usher, and others ; opinions not at all to be taken to such an extent as if the Articles were articles of peace merely, but abundantly asserting that a whole Church never can be expected to agree in the absolute truth of such a number of propositions as are contained in the Articles and Liturgy. This consideration seems to me also decisive on a priori grounds. For otherwise the Church could by necessity receive into the ministry only men of dull minds or dull consciences ; of dull, nay almost of dishonest minds, if they can persuade themselves that they actually agree in every minute particular with any great number of human propositions ; of dull consciences, if exercising theirminds freely and yet. believing that the Church requires the total ad- hesion of the understanding, they still, for considerations of their own con- venience, enter into the ministry in her despite. You will say that this makes the degree of adhesion required indefinite. And so it must be : yet these things, so seemingly indefinite, are not really so to an honest and sensible mind ; for such a mind knows whether it. is really in sympathy with the Church in its main faith and feelings; and, if it be not, then subscription would indeed be deceitful ; but, if it be, to refuse subscrip- tion would, I think, be at once unjust to the Church and to itself. Enough, however, of this ; I earnestly hope and pray that your entrance into the ministry may be to God's glory, to the good of his Church, and to your own great blessing. To have a ministry in the Church is a great honour, and a great responsibility ; yet in both it is far inferior to the privilege of being a member of the Church. In our heavenly commonwealth the jus civitatis is a thousand times greater than the jus honorum ; and he who most magnifies the solemnity of Baptism, will be inclined to value most truly the far inferior solemnity of Ordination. , - You are entering on an office extinct in all but name. If it could be revived in power, it would be one of the greatest blessings that could be conferred on the Church. I wish you would talk to about this ; and if a book on this point could be got up between us, I think it could excite no offence, and might lead to very great good. God bless you ever in this and in all your undertakings, through Jesus Christ. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD 35 j (In answer to a request for a subscription to a church ) Fox How, December 22, 1839. Your letter followed me hither from Rugby, and I only reply to it, that you may not think me neglectful if I delayed my answer till my return to Warwickshire. I shall be happy to subscribe towards the endowment of the Church and not towards the building. My reason for this distinction is, that I think in all cases the right plan to pursue is to raise funds in the first instance for a clergyman, and to procure for him a definitely marked district as his cure. The real Church being thus founded, if money can also be procured for the material Church, so much the better. If not, I would wish to see any build- ing in the district licensed for the temporary performance of Divine Service, feeling perfectly sure that the zeal and munificence of the congregation would in the course of years raise a far more ornamental building than can ever be raised by public subscription ; and that, in the mean time, there might be raised by subscription an adequate fund for the maintenance of a clergyman ; whereas, on the present system, it seems perfectly hopeless by any subscriptions in one generation to provide both clergymen and churches in numbers equal to the wants of the country. I should not have troubled you with my opinions, which I am aware are of no importance to you, did I not wish to explain the reason which makes me, in such cases, always desirous of contributing to the endowment of a minister rather than to the building. CCXVI. TO THE REV. DR. HAWKINS. Fox How, December 29, 1839. ...... I retained the benefit of my continental tour throughout the half-year, insomuch that at the very end of it, after the examination, I felt as if I was not entitled to my vacation, because I was so perfectly untired by my past work. This alone could tell you that the school had gone on quietly, as indeed was the case It seems to me that people are not enough aware of the monstrous state of society, absolutely without a parallel in the history of the world, — with a population poor, miserable, and degraded in body and mind, as much as it" they were slaves, and yet called freemen, and having a power as such of concerting and combining plans of risings, which makes them ten times more dangerous than slaves. And the hopes entertained by many of the effects to be wrought by new churches and schools, while the social evils of their condition are left uncorrected, appear to me to be utterly wild. Meanwhile here, as usual, we seem to be in an- other world, for the quietness of the valleys and the comparative comfort and independence of this population are a delightful contrast to what one finds almost every where else. We have had heavy rains and a flood, but now both are gone, and the weather is beautiful, and the country most mag- nificent— snow on all the high hills, but none on the low hills or in the valleys. CCXVIl. TO JAMES MARSHALL, ESQ. Fox How, January 1, 1840. I may be wrong as to the necessity of gaining more informa- tion, but I think I am not wrong in wishing to secure a more extensive and universal co-operation, before any thing is ventured remedially. — I would 352 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. join half a dozen men, or even fewer, if the ohject be merely to collect and circulate facts such as may fix the public attention ; but, if more be proposed to be done, I dread the thing's assuming a party character, and I could not myself undertake to sanction a sort of political mission system, without knowing more exactly than I can well expect to know, the characters and discretion and opinions of the agents to be employed. And, even if I could depend on these, yet I do not think that they could be successful, for the evil is far deeper, as I believe, than can be cured without the aid of the Government and Legislature. I quite agree with you in the wisdom of forming local societies and a general Central Society ; and I should wish the local societies to consist of men of all classes, including certainly the working classes ; every possible information collected by such societies would be most valuable, but why should they go on to the farther step of endeavouring by tracts or missionaries to influence the mass of the working classes, or to propose remedies ? For instance, in Leeds I can conceive that benevolent men among the highest Conservatives, and among the clergy especially, would join a society which really only sought to collect information ; but they could not, and would not, if it endeavoured to do more, because the differences of opinion between you and them render it impossible for you to agree in what you should disseminate. The Society would therefore consist, I think, exclusively of men of what is called the Liberal party, and principally of Dissenters ; and this would be, I think, a great pity, and would cripple our operations sadly. I confess I am very suspicious of bodies of men belonging all to one party, even although that party be the one with which I should in the main myself agree, and for this reason, I as little like the composition of the University of London, as I do that of the University of Oxford. CCXVIII. TO THE REV. J. HEARN. Fox How, Ambleside, January 5, 1840. I must not let more of my time at Fox How pass away without writ- ing to you, for I wish much to know how you are, and how you bear the winter. Your letter of September 7th, gave me a better account of you than your former note had done, and I was very glad to learn that you were better. Still you did not write as if you were quite well, and I do not like to hear of any disorder or languor hanging about you, however slight ; for you are not old enough to feel any natural decay, and slight, indisposition requires to be watched, lest it should become serious. But I love to think of the quiet of Hatford for you, which, if your complaints are bodily merely, must be very good for you ; if you feel any nervousness or oppression of spirits, then I suspect a little more of the stir of life would be very good for you ; and we should be delighted to see you and Mrs. Hearn and your little ones at Rugby, where you might have enough of movement around you, and yet might be yourself as much at rest as you chose. I sometimes think, that if I were at all in nervous spirits, the solemn beauty of this valley would be almost overwhelming, and that brick streets and common hedge- rows would be better for me ; just as now, whilst my life is necessarily so stirring, and my health so good, there is an extreme delight in the peaceful- ness of our life here, and in the quiet of all around us. Last night we were out on the gravel walk for nearly half an hour, watching the northern lights. I never saw them so beautiful ; the sky in the north behind the mountains was all of a silvery light, while in other parts it was dark as usual, and all set with its stars ; then, from the mass of light before us, there shot up con- tinually long white pillars or needles, reaching 1o the zenith ; and then again, fleeces of light would go quivering like a pulse all over the sky, till they died away in the far south. And to-day there is not a cloud to be seen LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 353 and the mountain before our windows reflects the sun's light upon us like a great mirror, we ourselves being in the shade, for the sun soon sets on this side of the valley P. S Have you seen Taylor's book on Early Chris- tianity ? With much allowance for an unpleasant manner, and some other faults, yet I think he is right in his main point, that the question at issue is really one of Christianity or of the Church system Because I believe the New Testament to represent Christianity truly, therefore I "reject the Church system, and I think that the Church of England does ex- actly the same thing for the same reason. But that the Church has always faithfully preserved the Christian doctrine in other points, and much of the purity of Christian holiness, I acknowledge , thankfully ; and therefore, al- though I think that in one point Antichrist was in the Church from the first century, yet God forbid that I should call the Church Antichrist. It pre- served much truth and much holiness, with one fatal error, subversive, indeed, in its consequences, both of truth and goodness, but which has not always developed its full consequences, nor was even distinctly conscious of its own ground. But that the modern Newmanites are far worse than the early Church writers is certain, and many of their doctrines are disclaimed and condemned by those writers ; only in their peculiar system, they are the development of that system which, in the early Church, existed in the bud only; and which, as being directly opposed to our Lord's religion, as taught by Him and His Apostles, I call Antichrist. CCXIX. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ. Fox How, January 12, 1840. It is a very long time since I have written to you ; your last letter to me being dated, I am ashamed to say, nearly a year ago. But I intended to write to you from this place in the summer ; and then my stay here was so short, that I had no time for any thing, the greater part of my holidays having been passed on the Continent. 1 think that 1 have to thank you for introducing so much of my little Lecture, on the Divisions of Knowledge, into the Penny Magazine. I printed it, thinking that it might be useful to the members of Mechanics' Institutions ; but having printed it at Rugby, and no publisher having an interest in it, and it not having been advertised, it has had, I suppose, but a very limited circulation. I was very glad therefore to see such large ex- tracts from it in the Penny Magazine, which must have brought it to the knowledge of many readers, although perhaps not exactly of that class for whom I most designed it. I shall be very glad if you can give me good accounts of yourself and all your family. Our life goes on with very little variety beyond its own even alternations of vacation and half-year ; and I could be too happy if private comfort did not seem almost inconsistent with justice, while the state of public affairs is so troubled If you see the Herts Reformer, you will have observed that I have still continued from time to time to write on my old subject, and latterly I have been trying to form a Society to collect in- formation, and draw public attention to the question. The difficulties are very great, but I do hope that something will be done, for I see that men are interested in the question who have a personal interest in manufactures, and a practical knowledge of the state of the people. Such men may really do great good, but I can do nothing more than pull the bell, as it were, and try to give the alarm as to the magnitude of the danger. I was very much struck with Mr. Gill's speech the other day in answer to . I do not know how you find it, but for myself I cannot go cordially along with the Radical party, philosophical or otherwise, even on points where in the main 354 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. I agree with them. They all seem to me more or less overrun with two things, Benthamism and Political Economy ; and Bentham I have always thought a bad man, and also, as Carlyle called him in a letter to a friend of mine, " a bore of the first magnitude." I believe I agree with the Radicals as to the mischief of the Corn Laws ; yet I cannot but tbink that the Chart- ists have some reason in their complaint, that the clamour about the Corn Laws is rather leading men off on a false scent, and that the Repeal will not benefit the working man so much as it is expected. You will not, however, suspect me of thinking that the true scent is to be found in following 'e notions of universal suffrage and universal plunder. He and his companions continually reminded me of slaves, of men so brutalized by their seclusion from the pale of society, that they have lost all value for the knowledge and morality of the civilized world, and have really no more ideas of the use to be made of all the manifold inventions and revelations of six thousand years, than Sir Isaac Newton's dog had of the value of his master's problems. The cry against property is just the cry of a slave, who, being incapable of holding any thing himself as his own, has no notion of any harm in steal- ing,— stealing, in fact, is hardly a word in his language. It is certain, I suppose, that a certain moral and social training are necessary in order to enable us to appreciate truths which, to those who have had that training, are the very life of their life. And again, there is a course of training so mischievous, and degradation and distress are such a curse, as absolutely to make men believe a lie, and to take away lhat common standing ground of a general sense of the principles of right and wrong, on which we meet uncorrupted ignorance, and so are able to lead it on to a sense of the purest truths and the highest. You mentioned Laing's book on Norway to me. I have got it, and like it very much ; but it is easier to admire, and almost envy, the example of Norwegian society, than to apply it to our own state here. It would be a great comfort to me if your experience and observa- tion have led you to look on matters more hopefully ; and yet no man feels more keenly than I do the vast amount of goodness and energy which we have amongst us. How noble, after all, is the sight of these Trials for high treason. Such deliberation and dignity, and perfect fairness, and even gentleness on the part of the Government and the law, in dealing with guilt so recent, so great, and so palpable. Therefore we cannot be without hope that, with God's blessing, we may get over our evils, although I own with me that fear is stronger than hope. CCXX. TO THOMAS CARLYLE, ESd. Rugby, January, 1840. A note of yours to our common acquaintance, Mr. James Marshall, fur- nishes, I believe, the only shadow of a pretence which I could claim for ad- dressing you, according to the ordinary forms of society. But I should be ashamed, to you above all men, to avail myself of a mere pretence; and my true reason for addressing you is because I believe you sympathize with me on that most important subject, the welfare of the poorer classes, and be- cause I know, from your History of the French Revolution, that you under- stand the real nature and magnitude of the evil, which so many appear to me neither to comprehend nor to feel. I have been trying, hitherto with no success, to form a Society, the ob- ject of which should be to collect information as to every point in the con- dition of the poor throughout the kingdom, and to call public attention to if by every possible means, whether by the press or by yearly or quarterly meetings. And as I am most anxious to secure the co-operation of good men of all parties, it seems to me a necessary condition that the Society should broach no theories, and propose no remedies ; that it should simply LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 355 collect information, and rouse the attention of the country to the infinite im- portance of the subject. You know full well that wisdom in the higher sense and practical knowledge are rarely found in the same man ; and, if any theory be started, which contains something not suited to practice, all the so-called practical men cry out against the folly of all theories, and con- clude themselves, and lead the vulgar to the conclusion, that, because one particular remedy has been prescribed ignorantly, no remedy is needed, or at least none is practicable. I see by the newspapers that you are writing on Chartism, and I aro heartily glad to hear of it. I shall be curious to know whether you have any definite notions as to the means of relieving the fearful evils of our so- cial condition, or whether you, like myself, are overwhelmed by the magni- tude of the mischief, and are inclined to say, like the Persian fatalist in Her- odotus, ix&iarri <)dvvr\ nolla cpoovfovta [tr\divo<; xoart'eiv. I have no sort of desire to push my proposal about a Society, and would gladly be guided by wiser men as to what is best to be done. But I cannot, I am sure, be mistaken as to this, that the state of society in England at this moment was never yet paralleled in history ; and though I have no stake on the country as far as property is concerned, yet I have a wife and a large family of children ; and I do not wish to lose, either for them or my- self, all those thousand ties, so noble and so sacred and so dear, which bind us to our country, as she was and as she is, with all her imperfections and diffi- culties. If you think that any thing can be done, which could interest any- other persons on the subject, I should be delighted to give aid in any possi- ble manner to the extent of my abilities. I owe you many apologies for writing thus to a perfect stranger, — but ever since I read your History of the French Revolution, I have longed to become acquainted with you ; be- cause I found in that book an understanding of the true nature of history, such as it delighted my heart to meet with ; and, having from a child felt the deepest interest in the story of the French Revolution, and read pretty- largely about it, I was somewhat in a condition to appreciate the richness of your knowledge, and the wisdom of your judgments. I do not mean that I agree with you in all these ; in some instances I should differ very decid- edly ; but still the wisdom of the book, as well as its singular eloquence and poetry, was such a treasure to me, as I have rarely met with, arid am not at all likely to meet with again. CCXXI. TO JAMES MARSHALL, ESQ. Fox How, January 23, 1840. I thank you much for your last letter, and I assure you that I attach a great value to such communications from you. The scheme of a newspaper I actually tried myself nine years ago, and spent above two hundred pounds- upon it. I was not so foolish as to think that I could keep up a newspaper ; but I was willing to bell the cat, hoping that some who were able might take up what I had begun. But no one did, and the thing died a natural death at the end of two months. I feel, however, so strongly the desirableness of such an attempt, that I am ready again to contribute money or writing, or both, to the same cause ; and I should be doubly glad if we could effect both the objects you speak of, a daily paper and a weekly one. It seems, to me, however, desirable that at this point I should make somewhat of a confession of my political faith to you, that you may know how far my views would coincide with yours. My differences with the Liberal Party would turn, I think, chiefly on two points. First, I agree with Carlyle, in thinking that they greatly over-esti- mate Bentham, and also that they over-rate the Political Economists gene- rally ; not that I doubt the ability of those writers, or the truth of their 356 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. conclusions, as far as regards their own science, — but I think that the sum- mum bonum of their science, and of human life, are not identical ; and therefore, many questions in which free trade is involved, and the advan- tages of large capital, &c, although perfectly simple in an economical point of view, become, when considered politically, very complex ; and the eco- nomical good is very often from the neglect of other points made in practice a direct social evil. But my second difference is greater by much than this ; I look to the full development of the Christian Church in its perfect form, as the Kingdom of God, for the most effective removal of all evil, and promotion of all good : and I can understand no perfect Church, or perfect State, without their blending into one in this ultimate form. I believe, farther, that our fathers at the Reformation stumbled accidentally, or rather were unconsciously led by God's Providence, to the declaration of the great principle of this system, the doctrine of the King's Supremacy ; — which is, in fact, no other than an assertion of the supremacy of the Church or Christian society over the clergy, and a denial of that which I hold to be one of the most mischievous falsehoods ever broached, — that the government of the Christian Church is vested by divine right in the clergy, and that the close corporation of bishops and presbyters, — whether one or more, it makes no difference, — is and ever ought to be the representative of the Christian Church. Holding this doc- trine as the very corner stone of all my political belief, I am equally opposed to Popery, High Churchism, and the claims of the Scotch Presbyteries, on the one hand ; and to all the Independents, and advocates of the separation, as they call it, of Church and State, on the other ; the first setting up a Priesthood in the place of the Church, and the other lowering necessarily the objects of Law and Government, and reducing them to a mere system of police, while they profess to wish to make the Church purer. And my fondness for Greek and German literature has made me very keenly alive to the mental defects of the Dissenters as a body ; the characteristic faults of the English mind, — narrowness of view, and a want of learning and a sound critical spirit, — being exhibited to my mind in the Dissenters almost in caricature. It is nothing but painful to me to feel this ; because no man appreciates more than I do the many great services which the Dissenters have rendered, both to the general cause of Christianity, and especially to the cause of justice and good government in our own country ; and my sense of the far less excusable errors, and almost uniformly mischievous con- duct of the High Church party,' is as strong as it can be of any one thing in the world. Again, the principle of Conservatism has always appeared to me to be not only foolish, but 1o be actually felo de se: it destroys what it loves, be- cause it will not mend it. But I cordially agree with Niebuhr, — who in all such questions is to me the greatest of all authorities ; because, together with an ability equal to the highest, he had an universal knowledge of po- litical history, far more profound than was ever possessed by any other man, — that every new institution should be but a fuller development of, or an addition to, what already exists ; and that if things have come to such a pass in a country, that all its past history and associations are cast away as merely bad, Reform in such a country is impossible. I believe it to be necessary, and quite desirable, that the popular power in a state should, in the perfec- tion of things, be paramount to every other ; but this supremacy need not, and ought not, I think, to be absolute ; and monarchy, and an aristocracy of birth, — as distinguished from one of wealth or of office, — appear to me to be two precious elements which still exist in most parts of Europe, and to lose which, as has been done unavoidably in America, would be rather our insanity than our misfortune. But the insolencies of our aristocracy no one feels more keenly than I do : the scandalous exemption1 of the peers from ' This, so far as it is here correctly stated, was abolished by 4 & 5 Vict. cap. 22. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 357 all ignominious punishments short of death. — so that for a most aggravated manslaughter a peer must escape altogether, as the old Lord Byron did, or as the Duchess of Kingston did, for bigamy: — the insolent practice of allow- ing peers to vote in criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath ; the absurdity of proxy voting, and some other things of the same nature. All theory and all experience show, that if a system goes on long unreformed, it is not then reformed, but destroyed. And so, I believe, it will be with our Aristocracy and our Church ; because I fear that neither " will be wise in time. But still, looking upon both as positive blessings — and capable— the latter especially— of doing good that can be done by no other means, I love and would maintain both, not as a concession or a com- promise, but precisely with the same zeal that I would reform both, and en- large the privileges and elevate the condition of the mass of the community. As to your difference of opinion with Carlyle about the craving for politi- cal rights, I agree with you fully. But I think that, before distress has once got in, a people whose physical wants are well supplied, may be kept for centuries by a government without a desire for political power : but, when the ranks immediately above them have been long contending earnestly for this very power, and physical distress makes them impatient of their actual condi- tion, then men are apt, I think, to attach even an over-value to the political remedy ; and it is then quite too late to try to fatten them into obedience : other parts of their nature have learnt to desire, and will have their desire gratified. CCXXII. TO SIR THOMAS PASLEY, BART. Fox How, January 25, 1840. On the difficulties of Scripture I met , as to the matter of fact, maintaining that the differences of interpretation are few in number ; and that many'ofthe greatest points at issue are altogether foreign to the interpretation of Scripture, and are argued upon other grounds ; and that where the Scripture is really difficult, there the boasted authority of the Church gives no help, — the early Christian writers having been quite as much puzzled as ourselves, when they did not attempt to clear themselves by mere guesses, and those generally very bad ones. I have been working hard every morning at my History, and have wanted the evenings for my letters ; so that we really declined dining out after the first half of our stay. The second volume is now finished, and I have written besides four Sermons, three Letters to the Herts Reformer, and letters of other sorts, of course, without number. I have had a considerable correspondence with Mr. James Marshall, about our plan of a Society for obtaining and dis- seminating information about the poorer clashes : he is deeply interested in the question. Indeed, it is only a wonder to me that every one is not ener- getic on this matter ; but the security of those who were " buying, selling, planting, and building, and knew not till the flood came and swept them all away," is to be repeated, I suppose, or rather will be repeated, before each of our Lord's comings, be they as many as they may. I have often thought of New Zealand, and if they would make you Governor and me Bishop, I would go out, I think, to-morrow, — not to return after so many years, put to live and die there, if there was any prospect of rearing any hopeful form of society. I have actually got 200 acres in New Zealand, and I confess that my thoughts often turn thitherward ; but that vile population of runaway convicts and others, who infest the country, deter me more than any thing else, as the days of Roman Proconsuls are over, who knew so well how to clear a country of such nuisances. Now, 1 suppose they will, as they find it convenient, come in and settle down quietly amongst the colo- nists, as Morgan did at Kingston ; and the ruffian and outlaw of yesterday becomes to-day, according to our Jacobin notions of citizenship, a citizen, 358 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. and perhaps a magistrate and a legislator. I imagine that the Jamaica soci- ety has never recovered the mixture of Buccaneer blood, and it is in that way that colonial societies become so early corrupted, because all the refuse of old societies find such easy access into them. I am very glad, indeed, that you like my Prophecy Sermons : the points in particular on which I did not wish to enter, if I could help it, but which very likely I shall be forced to touch on, relate to the latter chapters of Daniel, which, if genuine, would be a clear exception to my canon of inter- pretation, as there can be no reasonable spiritual meaning made out of the Kings of the North and South. But I have long thought that the greater part of the book of Daniel is most certainly a very late work, of the time of the Maccabees; and the pretended prophecy about the Kings of Greciaand Persia, and of the North and South, is mere history, like the poetical pro- phecies in Virgil and elsewhere. In fact, you can trace distinctly the date when it was written, because the events up to the date are given with his- torical minuteness, totally unlike the character of real Prophecy ; and be- yond that date all is imaginary. It is curious that when there was so allowed a proof of the existence of apocryphal writings, under the name of the Book of Daniel, — as the Stories of the apocryphal Esther, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon, — those should have been rejected, because they were only known in the Greek translation, and the rest, because it happened to be in Chaldee, was received at once in the lump, and defended as a matter of faith. But the self-same criticism which has established the authenticity of St. John's Gospel against all questionings, does, I think, equally prove the non-authenticity of great part of Daniel : that there may be genuine frag- ments in it is very likely. CCXXI1I. TO ARCHDEACON HARE. Fox How, January 26 1840. The Penny postage will allow me to trouble you with a question, which otherwise I should not have thought it worth while to send to you. Words- worth, I think, told me on your authority, that Niebuhr had spoken with strong disrespect of Coleridge's Church and State. Now, as I respect Coleridge exceedingly, it pains me to think that Niebuhr should speak with actual disrespect of any work of his ; and it seems to me that his habit of criticism was generally mild and considerate. On the other hand, Cole- ridge's Church and State does seem to me to be historically very faulty, and this Niebuhr would feel. I doubt not very keenly. Can you tell me whatf Niebuhr's judgment of the book really was, and on what it was founded V You will be glad to hear, I think, that the volumes of Thirlwall's Greece seem to me to improve as the work advances. There never could be a doubt as to the learning and good sense of the book ; but it seems to me to be growing in feeling and animation, and to be now a very delightful history, as well as a very valuable one Mr. Mau- rice wrote to me the other day, to say that he had sent to Rugby, for me, the first number of the Educational Magazine... I could not thank him be- cause I did not know his address, but I should be very sorry to appear inat- tentive to a man whom I respect so highly as I do Mr. Maurice. CCXXIV. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. Fox How, Jamrory24, 1840. We are going to leave this place, if all be well, on Monday; and I con- fess that it makes me rather sad to see the preparations for our departure, ' This question has been inserted merely as an illustration of the jealousy with which he regarded the reputations of men whom he really reverenced. It does not appear how far Niebuhr's unfavourable judgment was deliberately given. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 359 for it is like going out of a very quiet cove into a very rough sea ; and I am every year approaching nearer to that time of life when rest is more wel- come than exertion.1 Yet, when I think of what is at stake, on that rough sea, I feel that I have no right to lie in harbour idly ; and indeed I do yearn more than I can say to be able to render some service where service is so greatly needed. It is when I indulge such wishes most keenly, and only then, that strong political differences between my friends and myself are really painful ; because I feel that not only could we not act together, but there would be no sympathy the moment I were to express any thing be- yond a general sense of anxiety and apprehension, in which I suppose all good men must share. CCXXV. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. Fox How, January 26, 1840. We left Rugby this time so early, that your letter followed me down here, and I must have the pleasure of answering it before we go away, which alas ! must be to-morrow morning. We talk of going to Norwich for a few days, to see the Stanleys, and to Cambridge, before we settle at Rugby ; and really, in these most troublous times, it seems more than is allowable to be living, as we are here, in a place of so much rest and beauty. Your letter interested me very deeply, and I have thought over what you say very often. Yet I believe that no man's mind has ever been more consciously influenced by others than mine has been in the course of my life, from the time that I first met you at Corpus. I doubt whether you ever submitted to another with the same complete deference as I did to you when I was an under-graduate. So, afterwards, I looked up to Davison with ex- ceeding reverence, — and to Whately. Nor do I think that Keble himself has lived on in more habitual respect and admiration than I have, only the ob- jects of these feelings have been very different. At this day, I could sit at Bunsen's feet, and drink in wisdom, with almost intense reverence. But I cannot reverence the men whom Keble reverences, and how does he feel to Luther and Milton 1 It gives me no pain and no scruple whatever to differ from those whom, after the most deliberate judgment that I can form, I can- not find to be worthy of admiration. Nor does their number affect me, when all are manifestly under the same influences, and no one seems to be a mas- ter spirit, fitted to lead amongst men. But with wise men in the way of their wisdom, it would give me very great pain to differ; I can say that truly with regard to your Uncle, even more with regard to Niebuhr. I do not know a single subject on which I have maintained really a paradox, — that is, on which I have presumed to set up my judgment against the con- curring judgment of wise men, and I trust I never should do it. But it is surely not presumption to prefer a foreign authority to one nearer home, when both are in themselves perfectly equal. For instance, — suppose that any point in English Law, although steadily defended by English lawyers, was at variance no less decidedly with the practice of the Roman Law, and condemned by the greatest jurists and philosophers of other countries, — there can be no presumption, as it seems to me, in taking either side strongly according as a man's convictions may be ; nor ought one to be taxed with disrespect of authority in either case ; because, although one may be treating some great men as clearly wrong, yet other men no less great have justified us in doing so. Perhaps this consciousness of the actually disputed charac- ter of many points in theology and politics rendered it early impossible to my mind to acquiesce without inquiry into any one set of opinions ; the choice was not left me to do so. I was brought up in a strong Tory family ; the first impressions of my mind shook my merely received impressions to pieces. 3G0 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. and at Winchester I was well nigh a Jacobin. At sixteen, when I went up to Oxford, all the influences of the place which I loved exceedingly, your influence above all, blew my Jacobinism to pieces, and made me again a Tory. I used to speak strong Toryism in the old Attic Society, and greedily did I read Clarendon with all the sympathy of a thorough royalist. Then came the peace, when Napoleon was put down, and the Tories had it their own way. Nothing shook my Toryism more than the strong Tory senti- ments that I used to hear at , though I liked the family exceedingly. But I heard language at which my organ of justice stood aghast, and which, the more I read the Bible, seemed to me more and more unchristian. I could not. but go on inquiring, and I do feel thankful that now and for some years past I have been living not in skepticism, but in a very sincere faith, which embraces most unreservedly those great truths, divine and human, which the highest authorities, divine and human, seem to me concurringly to teach. I have said this defensively only, for I am sure I meant to convey no insinuation against you for not being active in inquiring after truth. I believe I never think of you but with entire respect and admiration, and I never talked with you on any subject without gaining something, — so far am I from venturing to think that I am entitled to think myself fonder of truth than you are. I am glad that you like the Sermons on Prophecy ; I have not ventured to say that the principle is of universal application, but it is I think very general ; and, in both the cases which you notice, I think it holds. Cyrus is said, in many commentaries, to be a type of Christ, by which I understand that the language applied to him is hyperbolical, and suits properly only Him who is the real deliverer of Israel, and conqueror of Babylon. And the passage about the " Virgin conceiving," &c, has a man- ifest historical meaning as applied to Isaiah's wife ; the sign being one of time, that within the youth of an infant presently to be born, Syria and Israel should be overthrown. Emmanuel might improperly be the name of a com- mon child, just as Jesus and Joshua was, but both apply to our Lord, and to Him only, in unexaggerated strictness. I have finished Vol. II. of the His- tory, and am getting on with the new edition of Thucydides. The school is quite full, and I have been obliged to refuse several applications on that ac- count. Our attempt to secure some of the benefits of the Eton system of tui- tion will come into practice as soon as the half-year begins. Wordsworth is and has been remarkably well this winter. A Miss Gillies came down here in the autumn to take his miniature, in which I think she has succeeded admi- rably. The state of the times is so grievous, that it really pierces through all private happiness, and haunts me daily like a personal calamity. But I sup- pose that as to causes and cure, we should somewhat differ, though in much surely we should agree. I wish your son John would come down to see me some day from Oxford. I should much wish to see him, and to observe how he is getting on. CCXXVI. TO SIR CULLING E.^SMITH, BART. (With reference to a correspondence in the Herts Reformer.) Rugby, February 14, 1840, I have two principal reasons which make me unwilling to affix my name to my letters in the Herts Reformer,— one, as I mentioned before, because I am so totally unconnected with the county, — which to my feelings is a reason of great weight : — my other reason concerns my own particu- lar profession, not so much as a clergyman but as a schoolmaster. I think if I wrote by name in a newspaper published in another county, I should be thouo-ht to be stepping out of the line of my own duties, and courting notorietyas a political writer. And this, I think, I am bound for the school's sake to avoid, unless there is a clear duty on the other side, which I own I LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 3^ cannot as yet perceive to exist. I think that your own case as a gentleman of independent rank and fortune, and directly connected with Hertfordshire, is very different from mine : for no one could charge you with stepping out of your own profession, or with interfering without any title to do so in the newspaper of another county. And as to the reasons which you urge, of setting an example of moderation in arguing on the question of Church Establishments, it seems to me that the mischief of our newspapers mainly arises from the virulent language which men use while writing anonymous- ly, and that, as far as example goes, this is hetter reproved by temperate writings which are also anonymous. I suppose that no man, writing with his name, would allow himself to write in the style which newspaper writers often use ; if you and I write with our names, it would be no wonder at all if we should write moderately ; but if Augur and F. H. observe the courte- sies and the charities of life, which their incognito might enable them to cast aside if they would, it appears to me to be likely, as far as their letters are read, to have a salutary influence, because their moderation could scarcely be ascribed to any thing but to their real disapprobation of scurrility and un- fairness. After all, my incognito is only a very slight veil, and I am more anxious to preserve it in form than in reality. I have no objection to be known as the author of my Letters, but I would neither wish to attach my name to them, nor to be mentioned by name in the Reformer, for the reasons which I have given above. I trust that you will not take it amiss that I still adhere to my former resolution. May I add at the same time, that I am much obliged to you for the kind expressions in your letter, and I trust that you will have no cause to recall your testimony to the respectfulness of my language in any of my future Letters. I do respect sincerely every man who writes with a real desire to promote the cause of Christ's kingdom. CCXXVII. * TO H. FOX, ESQ.. Rugby, February 21, 1840. I am well persuaded that to a good man with regard to his choice of one amidst several lines of duty, " Sua cuique Deus fit dira cupido." It is a part of God's Providence that some men are made to see strongly the claims of one calling, others those of another. If, therefore, a man tells me that he feels bound to go out as a Missionary to India, I feel that I onght not to grudge to India what God seems to will for her. A very old friend of mine, who has been for some years superintendent of the missions at Madras, is coming home this spring for his health, hoping to go out again in the au- tumn ; if your purpose is fixed, I should like you to see him, for he would counsel you well as to the manner of carrying it into effect ; but on the previous question itself, — to go to India or not, — his judgment must be bias- ed, for he himself left a very large field of ministerial duty here, to go out to India. But whether you go to India or to any other foreign country, the first and great point, I think, is to turn your thoughts to the edification of the Church already in existence, — that is, the English or Christian soci- eties as distinct from the Hindoos. Unless the English and the half-caste people can be brought into a good state, how can you get on with the Hindoos 1 Again, I am inclined to think that greater good might be done by joining a young English settlement, than by missionary work amongst the heathen. Every good man going to New Zealand, or to Van Diemen's Land, not for the sake of making money, is an invaluable element in those societies ; and remember that they, after all, must be, by and by, the great missionaries to the heathen world, either for God or for the Devil. But still, do not lightly think that any claims can be greater upon you than those of this Church and people of England. It is not surely to the 24 362 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. purpose to say that there are ten thousand clergymen here, and very few in India. Do these ten thousand clergymen all, or even the greater part of them, appreciate what they have to do ? Is not the mass of evil here, greater a thousand times in its injurious effects on the world at large, than all the idolatry of India ? and is it less dangerous to the souls of those con- cerned in it 1 Look at the state of your own county ;' and does not that cry out as loud as India, notwithstanding its bishop and its golden stalls ? And remember— that the Apostles did indeed, or rather some of them did, spread the Gospel over many provinces of the Roman Empire ;— but it was necessary that it should have a wide diffusion once ; not that this diffusion was to go on universally and always, although the old Churches might be grievously wanting the aid of those who were plunging into heathen and barbarian countries to make nominal converts. But beyond this no man can advise you ; you may do good by God's blessino- any where, — you will, I doubt not, serve him every where, — but what you feel to be your particular call, you must alone determine. But do not decide hastily, for it is an important question, and if you go and then regret it, time and opportunities will be lost. You know that F. Newman went out as a missionary to Persia, and returned, finding that he had judged his calling wrongly. I shall,- of course, be at all times glad to advise you to the best of my power, either by letter or personally. CCXXVIII. TO THE SAME. Rugby, March 33, 1840. I would not willingly have left your last letter so long unanswered, but my time has been even more than usually engaged. I am sure that if your bent seems to be to the work of a Missionary in India, I would not be the man to dissuade you from it. It is a Christian and a most important calling, and though to my own mind, certainly, there are others even more import- ant,'yet I iully believe that it is God's will that, by our different impulses, all the several parts of His vineyard should be supplied with labourers. Only, if you do go to India, still remember that the great work to be done is to organize and purify Christian Churches of whites and half-castes. This, I believe, Tucker would tell you, and all other men whose judgments can be relied on. These must be the nucleus to which individuals from the natives will continually join more and more, as these become more numerous and more respectable. Otherwise the caste system is an insuperable diffi- culty : you call on a man to leave all his old connections, and to become in- famous in their eyes, and yet have no living Church to offer him, where, " he shall receive fathers and mothers, and brethren and sisters, &c., a hundredfold." Individual preaching amongst the Hindoos, without having a Church .to which to invite them, seems to me the wildest of follies. Re- member how in every place, Paul made the tvotfiiiq the foundation of his Church, and then the idolatrous heathens gathered round these in more or less numbers. Again, if you go out to India, you must be clear as to questions of Church government and the so-called Apostolical Succession, which there become directly practical questions. Are you to look upon Lutheran ordina- tions, and Baptists' or Independent baptisms, as valid or invalid ? Are the members of non-episcopal Churches your brethren or not ? In matters of doctrine, an opinion, however unimportant, is either true or false ; and if false, he who holds it is in error, although the error may be so practically indifferent as to be of no account in our estimate of the men. But in mat- ters of government, I hold that there is actually no right, and no wrong. 1 Durham. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 353 Viewed in the large, as they are seen in India, and when ahstracted from the questions of particular countries, I hold that one form of Church gov- ernment is exactly as much according to Christ's will as another ; nay, I consider such questions as so indifferent, that, if I thought the government of my neighbour's Church better than my own, I yet would not, unless the case were very strong, leave my Church for his, because habits, associations, and all tbose minor ties which ought to burst asunder before a great call, are yet of more force, I think, than a difference between Episcopacy and Presbytery, unless one be very good of its kind, and the other very bad. However, whether you think with me or not, the question at any rate is one of importance to a man going as missionary to India. Let me hear from you again when you can. CCXXIX. TO CHEVALIER BUNSEN. (Then Prussian Minister at Berne.) Rugby, February 25, 1840. It rejoices me indeed to resume my communication with you, and it is a comfort to me to think that you are at least on our side of the Alps, and on a river which runs into our own side, in the very face of Father Thames. May God's blessing be with you and yours in your new home, and prosper all your works public and private, and give you health and strength to execute them, and to see their fruits beginning to show themselves. I am going on in my accustomed way, in this twelfth year of my life at Rugby, with all about me, thank God, in good health. I have determined, after much consideration, to follow the common chronology for convenience. To alter it now seems as hopeless as Hare's attempt to amend our English spelling ; and besides I cannot sat- isfy myself that any sure system of chronology is attainable, so that it does not seem worth while to put all one's recollections in confusion for the sake of a result which after all is itself uncertain. I have written the naval part of the first Punic War with something of an Englishman's feeling, which I think will make you find that part interesting. I have tried also to make out a sort of Domesday Book of Italy after the Roman Conquest, to show as far as possible the various tenures by which the land was held ' I am seriously thinking of going southwards. I hesi- tate between two plans, Marseilles and Naples, or Trieste and Corfu. Corfu — Corcyra — would be genuine Greece in point of climate and scenery, and if one could get a sight of the country about Durazzo, it would greatly help the campaign of Dyrrhachium. Then, in going to Trieste, we should see Ulm, Augsburg, Munich and Salzburg, and' might take Regensburg and Nurnberg on our return. Naples in itself would be to me less interesting than Corfu, but if we could penetrate into the interior, nothing would delio-ht me more Niebuhr's third volume is indeed delightful ; but it grieved me to find those frequent expressions, in his later letters, of his declining regard for England. I grieve at it, but I do not wonder. Most gladly do I join in your proposal that we should write monthly Will you send me your proper address in German, for I do not like directious to you in French. « A passage has been here omitted relating to the question between the Judges and the House of Commons', on Breach of Privilege, in consequence of the statement of his opinion being mixed up with a statement of facts which he had intended eventually to reconsider. But it was a subject on which, at the time, he felt very strongly in favour of the House of Commons, in the belief that " the leading statesmen of all parties took one side, and the lawyers and the ultra-Tories the other side," and that " Peel's conduct on this occasion does him more credit than any part of his political life." 364 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. CCXXX. TO W. W. HULL, E9a. Rugby, March 13, 1840. I do not often venture to talk to you about public affairs, but surely you will agree with me in deprecating this war with China, which really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men's minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring ? I really do not remember, in any history, of a war undertaken with such combined injustice and baseness. Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the Government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force ; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority. CCXXXI. TO W. LEAPER NEWTON, ESd- Rugby, February 19, 1840. It is with the most sincere regret that I feel myself unable to give an unqualified support to the resolution which you propose to bring forward at the next general meeting of the proprietors of the North Midland Railway Company. Of course, if I held the Jewish law of the Sabbath to be binding upon us, the question would not be one of degree, but I should wish to stop all travelling on Sundays as in itself unlawful. But holding that the Christian Lord's Day is a very different thing from the Sabbath, and to be observed in a different manner, the q\iestion of Sunday travelling is, in my mind, quite one of degree ; and whilst I entirely think that the trains which travel on that day should be very much fewer on every account, yet I could not consent to suspend all travelling on a great line of communication for twen- ty-four hours, especially' as the creation of railways necessarily puts an end to other conveyances in the same direction ; and if the trains do not travel, a poor man, who could not post, might find it impossible to get on at all. But I would cheerfully support you in voting that only a single train each way should travel on the Sunday, which would surely enable the clerks, porters, &c, at every station, to have the greatest part of every Sunday at their own disposal. Nay, I would gladly subscribe individually to a fund for obtaining additional belp on the Sunday, so that the work might fall still lighter on each individual employed. CCXXXII. TO THE S*ME. Rugby, February 22, 1840. It would be absolutely wrong, I think, if I were not to answer your ques- tion to the best of my power ; yet it is so very painful to seem to be arguing in any way against the observance of the Sunday, that I would far rather agree with you than differ from you. I believe that it is generally agreed amongst Christians that the Jewish Law, so far as it was Jewish and not moral, is at an end ; and it is assuming the whole point at issue to assume that the Ten Commandments are all moral. If that were so, it seems tome quite certain that the Sabbath would have been kept on its own proper day ; for, if the Commandments were still binding, I do not see where would be the power to make any alteration in its enactments. But it is also true, no LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 355 doubt, that the Lord's Day was kept from time immemorial in the Church as a day of festival ; and connected with the notion of festival, the absti- nence from worldly business naturally followed. A weekly religious festi- val, in which worldly business was suspended, bore such a resemblance to the Sabbath, that the analogy of the Jewish Law was often urged as a reason for its observance ; but, as it was not considered to be the Sabbath, but only a day in some respects like it, so the manner of its observance varied from time to time, and was made more or less strict on grounds of religious expediency, without reference in either case to the authority of the fourth commandment. An ordinance of Constantine prohibits other work, but leaves agricultural labour free. An ordinance of Leo I. (Emperor of Constantinople) forbids agricultural labour also. On the other hand, our own Reformers (see Cranmer's Visitation Articles) required the Clergy to teach the people that they would grievously offend God if they abstained from working on Sundays in harvest time ; and the Statute of Edward VI., 5th and 6th chap. iii. (vol. iv. part i. p. 132 of the Parliamentary edition of the Statutes, 1819,) expressly allows all persons to work, ride or follow their calling," whatever it may be, in the case of need. And the preamble of this statute, which was undoubtedly drawn up with the full concurrence of the principal Reformers, if not actually written by them, declares in the most express terms that the observance of all religious festivals is left in the dis- cretion of the Church, and therefore it proceeds to order that all Sundays, with many other days named, should be kept holy. And the clear language of this Statute, — together with the total omission of the duty of keeping the Sabbath in the Catechism, although it professes to collect our duty towards God from the four first commandments, — proves to my mind that in using the fourth commandment in the Church Service, the Reformers meant it to be understood as enforcing to us simply the duty of worshipping God, and devoting some portion of time to His honour, the particular portion so de- voted, and the manner of observing it, being points to be fixed by the Church. It is on these grounds that I should prefer greatly diminishing public travelling on the Sunday to stopping it altogether ; as this seems to me to correspond better with the Christian observance of the Lord's Day, which, while most properly making rest from ordinary occupations the gen- eral rule, yet does not regard it as a thing of absolute necessity, but to be waived on weighty grounds. And surely many very weighty reasons for occasionally moving from place to place on a Sunday are occurring con- stantly. But if the only alternative be between stopping the trains on our railway altogether, o# having them go frequently, as on other days, I cannot hesitate for an instant which side to take, and I will send you my proxy without a moment's hesitation. You will perhaps have the goodness to let me hear from you again. CCXXXIII. TO THE SAME. Rugby, April 1, 1840. I should have answered your last letter earlier, had I not been so much engaged that I assure you I do not find it easy to find time for any thing beyond the necessary routine of my employments. I agree with you that it is not necessary with respect to the practical point to discuss the authority of the command to keep the Sunday. In fact, believing it to be an ordinance of the Church at any rate, I hold its practical obligation just as much as if I considered it to be derivable from the fourth commandment ; but the main question is, whether that rest, on which the commandment lays such exclu- sive stress, is really the essence of the Christian Sunday. That it should be a day of greater leisure than other days, and of the suspension, so far as may be, of the common business of life, I quite allow; but then I believe that I should have much greater indulgence for recreation on a Sunday 366 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. than you might have ; and, if the railway enables the people in the great towns to get out into the country on the Sunday, I should think it a very great good. I confess that I would rather have one train going on a Sun- day 'than none at all ; and I cannot conceive that this would seriously interfere with any of the company's servants ; it would not be as much work as all domestic servants have every Sunday in almost every house in the country. At the same time, I should be most anxious to mark the day decidedly from other days, and I think that one train up and down would abundantly answer all good purposes, and that more would be objectiona- ble. I was much obliged to you for sending me an account of the discussion on the subject, and if it comes on again, I should really wish to express my opinion, if I could, by voting against having more than one train. I am really sorry that I cannot go along with you more completely. At any rate, I cannot but rejoice in the correspondence with you to which this question has given occasion. Differences of opinion give me but little con- cern ; but it is a real pleasure to be brought into communication with any man who is in earnest, and who really looks to God's will as his standard of right and wrong, and judges of actions, according to their greater or less conformity.1 CCXXXIV. * TO HOWELL LLOYD, ESQ.. Rugby, February 25, 1840. With regard to Welsh, I am anxious that people should notice any words which may exist in the spoken language of old people, or in remote parts of the country, which are not acknowledged in the written language. Welsh must have its dialects, I suppose, like other languages, and these dialects often preserve words and forms of extreme antiquity, which have long since perished out of the written language, or rather were never introduced into it. You know Dr. Prichard's book, I take it for granted, the only sensible book on the subject which I ever saw written in English. This and Bopp's Vergleichende Grammatik, should be constantly used, I think, to enable a man to understand the real connexion of languages, and to escape the ex- travagances into which our so-called Celtic scholars have generally fallen. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. (Relating to a Petition on Subscription ) April, 1840. My wish about the bill is this, if it could be done; that the Athanasian creed should be rejected altogether, — that the promise to use the Liturgy should be the peculiar subscription of the clergy, — that the Arti- cles should stand as articles of peace, in the main draft of each Article, for clergy and laity alike ; — and that for Church membership there should be no other test than that required in Baptism. I think you may require fuller knowledge of the clergy than of the laity; and, as they have a certain pub- lic service in the Church to perform, you may require of them a promise that they will perform it according to the law of our Church ; but as to the adhesion of the inner man to any set of religious truths, — this, it seems to me, belongs to us as Christians, and is in fact a part of the notion of Chris- tian faith, which faith is to be required of all the Church alike, so far as it can be or ought to be required of any one. And therefore, so long as the clergy subscribe to the Articles, so long do I hope that they will be required at taking degrees in Oxford or Cambridge, of all who are members of the 1 See p. 218, for liis further view of the fourth commandment. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 367 Church. If they are a burden, all ought to bear it alike ; if they are a fair test of church membership, they should extend to all alike. CCXXXVI. TO THE SAME. April, 1840. I would not willingly petition about the Canons, except to procure their utter abolition ; I have an intense dislike of clerical legisla- tion, most of all of such a clergy as was dominant in James the First's reign. And, if the Canons are touched ever so lightly, what is left untouched would acquire additional force, an evil greater to my mind than leaving them altogether alone. I think that I should myself prefer petitioning for a relaxation of the terms of Subscription, and especially for the total repeal of the 36th Canon. Historically, our Prayer Book exhibits the opinions of two very different parties, King Edward's Reformers, and the High Church- men of James the First's time and of 1661. There is a necessity, therefore, in fact, for a comprehensive Subscription, unless the followers of one of these parties are to be driven out of the Church ; for no man, who heartily likes the one, can approve entirely of what has been done by the other. And I would petition specifically, I think, but I speak with submission, for the direct cancelling of the damnatory clauses of the anonymous Creed, vul- garly called Athanasius' — (would it not be well in your petition to alter the expression " Athanasius' Creed ?") leaving the creed itself untouched. CCXXXVII. TO THE SAME. May 16, 1840. I have sent a copy of this petition1 to .Whately ; if he approves of it, I will ask you to get it engrossed, and put into the proper forms. My feeling is this ; as I believe that the tide of all reform is at present on the ebb, I should not myself have come forward at this moment with any petition, but, as you have resolved to petition, I cannot but sign it; and then, signing your petition, I wish also to put on record my sentiments as to what seems to me to be a deeper evil than any thing in the Liturgy or Articles I wish that the signatures may be numerous, and may include many Lay- men ; it is itself a sign of life in the Church that Laymen should feel that the Articles and Liturgy belong to them as well as to the Clergy. CCXXXVIII. * TO J. P. GELL, ESQ.. April 12, 1840. I do not like to let my wife's letter go without a word from me, if it were only to express to you my earnest interest about the beginnings of your great work, which I imagine is now near at hand. It is very idle for me to speculate about what is going on in states of society, of which I know so little ; yet my knowledge of the Jacobinism of people here at home, makes me full sure that there must be even more of it out with you, and it fills me with grief when I think of societyhaving such an element ovvrgotpov l£ «?/>?? I often think that nothing could so rouse a boy's energies as 1 i.e. for the restoration of Deacons. His wish for the revival of any distinct eccle- siastical government of the clergy at this time, was checked by the fear of its counte- nancing what he held to be erroneous views concerning the religious powers and duties of the State. 368 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. sending him out to you, where he must work or starve. There is no earthly thing more mean and despicable in my mind than an English gentleman destitute of all sense of his responsibilities and opportunities, and only revel- ling in the luxuries of our high civilization, and thinking himself a great per- son. Burbidge is here again, as fond of Rugby as ever, but I hope that he will now complete his terms at Cambridge. I hope that you will journalize largely. Every tree, plant, stone, and living thing is strange to. us in Eu- rope, and capable of affording an interest. Will you describe the general aspect of the country round Hobart's Town ? To this day I never could meet with a description of the common face of the country about New York, or Boston or Philadelphia, and therefore I have no distinct ideas of it. Is your country plain or undulating, your valleys deep or shallow. — curving, or with steep sides and flat bottoms 1 Are your fields large or small, parted by hedo-es or stone walls, with single trees about them, or patches of wood here and&there 1 Are there many scattered houses and what are they built of, — brick wood, or stone 1 And what are the hills and streams like, — ridges, or with waving summits, — with plain sides, or indented with combes ; — full of springs, or dry ; — and what is their geology ? I can better fancy the actors when°I have got a lively notion of the scene on which they are acting. Pray give my kindest remembrances to Sir John and Lady Franklin ; and by all means, if possible, stick to your idea of naming your place Christ's College. Such a name seems of itself to hallow Van Diemen's Land, and the Spaniards did so wisely in transplanting their religious names with them to the new world. We unhappily " in omnia alia abiimus." May God bless you and your work. CCXXXIX. f TO REV. W. K. HAMILTON. . Rugby, May 4, 1640. I thank you very much for the book which you were so kind as to send me I was delighted to see translations of some of my favourite hymns in Bunsen's collection, and shall try to get them sometimes sung in our Chapel. I will try also again to understand the very old music which you speak of, and which Lepsius, at Bunsen's request, once played to me. It is a proof of Bunsen's real regard for me, that he still holds intercourse with me, even after I proved utterly insensible to what he admires and loves so much. But seriously, those who are musical can scarcely understand what it is to want that sense wholly ; I cannot perceive, (y.araXafipdriiv,) what to others is a keen source of pleasure ; there is no link by which my mind can attach it to itself; and, much as I regret this defect, I can no more rem- edy it, than I could make my mind mathematical, or than some other men could enter into the deep delight with which I look at wood anemones or wood sorrel. I trust that you will be able to come and see us, though I know the claims upon your time too well to complain of your absence. You will be glad to hear that I wrote to Keble lately, and had a very kind an- swer from him ; I yearn sadly after peace and harmony with those whom I have long known, and I will not quarrel with them if I can help it ; though, alas in some of our tastes there is the music which to them is heavenly, and which to me says nothing ; and there are the wild flowers which to me are so full of beauty, and which others tread upon with indifference If you come to us in about a month's time, I hope that I shall be able to show you four out of the seven windows in our chapel supplied with really good painted glass, which makes us not despair of getting the other three done in good time. I should always wish to be very kindly remembered to your father and mother, whom I now so rarely see. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 359 CCXL. TO REV. HERBERT HILL. Rugby, May 8, 1840. I was very glad indeed to find that were to go to you ; but, before I heard it, I was going to send you an exhortation, which, although you may think it needless, I will not even now forbear. It is, that you should, without fail, instruct your pupils in the six books of Euclid at least. I am, as you well know, no mathematician, and therefore my judgment in this matter is worth so much the more, because what I can do in mathematics, any body can do ; and as I can teach the first six books of Euclid, so I am sure can you. Then it is a grievous pity that at your age, and with no greater amount of work than you now have, you should make up your mind to be shut out from one great department, I might almost say, from many great departments of human knowledge. Even now I would not allow my- self to say that I should never go on in mathematics, unlikely as it is at my age ; yet I always think that if I were to go on a long voyage, or were in any way hindered from using many books, I should turn very eagerly to geometry, and other such studies. But further, I do really think that with boys and young men, it is not right to leave them in ignorance of the begin- nings of physical science. It is so hard to begin any thing in after life, and so comparatively easy to continue what has been begun, that I think we are bound to break ground, as it were, into several of the mines of knowledge with our pupils, that the first difficulties may be overcome by them while there is yet a power from without to aid their own faltering resolution, and that so they may be enabled, if they will, to go on with the study hereafter. I do not think that you do a pupil full justice, if you so entirely despise Plato's authority, as to count geometry in education to be absolutely good for nothing. I am sure that you will forgive me for urging this, for I think that it concerns you much, and I am quite sure that you ought not to run the risk of losing a pupil because you will not master the six books of Euclid, which, after all, are not to be despised for one's very own solace and delight ; for I do not know that Pythagoras did any thing strange, if he sacrificed a hecatomb when he discovered that marvellous relation between the squares containing and sub- tending a right angle, which the 47th proposition of the first book demon- strates More than 500 pages of Vol. II. are printed, but there will be, I fear 100 more. I dread the adage about [6raTov xpivdoq of a false system. I feel, therefore, half attracted and half repelled, doubting whether the practical administrative and social ad- vantages to be gained are likely to outweigh the encouragement given to what T believe to be very mischievous error ; and while " dubitatio ista non tollitur," I cannot feel disposed to come to the practical conclusion of a subscription. Believe me, it is no pleasure to me to be obliged to stand aloof from a movement which has so much of good in it, and might be so purely and gloriously good, were it not . The time which he had originally fixed for his retirement from Rngby was now drawing near, and the new sphere opened to him in his Professorship at Oxford, seemed to give a fixedness to his future prospects, which would naturally increase his long-cher- ished wishes of greater leisure and repose. But he still felt him- self in the vigour of life, and used to rejoice in the thought that the forty-ninth year, fixed by Aristotle as the acme of the human faculties, lay still some years before him. The education of his two younger sons was a strong personal inducement to him to re- main a short time longer in his situation. His professorial labours were of course but an appendage to his duties in the school, and when some of the unforeseen details of the entrance on his new of- fice had seemed likely to deprive him of the place which he had so delighted to receive, — " in good and sober truth," he writes to Archbishop Whately, " I believe that this and all other things are ordered far more wisely than I could order them, and it will seem a manifest call to turn my mind more closely to the great work which is before me here at Rugby." The unusual amount also of sickness and death which had marked the beginning of the school year, naturally gave an increased earnestness to his dealings with the boys. His latest scholars were struck by the great freedom and openness with which he spoke to them on more serious sub- jects,— the more directly practical applications which he made of their Scriptural lessons, — the emphasis with which he called their attention to the contrast between Christian faith and love, and that creed of later Paganism, which made " the feelings of man to- wards the Deity to be exactly those with which we gaze at a beautiful sunset." l The same cause would occasion those fre- quent thoughts of death which appear in his Chapel Sermons, and in his more private life during this last year. There had never, indeed, been a time from his earliest manhood, in which the un- 1 MS. Notes of his lessons on Cic. Div. ii. 72. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 423 certainty of human life had not been one of the fixed images of his mind ; and many instances would recur to all who knew him, of the way in which it was constantly blended with all his thoughts of the future. " Shall I tell you, my little boy," he once said to one of his younger children whose joyful glee at the ap- proaching holidays he had gently checked ; " shall I tell you why I call it sad ?" — and he then repeated to him the simple story of his own early childhood ; how his own father had made him read to him a sermon on the text, " Boast not thyself of to-morrow," on the very Sunday evening before his sudden death : — " Now cannot you see, when you talk with such certainty about this day week and what we shall do, why it seems sad to me ?" — But it was natural that such expressions should have been more often re- marked by those who heard them during this year, even had they not been in themselves more frequent. " It is one of the most sol- emn things I do," he said to one of his children, who asked him why, in the title-page of his MS. volume of Sermons, he always wrote the date only of its commencement, and left a blank for that of its completion,— " to write the beginning of that sentence, and think that I may perhaps not live to finish it." And his pupils recollected the manner in which he had announced to them, before morning prayers, the unexpected death of one of their number : " We ought all to take to ourselves these repeated warnings ; God, in His mercy, sends them to us. I say in His rnercy, because they are warnings to all of us here, — we ought all to feel them as such," — adding emphatically. — "and I am sure 1 feel it so my- self." Whatever might be the general interest of this closing period, was deepened during the last month by accidental causes, into which it is not necessary to enter, but which became the means of drawing forth all the natural tenderness of his character more ful- ly than any previous passage of his life. There was something in the added gentleness and kindness of his whole manner and conversation, — watching himself, and recalling his words, if he thought they would be understood unkindly, — which even in his more general intercourse, would make almost every one who saw him at that time connect their last recollections of him with some trait of thoughtfulness for others, and forgetfulness of himself ; and which, to those nearest and dearest to him, seemed to awaken a consciousness, amounting almost to awe, of a visible growth in those qualities which are most naturally connected with the thought of another world. There was something also in the ex- pressions of his own more personal feelings, — few and short as they ever were, but for that reason the more impressive when they did escape him, — which stamped them with a more than usual so- lemnity. Such were some of the passages in a private diary, which he now commenced for the first time, but not known till after his death by any, except her who alone shared his inmost thoughts, and who could not but treasure up in her memory every 424 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. word connected with the beginning of this custom. It was about three weeks before his end, whilst confined to his room for a few days by an attack of feverish illness, to which, especially when in anxiety, he had always from time to time been liable, that he call- ed her to his bed-side> and expressed to her how, within the last few days, be seemed to have " felt quite a rush of love in his heart towards God and Christ;" and how he hoped that "all this might make him more gentle and tender," and that he might not soon lose the impression thus made upon him ; adding, that, as a help to keeping it alive, he intended to write something in the evenings before he retired to rest. From this Diary, written the last thing at night, not daily, but from time to time in each week, it has been thought right to give the following extracts. May 22. — I am now within a few weeks of completing my forty-seventh year. Am I not old enough to view life as it is, and to contemplate steadily its end, — what it is coming to, and must come to — what all things are without God? I know that my senses are on the very eve of becoming weaker, and that my faculties will then soon begin to decline too, — whether rapidly or not, I know not — but they will decline. Is there not one faculty which never declines, which is the seed and the seal of immortality ; and what has become of that faculty in me ? What is it to live unto God ? May God open my eyes to see Him by faith, in and through His Son Jesus Christ: may He draw me to Him. and keep me with Him, making His will my will, His love my love, His strength my strength, and may He make me feel that pretended strength, not derived from Him, is no strength, but the worst weakness. May His strength be perfected in my weakness. Tuesday evening, May 24. — Two days have passed, and I am mercifully restored to my health and strength. To-morrow I hope to be able to re- sume my usual duties. Now then is the dangerous moment O gracious Father, keep me now through thy Holy Spirit: keep my heart soft and tender now in health and amidst the bustle of the world : keep the thought of Thyself present to me as my Father in Jesus Christ : and keep alive in me a spirit of love and meekness to all men, that I may be at once genlle and active and firm. O strengthen me to bear pain, or sickness, or danger, or whatever Thou shalt be pleased to lay upon me, as Christ's sol- dier and servant ; and let my faith overcome the world daily. Strengthen my faith, that I may realize to my mind the things eternal — death, and things after death, and Thyself. O save me from my sins, from myself, and from my spiritual enemy, and keep me eVer thine through Jesus Christ. Lord, hear my prayers also for my dearest wife, my dear children, my many and kind friends, my household, — for all those committed to my care, and for us to whom they are committed, — I pray also for our country, and for Thy Holy Church in all the world. Perfect and bless the work of Thy Spirit in the hearts of all Thy people, and may Thy kingdom come, and Thy will be done'in earth as it is in heaven. I pray for this, and for all that Thou seest me to need, for Jesus Christ's sake. Wednesday, May 25. — Again, before I go to rest, would I commit myself to God's care, through Christ, beseeching Him to forgive me all my sins of this day past, and to keep alive His grace in my heart, and to cleanse me from all indolence, pride, harshness and selfishness, and to give me the spirit of meekness, humility, firmness, and love. O Lord, keep Thyself present to me ever, and perfect Thy strength in my weakness. Take me and mine under Thy blessed care, this night and evermore, through Jesus Christ. Thursday, May 26 O Lord, keep Thyself present to me LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 425 always, and teach me to come to Thee by the One and Living Way, Thy Son Jesus Christ. Keep me humble and gentle. 2. Self-denying. 3. Firm and patient. 4. Active. 5. Wise to know Thy will, and to discern the truth. 6. Loving, that I may learn to resemble Thee and my Saviour. O Lord forgive me for all my sins, and save me and guide me and strengthen me through Jesus Christ. May 29 O Lord save me from idle words, and grant that my heart may be truly cleansed and filled with Thy Holy Spirit, and that I may arise to serve Thee, and lie down to sleep in entire confidence in Thee and submission to Thy will, ready for life or for death. Let me live for the day, not overcharged with worldly cares, but feeling that my treasure is not here, and desiring truly to be joined to Thee in Thy heavenly kingdom, and to those who are already gone to Thee. O Lord, let me wait on patiently ; but do Thou save me from sin, and guide me with Thy Spirit, and keep me with Thee, and in faithful obedience to Thee, through Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord. May 31. — Another day and another month succeed. May God keep my mind and heart fixed on Him, and cleanse me from all sin. I would wish to keep a watch over my tongue, as to vehement speaking and censuring ot others. I would desire to be more thoughtful of others, more thoughtful " ultro " of my own. head, without the suggestions of others. I would desire to remember my latter end to which I am approaching, going down the hill of life, and having done far more than half my work. May God keep me in the hour of death, through Jesus Christ ; and preserve me from over fear, as well as from presumption. Now, O Lord, whilst I am in health, keep my heart fixed on Thee by faith, and then I shall not lose Thee in sickness or in death. Guide and strengthen and enkindle me, and bless those dearest to me, and those committed to my charge, and keep them Thine, and guide and support them in Thy holy ways. Keep sin far from them, O Lord, and let it not come upon them through any neglect of mine. O Lord, inspire me with zeal, and guide me with wisdom, that Thy name may be known to those committed to my care, and that they may be made and kept always Thine. Grant this, O Lord, through Jesus Christ my Saviour, and may my -whole trust towards Thee be through His merits and intercessions. Thursday evening, June 2. — Again the day is over and I am going to rest. O Lord preserve me this night, and strengthen me to bear whatever Thou shalt see fit to lay on me, whether pain, sickness, danger or distress. Sunday, June 5. — I have been just looking over a newspaper, one of the most painful and solemn studies in the world, if it be read thoughtfully. So much of sin and so much of suffering in the world, as are there displayed, and no one seems able to remedy either. And then the thought of my own private life, so full of comforts, is very startling ; when I contrast it with the lot of millions, whose portion is so full of distress or of trouble. May I be kept humble and zealous, and may God give me grace to labour in my gen- eration for the good of my brethren, and for His glory ! May He keep me His by night and by day, and strengthen me to bear and to do His will, through Jesus Christ. Monday evening, June 6. — I have felt better and stronger all this day, and I thank God for it. But may He keep my heart tender. May He keep me gentle and patient, yet active and zealous, may He bless me in Himself and in His Son. May He make me humble minded in this, that I do not look for good things as my portion here, but rather should look for troubles as what I deserve, and as what Christ's people are to bear. i( If ye be with- out chastisement, of which all are partakers," &c. How much of good have I received at God's hand, and shall I not also receive evil ? Only, O Lord, strengthen me to bear it, whether it visit me in body, in mind, or in estate. Strengthen me with the grace which Thou didst vouchsafe to Thy martyrs ; and let me not fall from Thee in any trial. O Lord, let me cherish a sober mind, to be ready to bear evenly, and not sullenly. O Lord reveal to me Thy- 28 426 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. self in Christ Jesus, which knowledge will make all suffering and all trials easy. O Lord ! bless my dearest wife, and strengthen us in the hardest of all trials, evil befalling each other. Bless our dear children, and give me grace to guide them wisely and lovingly through Jesus Christ. O Lord, may I join with all Thy people in heaven and on earth in offering up my prayers to Thee through our Lord Jesus Christ; and in saying "Glory bo to Thy most holy Name for ever and ever." Meantime his general occupations during this last year had been going on as usual, though interrupted for a time by his Professo- rial Lectures at Oxford. On returning from them to Rugby, in February, he immediately engaged again upon the Roman History. " I thirst," he said, " for Zama," and on the 5th of May, he had begun the chapter immediately preceding the account of that bat- tle which with two more, would have completed the third volume. His Lecture on Gregory the Great had also been occupying his time and thoughts ; and he had for this purpose been analyzing and commenting on the earlier books of Paulus Uiaconus, De Gestis Longobardorum. He was also beginning to make final ar- rangements for the edition of St. Paul's Epistles, which he had now for some years past been hoping to leave as a monument of his government of Rugby School. And it was about six weeks before his death that he explored the field of Naseby in company with Mr. Carlyle, who left his house at Rugby, expressing the hope that it might " long continue to be what was to him one of the rarest sights in the world — a temple of industrious peace." His short illness presented no material interruption to his pres- ent pursuits or future plans. He looked eagerly forward to his holidays at Fox How, often writing to those of his children who had gone there before the usual time of their common journey, to inquire after the growth of his favourite trees, and the aspect of his favourite views ; and he was a'so preparing for his meditated excursion to Carthagena, with a view to his history of the Punic wars. His more laborious and extended designs for his later years were still floating before him. " One inducement I should have if they would send me as Bishop to any of the Australian colonies," were his last words to one of- his most attached pupils, while the attack of illness was still upon him, " that there should be at least one Bishop in those parts, who would endeavour to build up a Church according to my idea of what a true Church should be." His terminal Lecture at Oxford had been-duly notified for the 2nd of June, and was not abandoned till he found that it would be physi- cally impossible, in consequence of the unexpected interruption of his indisposition, to finish it in time. " I am obliged," he wrote to Dr. Hawkins, on the 27th of May, "to give up altogether the hope of coming to Oxford this term. I grieve for this very much, but if I live and am well, I hope to give two Lectures next term to make up for it, for nothing would grieve me more than to be thought to escape from the duties of my office, so far as it is in my power to fulfil them." LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 427 The last week of the long summer half-year had now arrived — his fourteenth year at Rugby was drawing to its close — the course of sermons, in which, during the preceding month, he had dwelt on the three things necessary to be borne in mind by his scholars wherever they might be scattered in after life, had now been ended. On the fifth of June the last and farewell sermon was preached in the Chapel, before the final dispersion of the boys for the holidays, in which he surveyed, from his own long expe- rience, the peculiar difficulties and temptations of the place, and in which he concluded his parting advice with words to which, in the minds of his hearers, the sequel gave a new import, even in their minutest particulars. "The real point which concerns us all, is not whether our sin be of one kind or of another, more or less venial, or more or less mischievous in man's judgment, and to our worldly interests; but whether we struggle against all sin because it is sin ; whether we have or have not placed ourselves conscious- ly under the banner of our Lord Jesus Christ, trusting in Him, cleaving to Him, feeding on Him by faith daily, and so resolved, and continually renewing our resolution, to be his faithful soldiers and servants to our lives' end. To this," he said, " I would call you all, so long as I am permitted to speak to you — to this I do call you all, and especially all who are likely to meet here again after a short interval, that you may return Christ's servants with a be- lieving and loving heart ; and, if this be so, 1 care little as to what particular form temptations from without may take ; there will be a security within — a security not of man, but of God." The succeeding week was, as usual, one of much labour, and confusion, from the accumulation of work at the end of the half- year. There was the heavy pressure of the Fifth Form Examin- ation, and the general winding up of the school business ; — there was the public day of the school-speeches, on Friday, the tenth, — the presence of the yearly examiners from Oxford and Cambridge, — the visits of his former pupils on their way from the Universities at the beginning of die long vacation. It might seem needless to dwell on details which, though of deep interest to those who knew him well, differed but little from the tenor of his usual life. Yet for this very reason it is worth while to recall so much of them as shall continue the same image down to its sudden close. Whatever depression had been left by the feverish attack of the preceding fortnight, had in the two or three last days passed away, and he had recovered not only his usual health, but his usual spirits and energy, playing with his children, undertaking all the work of the Examination, and at the same time interrupt- ing himself in-his vaiious occupations, to go and sit for an hour to relieve the anxiety or enliven the sick bed of an invalid ; and though "glad to get off going up to Oxford to do battle," and wishing to avoid the excitement and inconvenience of a hurried journey, he offered, if it were necessary, to give his vote in convo- cation, on June ninth, for the repeal of the censure on Dr. Hampden. 428 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. Deeply, too, did he enter into the unusual beauty of the sum- mer of that genial year. In his daily walk to his bathing-place in the Avon, he was constantly calling the attention of his companions to the peculiar charm of this season of the year, when every thing was so rich, without being parched ; the deep green of a field of clover, or of an old elm on the rise of a hill on the outskirts of Rugby, or of a fine oak, which called forth many old recollections of its associates in the adjoining hedges, of which it was one of the few survivors. And these walks were enlivened by those con- versations in which his former pupils took so much delight, in which he was led on through the various topics of which his mind was full. There were the remembrances of his past tours, and "of the morning between Pisa and Rome, which gave him the most perfect outward enjoyment which he could conceive ;" the expecta- tion of future journeys — of the delight of visiting the Sierra More- na, " containing all the various stages of vegetation, and beautiful as the garden of the Lord," — and yet again the constant feeling that "he never could rest any where in travelling," — "if he staid more than a day at the most beautiful spot in the world, it would only bring on a longing for Fox How." There was also the anti- cipation of the more distant future ; how he would have pupils with him in Westmoreland during the long vacation, when he had retired from Rugby, and " what glorious walks he would take them upon Loughrigg." His subjects of more general interest were also discussed as usual, — such as the comparison of the art of medicine in barbarous and civilized ages, — the philological importance of provincial vo- cabularies,— the threatening prospect of the moral condition of the United States, — united on the other hand with their great opportu- nities for good in " that vast continent." Of the Oxford opinions his language was strong as usual, but with none of that occasional vehemence of expression, which had of late years somewhat inter- fered with the freedom of his intercourse with some of his Oxford pupils, who thought more favourably than himself of the school in question. He objected, as he often did, to the use of ridicule in religious arguments, as incompatible with the painful feeling which should be aroused by the sight of serious errrors or faults ; and spoke of the irreconcileable difference of principle by which he believed Roman Catholics and Protestants were divided, and " be- tween which," he said, " the nineteenth" century will have to make her choice," — dwelling at the. same time on the inconsistency of any attempt to hold the Apostolical Succession short of Romanism ; though with expressions of great affection of some of his friends, and with great respect of Mr. Maurice, who seemed to him to do this. " But such views," he said, " were my earliest dislike, — the words mean so entirely nothing, their system goes on two legs and a half, — the Oxford system on three and three quarters, — the Ro- man Catholic on four." On Saturday morning he was busily employed in examining LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 429 some of the boys in Ranke's History of the Popes, in the prepara- tion of which he had sat up late on the previous night, and some of the answers which had pleased him he recounted with great interest at breakfast. The chief part of the day he was engaged in finishing the business of the school, not accepting proffered assist- ance even in the mechanical details, but going through the whole work himself. He went his usual round of the school to distribute the prizes to the boys before their final dispersion, and to take leave of those who were not returning after the holidays. " One more lesson," he had said, to his own Form on the previous evening, " I shall have with you on Sunday afternoon, and then I will say to you what I have to say." That parting address to which they were always accustomed to look forward with such pleasure, never came. But it is not to be wondered at, if they remarked with pe- culiar interest, that the last subject which he had set them for an exercise was " Domus Ultima ;" that the last translation for Latin verses was from the touching lines on the death of Sir Philip Syd- ney, in Spenser's " Ruins of Time ;" — that the last words with which he closed his last lecture on the New Testament were in commenting on the passage of St. John : — " It doth not yet appear what we shall be ; but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." — " So, too," he said, " in the Corinthians, ' For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.' — Yes," he added, with marked fervency, " the mere contemplation of Christ shall transform us into His likeness." In the afternoon he took his ordinary walk and bathe, enjoying the rare beauty of the day, and he stopped again and again to look up into the unclouded blue of the summer sky, t: the blue depth of aether" which had been at all times one of his most favourite ima- ges in nature, " conveying," as he said, " ideas so much more beau- tiful, as well as more true, than the ancient conceptions of the heavens as an iron firmament." At dinner he was in high spirits, talking with his several guests on subjects of social or historical interest, and recurring with great pleasure to his early geological studies, and describing, with much interest, his recent visit to Naseby with Carlyle, " its position on some of the highest table land in England,— the streams falling on the one side into the At- lantic, on the other into the German Ocean, — far away, too, from any town, — Market Harborough, the nearest, into which the cava- liers were chased, late in the long summer evening, on the four- teenth of June, you know." In the evening he took a short stroll, as usual, on the lawn in the further garden, with the friend, and former pupil, from whom the account of these last conversations has been chiefly derived. His conversation with him turned on some points in the school of Oxford Theology, in regard to which he thought him to be in error ; particularly he dwelt seriously, but kindly, on what he con- ceived to be false notions of the Eucharist, — insisting especially, 430 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. that our Lord forbids us to suppose that the highest spiritual bless- ings can be conferred only or chiefly through the reception of mate- rial elements,' — urging with great earnestness, when it was said that there might be various modes of spiritual agency, " My dear Lake, God be praised, we are told the great mode by which we are af- fected— we have His own blessed assurance, ' The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' " At nine o'clock was a supper, which, on the last evening of the summer half-year, he gave to the Sixth Form boys of his own house ; and they were struck with the cheerfulness and liveliness of his manner, talking of the end of the half-year, and the pleasure of his return to Epx How in the next week, and observing, in allu- sion to the departure of so many of the boys, " How strange the Chapel will look to-morrow." The school business was now completely over. The old school-house servant, who had been about the place many years, came to receive the final accounts, and delighted afterwards to tell how his master had kept him a quarter of an hour talking to him with more than usual kindness and confidence. One more act, the last before he retired that night, remains to be recorded, — the last entry in his Diary, which was not known or seen till the next morning, when it was discovered by those to whom every word bore a weight and meaning, which he who wrote it had but little anticipated. " Saturday Evening, June 11th. — The day after to-morrow is my birth- day, if I am permitted to live to see it — my forty-seventh birthday since my birth. How large a portion of my life on earth is already passed. And then — what is to follow this life ? How visibly my outward work seems contracting and softening away into the gentler employments of old age. In one sense, how nearly can I now say, ' Vixi.' And I thank God that, as far as ambition is concerned, it is, I trust, fully mortified ; I have no desire other than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to a higher. Still there are works which, with God's permission, I would do before the night cometh; especially that great work,1 if I might be permitted to take part in it. But above all, let me mind my own personal work, — to keep myself pure and zealous and believing, — labouring to do God's will, yet not anxious that it should be done by me rather than by others, if God dis- approves of my doing it." It was between five and six o'clock on Sunday morning that he awoke with a sharp pain across his ohest, which he mentioned to his wife, on her asking whether he felt well, — adding that he had felt it slightly on the preceding day, before and after bathing. He then again composed himself to sleep ; but her watchful care, always anxious, even to nervousness, at the least indication of ill- ness, was at once awakened ; and on finding from him that the pain increased, and that it seemed to pass from his chest to his left arm, her alarm was so much aroused from a remembrance of hav- • To prevent any possibility of misconception, it may be as well to refer to p. 149. LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 431 ing heard of this in connexion with Angina Pectoris, and its fatal consequences, that in spite of his remonstrances, she rose and called up an old servant, whom they usually consulted in cases of illness, from her having so long attended the sick bed of his sister Susan- nah. Reassured by her confidence that there was no ground for fear, but still anxious, Mrs. Arnold returned to his room. She ob- . served him, as she was dressing herself, lying still, but with his hands clasped, his lips moving, and his eyes raised upwards, as if engaged in prayer, when all at once he repeated, firmly and earnestly, " And Jesus said unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen thou has believed ; blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have be- lieved ;" and soon afterwards with a solemnity of manner and depth of utterance, which spoke more than the words themselves, " But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards and not sons." From time to time he seemed to be in severe suffering ; and, on the entrance of the old servant before mentioned, said, " Ah ! Eliza- beth, if I had been as much accustomed to pain as dear Susannah was, I should bear it better." To his wife, however, he uttered no expressions of acute pain, dwelling only on the moments of com- parative ease, and observing that he did not know what it was. But the more than usual earnestness which marked his tone and manner, especially in repeating the verses from Scripture, had again aroused her worst fears ; and she ordered messengers to be sent for medical assistance, which he had at first requested her not to do, from not liking to disturb at that early hour the usual medical at- tendant, who had been suffering from indisposition. She then took up the Prayer Book, and was looking for a Psalm to read to him, when he said quickly, " The fifty-first,"— which she accordingly read by his bedside, reminding him, at the seventh verse, that it was the favourite verse of one of the old almswomen, whom he was in the habit of visiting ; and at the twelfth verse, " O give me the comfort of Thy help again, and stablish me with Thy free Spirit :" — he repeated it after her very earnestly. She then read the prayer in the " Visitation of the Sick," beginning, " The Al- mighty Lord, who is a most strong tower," &c, kneeling herself at the foot of the bed, and altering it into a common prayer for them both. As the clock struck a quarter to seven, Dr. Bucknill (the son of the usual medical attendant) entered the room. He was then lying on his back, — his countenance much as usual,— his pulse, though regular, was very quick, and there was cold perspiration on the brow and cheeks. But his tone was cheerful. — "How is your father ?" he asked, on the physician's entrance : "I am sorry to disturb you so early — I knew that your father was unwell, and that you had enough to do." He described the pain, speaking of it as having been very severe, and then said, " What is it ?" Whilst the physician was pausing for a moment before he replied, the pain returned, and remedies were applied till it passed away ; and Mrs. 432 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. Arnold, seeing by the measures used that the medical man was himself alarmed, left the room for a few moments to call up her second son, the eldest of the family then at Rugby, and impart her anxiety to him ; and during her absence her husband again asked what it was, and was answered that it was spasm of the heart. He exclaimed, in his peculiar manner of recognition, "Ha !" and then on being asked if he had ever in his life fainted. — " No, never." If he had ever had difficulty of breathing ?— " No, never." If he had ever had sharp pain in the chest? "No, never."— If any of his family had ever had disease of the chest ? " Yes, my father had— he died of it."— What age was he ? " Fifty-three."— Was it suddenly fatal ? " Yes, suddenly fatal." He then asked, " If dis- ease of the heart was a common disease ?" " Not very common." "Where do we find it most?" "In large towns, I think." "Why?" (Two or three causes were mentioned.) " Is it generally fatal ?" " Yes, I am afraid it is." The physician then quitted the house for medicine, leaving Mrs. Arnold, now fully aware from him of her husband's state. At this moment she was joined by her son, who entered the room with no serious apprehension, and, on his coming up to the bed, his father, with his usual gladness of expression towards him, asked, — "How is your deafness, my boy?" (he had been suffering from it the night before,) — and then, playfully alluding to an old accusation against him, " you must not stay here ; you know you do not like a sick room." He then sat down with his mother at the foot of the bed, and presently his father said in a low voice : " My son, thank God for me !" and, as his son did not at once catch his meaning, he went on, saying, — " Thank God, Tom, for giving me this pain : I have suffered so little pain in my life, that I feel it is very good for me : now God has given it to me, and I do so thank Him for it." And again, after a pause, he said, — al- luding to a wish which his son had often heard him express, that if he ever had to suffer pain, his faculties might be unaffected by it, — "How thankful I am that my head is untouched." Mean- while his wife, who still had sounding in her ears the tone in which he had repeated the passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews, again turned to the Prayer Book, and began to read the Exhorta- tion, in which it occurs in " the Visitation of the Sick." He lis- tened with deep attention, saying emphatically, — " Yes," at the end of many of the sentences. " There should be no greater comfort to Christian persons than to be made like unto Christ." — "Yes." " By suffering patiently troubles, adversities, and sickness." — " Yes." " He entered not into His glory before he was crucified." — " Yes." At the words, " everlasting life," she stopped, and his son said, — " I wish, dear Papa, we had you at Fox How." He made no answer, but the last conscious look, which remained fixed in his wife's memory, was the look of intense tenderness and love with which he smiled upon them both at that moment. The physician now returned with the medicines, and the former LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 433 remedies were applied : there was a slight return of the spasms) after which he said : — " If the pun is again as severe as it was before you came, I do not know how I can bear it." He then, with his eyes fixed upon the physician, who rather felt than saw them upon him, so as to make it impossible not to answer the exact truth, repeated one or two of his former questions about the cause of the disease, and ended with asking, " Is it likely to re- turn?" and, on being told that it was, "Is it generally suddenly fatal ?" — " Generally." On being asked whether he had any pain, he replied that he had none, but from the mustard plaster on his chest, with a remark on the severity of the spasms in comparison with this outward pain ; and then, a few moments afterwards, in- quired what medicine was to be given ; and on being told, an- swed, " Ah, very well." The physician, who was dropping the laudanum into a glass, turned round, and saw him looking quite calm, but with his eyes shut. In another minute he heard a rat- tle in the throat, and a convulsive struggle, — flew to the bed, caught his head upon his shoulder, and called to one of the servants to fetch Mrs. Arnold. She had but just left the room before his last conversation with the physician, in order to acquaint her son with his father's danger, of which he was still unconscious, when she heard herself called from above. She rushed up stairs, told her son to bring the rest of the children, and with her own hands applied the remedies that were brought, in the hope of re- viving animation, though herself feeling, from the moment that she saw him, that he had already passed away. He was indeed no longer conscious. The sobs and cries of his children, as they entered and saw their father's state, made no impression upon him — the eyes were fixed — the countenance was unmoved : there was a heaving of the chest — deep gasps escaped at prolonged intervals, — and just as the usual medical attendant arrived, and as the old school-house servant, in an agony of grief, rushed with the others into the room, in the hope of seeing his master once more, — he breathed his last. It must have been shortly before eight a. m. that he expired, though it was naturally impossible for those who were present to adjust their recollections of what passed with precise exactness of time or place. So short and sudden had been the seizure, that hardly any one out of the household itself had heard of his illness before its fatal close. His guest, and former pupil, (who had slept in a remote part of the house,) was coming down to breakfast as usual, thinking of questions to which the conversation of the pre- ceding night had given rise, and which, by the great kindness of his manner, he felt doubly encouraged to ask him, when he was met on the staircase by the announcement of his death. The masters knew nothing till the moment when, almost at the same time at the different boarding-houses, the fatal message was deliv- ered in all its startling abruptness, "^that Dr. Arnold was dead." What that Sunday was in Rugby it is hard fully to represent : the 434 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. incredulity — the bewilderment— the agitating inquiries for every detail — the blank, more awful than sorrow, that prevailed through the vacant services of that long and dreary day — the feeling as if the very place had passed away with him who had so emphati- cally been in every sense its head — the sympathy which hardly dared to contemplate, and which yet could not but fix the thoughts and looks of all on the desolate house, where the fatherless family were gathered round the chamber of death* Five of his children were awaiting their father's arrival at Fox How. To them the news was brought on Monday morning, by the same pupil who had been in the house at his death, and who long would remember the hour when he reached the place, just as the early summer dawn — the dawn of that forty-seventh birthday — was breaking over that beautiful valley, every shrub and every flower in all its freshness and luxuriance, speaking of him who had so tenderly fostered their growth around the destined home of his old age. On the evening of that day, which they had been fondly preparing to celebrate with its usual pleasures, they arrived at Rugby in time to see their father's face in death. He was buried on the following Friday, the very day week, since, from the same house, two and two in like manner, so many of those who now joined in the funeral procession to the Chapel, had followed him in full health and vigour to the public speeches in the school. It was attended by his whole family, by those of his friends and former pupils who had assembled from various parts during the week. -and by many of the neighbouring clergy and of the inhabitants of the town, both rich and poor. The cere- mony was performed by Mr. Moultrie, Rector of Rugby, from that place which, for fourteen years, had been occupied only by him who was gone, and to whom every part of that Chapel owed its peculiar interest ; and his remains were deposited in the Chancel immediately under the Communion-table. Once more his family met in the Chapel on the following Sun- day, and partook of the Holy Communion at his grave, and heard read the sermon preached by him in the preceding year, on " Faith Triumphant in Death." And yet one more service in connexion with him took place in the Chapel, when, on the first Sunday of the nexthalf-year. the school, which had dispersed on the eve of his death, assembled again within its walls under his successor, and witnessed in the funeral services with which that day was observed, the last public tribute of sorrow to their departed master. Nowhere could the shock have been so overwhelming as in the immediate circle of his friends and pupils. But the sensation occasioned by his death was far wider than the limits of his per- sonal acquaintance. In London, and still more in Oxford, where his name had always excited so much interest, — where the last impression of him had been one of such life and energy, and of such promise for the future,— the tidings were received by men LIFE OP DR. ARNOLD. 435 of the most various parties, with. the shock which accompanies the announcement of a loss believed to be at once general and irreparable. Few men, it was felt, after having been centres of love and interest to a circle in itself so large, have been known and honoured in a circle yet larger, have been removed from both by an end so sudden and solemn. Some notion of the general sympa- thy may be formed by the notices of his death in most of the peri- odicals of the years 1842, 43, 44, amongst which may be especially mentioned the organs of the two most opposite parties, the ex- treme Radical and the extreme Oxford school, with both of which in life he had had so little of friendly intercourse. As a testimony of gratitude to his services in the cause of education, a public sub- scription was set on foot, under the superintendence of a Committee, consisting of noblemen and gentlemen of different political and ecclesiastical parties, the proceeds of which were applied, after the erection of a monument in Rugby Chapel, to the foundation of scholarships, to be enjoyed in the first instance by his sons in suc- cession, and afterwards dedicated to the pomotion of general study at Rugby, and of the pursuit of history at Oxford. But however wide was the sense of his loss, and the tribute of respect to his memory, it was only in the narrower range of those who knew him, especially of those who had been brought up under his charge, that the solemnity of the event could be fully appreci- ated. Many were the testimonies borne by them to the greatness of their loss, which it is impossible here to record. But it may be permitted to close this narrative with a letter to his widow from a former pupil, whose name has already occurred in these pages, which it has been thought allowable to publish, (though of course only the utterance of the first feelings of private sorrow,) as giving the impression left upon one who had been parted from him for three years in a distant country, and to whom his fellow scholars will, it is felt, willingly leave the expression of thoughts and hopes in which so many will be able more or less to share. Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land, Nov. 16, 1842. MY DEAR MRS. ARNOLD, If you knew the true affection I had for him whom we have los>t, you would not forbid my writing of my grief to one most near and p to him when here below. No one inspirited and en- coura^, hy undertaking here [as] he did ; no letters were so sure to bring fi^sh hopes and happiness as those which can never come again from him. It was not so much what he said in them, as the sense which they conveyed, that he still was as he had ever been, the same earnest faithful friend. It was this which made one feel that while he was alive, it would indeed be pusillanimous to shrink 436 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. from maintaining what was true and right. This I felt the last time I ever saw him, in the autumn of 1839. He rose early and spent the last hour with me, before we separated for ever ; he to his school work and I to my journey here. We were in the dining- room, and I well remember the autumnal dawn — it was calm and overcast, and so impressed itself on my memory, because it agreed with the more than usual quietness ; the few words of counsel which still serve me from time to time ; the manner in which the commonest kindnesses were offered to one soon to be out of their reach for ever ; the promise of support through evil fortune or good, in few words, once repeated, exceeded my largest deserts ; and then the earnest blessing and farewell from lips never again to open in my hearing. His countenance and manner and dress — his hand, and every movement are all before me now more clearly than . any picture — and you will understand full well how a quiet scene like this has an impressiveness unrivalled by the greatest excite- ments. The uncertain consciousness that this parting might be the last hung about it at the time ; and preserved the recollection of it, till now that the sad certainty gives a new importance to the slightest particular. I feel how unequal I am to offer you any consolation that you do not already possess, in the far more solemn and painful parting to which you have been called. But how unhappy would it have been, had you foreseen that each day was drawing nearer and nearer to that fatal event, as surely as you now know that every passing hour is an hour nearer to a happy reunion. Fear not but that he will be himself again — some good men fall asleep in Jesus so full of infirmities, that they cannot but be greatly changed both in body and mind by the healing miracle of the Resurrection. But will not those who die, as Moses and Elias did, in the fulness of. their labours and their strength, be as quickly recognized as were Moses and Elias by the faithful in God's holy mount ? As our Saviour's wounds were healed on the morning of the Resurrection, so shall his mortal disease be healed, and all that we most loved in him shall become immortal. The tone of earnestness shall be there, deepened perhaps into a more perfect beauty by a closer inter- course with the Son of Man, when his ears have heard the " Verily, verily, I say unto you," that once used to be heard upon the earth — the cheerfulness shall be there without a cloud to dim it through- out all eternity, — and how will the mosf aspiring visions of reforma- tion that ever filled his mind on earth be more than accwmp^hed in that day of the restitution of all things ! how will he. rejoicj" m his strength and immortality, as he busies himself to pn?vfim the whole counsel of God no longer doubted or disputed by n»n ! what member of the Divine Body will glory more than he will in the catholic and perfect union of men with each other and with God ! My dear Mrs. Arnold, you have been heretofore a kind friend to one wh'o is neither forgetful nor ungrateful. But, when thus gaz- LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. 437 ing up into heaven after him, I remember that you are his, I pray with a double earnestness that you may follow him, and that, when your time is come, you may present to him the greatest blessing that can now be added to his full cup of joy, yourself and your children perfect before the throne of God. Accept this blessing from your true and sincere friend, JOHN PHILIP GELL. APPENDIX. (A.) PRAYERS, WRITTEN BY DR. ARNOLD FOR VARIOUS OCCASIONS IN RUGBY SCHOOL. I. PRAYER READ EVERY MORNING IN THE SIXTH FORM. (See .p 95.) O Lord, who by Thy holy Apostle hast taught us to do all things in the name of the Lord Jesus and to Thy glory, give Thy blessing, we pray Thee, to this our daily work, that we may do it in faith, and heartily, as to the Lord and not unto men. All our powers of body and mind are Thine, and we would fain devote them to Thy service. Sanctify them and the work in which they are engaged ; let us not be slothful, but fervent in spirit, and do Thou, O Lord, so bless our efforts that they may bring forth in us the fruits of true wisdom. Strengthen the faculties of our minds and dispose us to exert them, but let us always remember to exert them for Thy glory, and for the furtherance of Thy kingdom, and save us from all pride, and vanity, and reliance upon our own power or wisdom. Teach us to seek after truth and enable us to gain it; but grant that we may ever speak the truth in love: — that, while we know earthly things, we may know Thee, and be known by Thee, through and in Thy Son Jesus Christ. Give us this day Thy Holy Spirit, that we may be Thine in body and spirit, in all our work and all our refreshments, through Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord. Amen. II. PRAYER USED ON SUNDAY EVENING IN THE SCHOOL-HOUSE. O Lord our God, we are once again arrived at the evening of Thy holy day. May Thy Spirit render it truly blest to us ! We have attended the public service of Thy church ; Thou knowest, O Lord and our own consciences each know also, whether while we worshipped Thee in form we worshipped Thee in spirit and in truth. Thou knowest, and our own consciences know also, whether we are or are likely to be any the better (or what we have heard with our outward ears this day. Forgive us, Lord, for this great sin of despising the means of grace which Thou hast given us. Forgive us for all our carelessness, inattention, and APPENDIX A. 439 hardness of heart; forgive us for having been far from Thee in mind; when our lips and outward expression seemed near to Thee. Lord, will it be so for ever ? Shall we ever hear and not heed ? And when our life is drawing near to its end, as this day is now, shall we then feel that we have lived without Thee in the world, and that we are dying unforgiven ? Gracious Father, be pleased to touch our hearts in time with trouble, with sorrow, with sickness, with disappointment, with any thing that may hinder them from being hard to the end, and leading us to eternal ruin. Thou knowest our particular temptations here. Help us with Thy Holy Spirit to struggle against them. Save us from being ashamed of Thee and of our duty. Save us from the base and degrading fear of one another. Save us from idleness and thoughtlessness. Save us from the sin of false- hood and lying. Save us from unkindness and selfishness, caring only for ourselves and not for Thee, and for our neighbours. Thou who knowest all our weaknesses, save us from ourselves, and our own evil hearts. Renew us with Thy Spirit to walk as becomes those whom Thou hast redeemed, through Thy Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour. Amen. III. PRAYER USED AFTER CONFIRMATION AND COMMUNION. O Lord, we thank Thee for having preserved us safe from all the perils and dangers of this day : that Thou hast given us health and strength, food and clothing, and whilst there are so many who are poor, so many who are sick, so many who are in sorrow, that Thou hast given us so richly such manifold and great blessings. Yet more, O Lord, we thank Thee for Thy mercies to us in Thy Son Jesus Christ. We thank Thee for Thy infinite love shown in our redemp- tion, that Thou hast opened, through Thy beloved Son, the kingdom of heaven to all believers. We thank Thee for the full assurance of hope which Thou hast given us, that if our earthly tabernacle be dissolved we have yet a building of God, a bouse not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Thou hast shown to us nothing but goodness, O Lord, for this life and for life eternal ; and yet we have sinned, and are sinning ao-ainst Thee daily. We are forfeiting all Thy blessings, and turning them into a curse. Forgive us, for Jesus Christ's sake, all and each, for all our many sins in thought, word, and deed ; whether known to others, or to our own conscience alone, or forgotten even by our own careless hearts, but known and recorded by Thee, against the great day of judgment. One thing more. O Lord, we pray for, without which all these blessings shall only condemn us the more heavily. O Lord, increase and keep alive in us Thy faith. Let not the world, and our own health, and the many good things which Thou hast given us, prove a snare' unto us. Let us endure, as seeing by faith Thee who art invisible. O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst take our nature upon Thee, and art now standing as the Son of Man at the right hand of the Majesty on high, reveal Thyself to our minds and hearts, as Thou didst to the bodily eyes of Thy martyr Stephen. As Thou didst comfort and strengthen him in his suffering, so, O Lord, do thou warn and chasten us in our enjoyments; making us to know and feel that in Thee is our only life, and that if we cleave not to Thee, and have not Thee abiding in us, we are dead now, and shall be dead for ever. Quicken in us the remembrance of-our baptism : how we are pledged to become Thy true servants and soldiers to our lives' end. Dispose us all to renew this pledge from the bottom of our hearts, both those of us who are going to receive the rite of confirmation soon, and those of us who have received it already, and those of us who may expect to receive it hereafter. Quicken in as many of us as have either this day or heretofore been partakers in the Communion of Thy body and blood, the remembrance of that blessed 440 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. sacrament, that we gave ourselves therein to be wholly Thine, in body, soul, and spirit, that we might evermore dwell in Thee, and Thou in us. O Holy Spirit of God, who art the only author of all spiritual life, quicken us with Thy power, and preserve and quicken us in the life which is Thy gift. Forgive us that we have so often grieved Thee, and preserve us from grieving Thee so long and so often, that Thou wilt depart from us for evermore, and leave us to a state beyond repentance, and beyond for- giveness. Teach us to remember that every day which we spend carelessly and unprofitably, we are grieving Thee, and tempting Thee to leave us. Let not our prosperity harden our hearts to our destruction. Screen us from the horrible sin of casting a stumbling block in our brother's way, of tempting him to evil, or discouraging him from good. by our example, or by our laughter, or by our unkindness and persecution. O Lord Almighty, this day is now drawing to its end. May the means of grace which Thou hast given us in it work good in us for to-morrow, and the days to come. May Thy blessing be with us on this first day of the week, to guide us and to strengthen us even to its end. Bless all our friends in all places, and keep them in Thy faith and fear: bless Thy universal Church militant here on earth, and grant that all who confess with their mouth the Lord Jesus, may believe on Him in their hearts, to life everlasting. Bless our Queen and our country ; that we may be a Christian people, not in word only, but in power. Bless this school, that it may be a place of godly education, to Thy glory, and the salvation of our own souls. Fill us with Thy Holy Spirit, that we may labour in our several duties towards one another and towards Thee, as befits those whom Thou hast redeemed by the blood of Thy dear Son. Finally, we thank Thee for all those, whether we have known them on earth, or whether they were strangers to us, who have departed this life in Thy faith and fear; and who are safe and at rest till the day of Thy coming. Increase their number, O Lord, and enable us through Thy grace to be of their company, that when Thou comest in Thy glorious majesty, and shalt call us all to judgment, we may stand with all Thy faithful people at Thy right hand, and may hear Thee call us " blessed," and bid us enter into Thy kingdom to see God face to face. IV. PRAYER USED IN THE SICK ROOMS. O Lord and heavenly Father, we come before Thee with our humble thanks for all Thy mercies towards us, more especially for the means of grace which Thou hast afforded us in this interruption to our usual course, of health. We thank Thee for thus reminding us that our enjoyment of the blessino-s of this world will not last for ever — that the things in which we commonly take delight will one day cease to please us. We thank Thee that by calling us off for a little while from our common employments and amusements, Thou givest us time to think how we are passing our life, and what those joys are which if we once learn to know them will abide with us for ever. Lord, deliver us from all impatience and from all fear for our bodies, and fill us at the same time with spiritual fear ; let us not be afraid of pain or sickness, but let vis be afraid of Thee, and not waste the opportu- nity which Thou art now affording us. Give us grace to think under the visitations of light sickness whether we are fit to be visited with dangerous sickness ; let us consider what we should do if, while our body were weak- ened our mind should be clouded also, so that we could not then pray to Thee for succour. Now, therefore, O Lord, teach us to call on Thee, while we can call on Thee, to think on Thee while our reason is yet is in its vigour. Teach us to look into our heart and life, to consider how Thou wouldest iudo-e us, to ask Thy forgiveness through Thy Son Jesus Christ, for all that Thou seest amiss in us, and by the help of Thy Holy Spirit to overcome all that is evil in our heart, and to learn and practise all that is good. Restore APPENDIX A. 441 us in thy good time to our usual health, and grant that this interruption to it may be sanctified to our soul's health, so making it not an evil to us, but an infinite blessing, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Saviour. V. THANKSGIVING ON A BOy's RECOVERING FROM SICKNESS. O Lord, our heavenly Father, we give Thee our humble and hearty thanks for Thy goodness shown to Thy servant whom Thou hast been pleased to visit with sickness. We thank Thee for the prospect which Thou hast given him of recovery of his full health and strength, as well as for the present abatement of his disorder. Grant that Thy mercies may be felt by him and by us ; that they may not lead us to tempt Thy long-suffering by continued hardness of heart, but may make us desirous of showing our grati- tude to Thee by living according to Thy will. May we remember how nearly health and sickness come together, and that the time will surely come to us all when we shall be raised up from sickness no more. While Thou sparest us, give us grace to turn to Thee in earnest, that we may not have to turn to Thee when it is too late with a vain regret and despair. Grant this, O Lord, for Thy dear Son's sake, Jesus Christ our Lord. The following prayers were contributed by Dr. Arnold, in 1842 to a " Book of Family Prayers for every day in the year," (pub- lished by Mr. Whittlemore, Brighton,) in answer to a request made to him by the Editor ; and they are here inserted by the kind per- mission of the publisher. The subjects of them were doubtless suggested by two wants, which he often lamented, in the public services of the Liturgy, viz., a more direct reference to the blessings of the natural seasons, and also an offering of thanksgivings and prayers for the blessings of law and government, unconnected with any such political allusions as occur in the four State Services appended to the Book of Common Prayer. I. JOHN, IV. 35. O Lord God, who givest us the promise of 'food for our bodies, and mak- est the seed sown to grow up and ripen and yield its fruits in season, do Thou be pleased to give us the true bread of life, and to bless and ripen in us the seed sown by Thy Holy Spirit in our hearts, that it may bring forth fruit unto life eternal. Give us, we beseech Thee, the true bread of life, Thy beloved Son. May we ever hunger after Him, and ever be filled. May we feed upon Him by faith, receiving into our hearts His most precious body and blood, even the virtue of His sacrifice which alone cl'eanseth from all sin. May we cleave unto Him, and grow unto Him, that we may be one with Him and He with us. Ripen in us also, we pray Thee, the seed of Thy Holy Spirit. Make us to cherish every good resolution which He suggests to us, and dread the great sin of grieving Him. Save us from hardness of heart which will not listen to Him; from carelessness and lightness of heart which forgets Him ; from worldliness and overmuch busi- ness, which cares for and loves other things more. Bless Thy spiritual works even as Thy natural works, and gather in Thy corn into Thy o-arner to Thy glory and our salvation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 29 442 LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD. O Lord, who hast given us thy summer sun to gladden us with his light and to ripen the fruits of the earth for our support, and who biddest him to set when his work is done, that he may rise again to-morrow ; give Thy blessing to us Thy servants, that the lesson of the works of Thy hand maybe learnt by us Thy living works, and that we may run our course like the sun which is now gone from us. Let us rise early and go late to rest, being ever busy and zealous in doing Thy will. Let our light shine before men, that they may glorify Thee our Heavenly Father. Let us do good all our days, and be useful to and comfort others. And let us finish our course in faith, that we too may rise again to a course which shall never end, through the only merits of Thy beloved Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. O Lord, we beseech Thee, teach us to mark the flight of time, and learn from the course of the natural seasons to take a lesson for the benefit of our own souls. The summer is nearly ended, and if Thou seest fit to deprive us of our time of harvest, or if we have neglected to do our part towards raising the fruits of the earth for our sustenance, then we can no more make good our neglect, and it will be too late to wish that we had been wiser. O Lord, our lives are fast running away, like the natural year ; we have received Thy good gifts, the sun and the rain of Thy grace, that we should bring forth spiritual fruits. Now is the time of the harvest ; now mayst Thou come to see whether or no the seed which has been sown in us is bringing forth fruit in its season. Every day, O Lord, mayst Thou expect to find fruit in us ; our spiritual harvest should be ever ready for the sickle. Yet how many days hast Thou come seeking fruit in us, and finding none. How many days have we spent in sin, or in that which thou callest sin, though we deem it innocent, in following our own ways, and our own pleasures, and neither working nor en- joying to thy glory, because we thought not of Thee, nor of Thy beloved Son. So, in one sense, O Lord, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. One summer, many summers have been so ended. — many times when we might have brought forth fruit and did not ; — many birthdays have returned to us, and yet have not found us nearer Thee, although we were nearer to death and judgment. Yet not for nothing, O Lord, does any man grieve Thy Holy Spirit and turn away from Thy loving call. Refusing Thy strength, we become weaker; refusing to live by faith, heavenly things become darker to us; despising Thy long suffering, our hearts become harder; we are not what we once were ; we are stained with many fresh sins, encumbered with many infirmities ; we have built again the things which Christ destroyed ; and next year we shall not be what we are now, but harder; and Thou hast said, there is a state in which it is impossible to be renewed unto repent- ance. O Lord, save us from this dreadful state, a state of condemnation even before the judgment. O Lord, yet once more we pray Thee to deliver us for Thy Son's sake, whose name we bear, and by whose blood we are re- deemed, have mercy upon us. Cleanse our hearts from their manifold sins. Give strength to our feeble purposes. Deliver us from the malice of our enemy, to whom we have betrayed ourselves. Deliver us from sin which can- not be repented of; from the last hardness of heart, to be melted only by Thy judgments when the time of mercy is over. O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst warn Thy disciples when they failed to watch with Thee, that they should APPENDIX A. 443 watch and pray, lest they entered into temptation, grant us the help of Thy Holy Spirit, to do those things which Thou commandest us. Help us to watch, and help us to pray. Keep alive in us the resolutions which fade so quickly. Call to prayer the murmuring heart that tries to escape from Thy service, and when we kneel down and our lips utter words of prayer, do Thou then restrain our wandering thoughts, and fix our whole soul and spirit in one earnest sense of our own perishing condition and of Thine almighty and ever-present love to us. And now, O Lord, the words which we have spoken, let us not deceive ourselves by them : let not our lips have prayed and our hearts be silent. Forgive the unworthiness of all our ser- vice, and cleanse us from the sin which cleaves to us in body, soul, and spirit by Thy most precious blood, and by the grace of Thy Holy Spirit. And O God most holy, receive our prayers in the name of Thy beloved Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. " O pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee." Psalm cxzii. O Lord, who by Thy Holy Apostle hast commanded us to make prayers and intercessions for all men, we implore thy blessing, more especially upon this our country, upon its government, and upon its people. May Thy Holy Spirit be with our rulers, with the Q,ueen, and all who are in authority under her. Grant that they may govern in Thy faith and fear, striving to put down all evil, and to encourage and support all that is good. Give Thy spirit of wisdom to those whose business it is to make laws for us. Grant that they may understand and feel how great a work Thou hast given them to do ; that they may not do it lightly or foolishly, or from any evil passion, or in ignorance, but gravely, soberly, and with a godly spirit, enact- ing always things just, and things wise, and things merciful, to the putting away of all wrong and oppression, and to the advancement of the true wei1- fare of Thy people. Give to us and all this nation a spirit of dutiful obedi- ence to the laws, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake. Teach us to remember Thy Apostle's charge, to render to all their dues, tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, not defrauding or suffering to defraud those who in the receiving of custom and tribute are Thy ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Give peace in our time, O Lord ! Preserve both us and our government from the evil spirit of ambition and pride, and teach us to value, and to la- bour with all sincerity to preserve peace with all nations, not indulging in taunts and railings against other people, but showing forth a spirit of meek- ness, as becomes those who call themselves Christ's servants. Save us from all those national sins which expose us most justly to Thy heavy judgments. From unbelief and profaneness, from injustice and oppression, from hardness of heart and neglect of the poor, from a careless and worldly spirit, working and enjoying with no thought of Thee, from these and all other sins, be Thou pleased to preserve us, and give us each one for himself a holy watchfulness, that we may not by our sins add to the guilt and punishment of our country, but may strive to keep ourselves pure from the blood of all men, and to bring down Thy blessing upon ourselves and all who belong to us. These things and all else which may be good for our temporal and for our spiritual welfare, we humbly beseech Thee to grant in the name and for. the sake of Thy dear Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 444 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. (B.) It has been thought worth while to select a few of the subjects which Dr. Arnold chose for exercises at Rugby, both as an illus- tration of what has been said on this point in the Chapter on his school life, and also because, at least to those who knew him, they would suggest, perhaps as much as any thing which could be given, his favourite images and trains of thought. They were of course varied with translations from the authors he most admired, and he used from time to time to give criticisms on different books or poems. Many of the subjects, as will be seen, are capable of various applications, which he used to indicate to the boys when he set the subjects. The subjects of the last half-year of his life have been given entire, and those who have read the account of that period will trace the connection of many of them with some of the thoughts then uppermost in his mind. SUBJECTS FOR PROSE EXERCISES. 1. The difference between advantages and merits. 2. On the excellences of Translation, and some of its difficulties. 3. I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning, Alas ! the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning. 4. Conversation between Thomas Aquinas, James Watt, and Sir Wal- ter Scott. 5. How far the dramatic faculty is compatible with the love of truth. 6. The principal events and men of England, France, Germany, and Holland, a. d. 1600. 7. The ideal is superior to the real. 8. The good and evil which resulted from the seven years' war. 9. Cogitamus secundum naturam, loquimur ex prseceptis, agimus e consuetudine. (Bacon.) 10. Magnus esse debet historiam legentibus fructus, superioris aevi ca- lamitates cum hac nostra humanitate et tranquil] itate conferentibus. 11. Parum valet rerum ipsarum scientia, nisi accedat ingenii vigor, quae informem molcm in veram doctrinam effingat. 12. Henricus Jenkyns, jam extrema senectute, qua? in tam longS. vita memoria dignissima viderit, nepotibus enarrat. 13. An bene constitutum sit debitoris non bona tantum, sed etiam corpus creditori esse obnoxium. 14. Franco - Gallorum exercitus, devicta ihferiori iEgypto, superiorem et urbem Thebas ingreditur. 15. De sa?culo, quo Esaias vaticinia sua edidit. 16. Diversi nuntii a Novoburiensi prselio Londinum et Oxoniam per- venientes. 17. Oxonige descriptio, qualem redivivus describeret Herodotus. (Greek.) 18. Q,uae in quascunque regiones peregrinantibus praecipue notanda. 19. Alexander Babylonem ingreditur, neque ita multo post morbo cor- reptus, inter summum suorum fletum et dolorem animum expirat. 20. Africa provincia, postquam Romanis subjecta esset, quas potissimum vices usque ad hanc aetatem subierit. 21. Non ea est vita? nostra? ratio ut sciamus omnia, neque ut de omnibus APPENDIX B. 445 incerti dubitemus ; sed ut neque scientes plane, neque ignorantes, probabili causS. moti credamus. 22. Definiantur voces quae sequuntur, to rtfiiov, to xdlov, hx^afa, fides : necnon, voces Anglicae— " revolution," "philosophy," "art," "religion," "duty," "romantic," "sublime," "pretty." 23. Judaeus quidam Athenas devectus Socrati de republican et puerorum institutione disputanti forte auditorem se et interrogatorem praebet. 24. De veris rerum miraculis. 25. De primaevis animalibus et terrae hujus mirandis vicibus. 26. Europam per aestatem anni 1815 circumvectus, quern rerum statura apud singuios populas offendisset. 27. Descriptio monasterii, quae sit singularum domi partium distributio, qualemque ibi vitam degant monachi. 28. De celeberrimis quae in omni memoria scriptae sunt legibus. 29. Calendarium naturale. 30. Ea demum vera est voluptas quae non tarn spe delectat, quam re- cordatione praeterita— (" Look not on pleasures as they come, but go.") SUBJECTS FOR VERSE. 1. Pendent opera interrupta. 2. Venus eadem quae Libitina. 3. Prytaneum. 4. Byzantinum sive Romanum Imperium inter novas Europae respubli- cas solum antiquitatis monumentum superstes manet. 5. Africa, bonarum artium nutrix, nunc barbarie premitur. 6. "Eoona; aoq>ici<; ndoidqot,. 7. Mediterranei Asia; campi. 8. Richardi Cromwellii in Senatum reditus. 9. Vulgo ferunt beatas esse nuptias, quas sol illuminat ; inferias, quibus irrorant nubes. 10. The Land's End. 11. Supremi fructus anni. 12. Siccitate laborant agri. 13. Festum omnium Animarum, sive Dies in memoriam Christianorum defunctorum celebratus. 14. Nav<; af aviod-ilaa. 15. Epicurus scholam in hortulo suo instituit. 16. Polycarpi Martyrium. 17. Magna est funerum religio. 18. Oculis capto mens tamen intus viget. 19. Christianus, trajecto flumine, ob pericula vise feliciter superata, grates agit; (Pilgrim's Progress.) 20. (The Seven Sleepers.) De septem illis pueris qui cum per clxxx. annos dormiissent, turn autem miraculo expergefacti sunt. 21. Duodecim vultures a Romulo visae. 22. Ulysses in ipso mortis limine cum matris umbra colloquitur. 23. Demosthenis suprema fata. 24. Fasti Christiani. 25. Adventus Domini qualis ab ecclesia singulis annis celebratur. 26. Urbis Romae vicissitudines. 27. Hortus Anglicus. 28. Prospectabat pulcherrimum sinum, antequam Vesuvius mons arde- scens faciem loci verteret. Tac. Ann. iv. 67. 29. Pastores duo, hie mare ille dulcis aquae flumina alternis versibus faudant. 30. Ne plus ultra. 446 LIPE 0F DR- ARNOLD. PROSE SUBJECTS, FROM FEBRUARY TO JUNE, 1842. 1. De fcenore et de legibus foenebribus. 2. Duo viatores, ab ipso fonte profecti, Rhodani cursum animi caush Hsque ad mare explorant. 3. Q,uis rerum fuerit status circa annum post Christum sexcentesi- mum. 4. " Nunc dimittis :" (Christianus, ipsis Apostolis sequalis, jam ad cen- tesimum annum provectus, grates Deo agit ob fidem per universum fere terrarum orbem pervulgatam.) 5. John, xvi. 22. " If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin ; but now they have no cloak for their sin." (English Prose.) 6. De sectis Judeeorum, Pharisseis, Sadducseis, et Essenibus ; necnon de Publicanis et quos vocant Judaizantibus sive Christianis Judaismum affec- tantibus. 7. Nib)tfQ(t,oiio)i', t\i di az'a. *Hv yao noxi /aiyaq dvd ndorjv, wq tlntiv, 'Evowtiijv noXifioq' ov/vai Si iyivovxo noXfuiv avanxamtq, ixl di jtaXXov dytjojv d'rjojoiiq xal dvO-oui- Ttwv (fovoi. 'Ev pit' (ov xovxw xw aoXtfua /.u'yiorct drj Ttartuv *{>y tw TZQairwytw, the four precious Epistles ad Ephesios, ad Philippenses, ad Colossenses, ad Phi- lemona ; and on the other hand, owing to his Jong absence, the growth of Judaism, that is, of priestcraft, in the eastern Churches, never, alas ! to be wholly put down. July 13, 1840. 9 Mary says that she never saw so beautiful a spot as Mola di Gaeta. I should say so too, in suo genere ; but Fox How and Chi- avenna are so different, that I cannot compare them ; so again are Rome from S. Pietroin Montorio, — Oxford from the pretty field, or from St. John's Gardens, — London, from Westminster Bridge, and Paris from the Quays. But Mola is one of those spots which are of a beauty not to be forgotten while one lives. " At Mola is what is called Cicero's Villa. There is no greater folly than to attempt to connect particular spots in this uncertain way with great names; and no one, who represents to his own mind the succession of events and ages which have passed, will attempt to do it upon conjecture, the chances being thousands to one against correctness. There can be no tra- ditions, from the long period when such things were forgotten and uncared for ; and what seems to be tradition, in fact, originates in what antiquarians have told the people. People do not enough consider the long periods of the Roman empire after Augustus's time, — the century of the greatest ac- tivity under Trajan, and the Antonines, when the Republic and the Augus- tan age were considered as ancient times, — then Severus and his time, — then Diocletian and Theodosius, — when the Roman laws were in full vigour." Naples, July 14, 1840. 10. While we are waiting for dinner, my dearest , I will write two or three lines of journal. Here we actually are, looking out upon what but 476 LIFE op DR- ARNOLD. presents images which, with a very little play of fancy, might all be shaped into a fearful drama of Pleasure, Sin, and Death. The Pleasure is every where, — nowhere is nature more lovely, or man, as far as appears, more enjoying ; the sin is in the sty of Caprese, in the dissoluteness of Baise and Pompeii, — in the black treachery which in this ill-omened country stained the fame even of Nelson, — in the unmatchable horrors of the White Jacob- ins of 1799, — in the general absence of any recollections of piety, virtue, or wisdom — for " he that is not with me is against me." And the Death stands manifest in his awfulness in Vesuvius, — in his loathesomeness at the abomi- nable Campo Santo. Far be it from me, or from my friends, to live or to sojourn long in such a place ; the very contradictory, as it seems to me, of the Hill Difficulty, and of the House Beautiful, and of the Land of Beulah. But, behold, we are again in voiture, going along the edge of the sea in the port of Naples, and going out to Salerno. Clouds are on the mountains which form the south-east side of the bay; but Vesuvius is clear, and quite quiet. — not a wreath of smoke ascends from him. Since I wrote this, in the last five minutes, there is a faint curl of smoke visible. Striking it is to ob- serve the thousand white houses round his base, and the green of copse- wood which runs half way up him, and up to the very summit of his neighbour, the Monte Somma, — and then to look at the desolate blackness of. his own cone. July 15, 1840. 11. We have just left Pompeii, after having spent two hours in walking over the ruins. Now, what has struck me most in this extraordinary scene, speaking historically ? That is, what knowledge does one gain from seeing an ancient town destroyed in the first century of the Christian era, thus laid open before us ? I do not think that there is much. I observed the streets crossing one another at right angles : I observed the walls of the town just keeping the crown of the hill, and the suburbs and the tombs falling away directly from the gates : I observed the shops in front of the houses, — the streets narrow, the rooms in the houses very small; the dining room in one of the best was twenty feet by eighteen nearly. The Forum was large for the size of the town ; and the temples and public buildings occupied a space proportionably greater than with us. I observed the Impluvium, forming a small space in the midst of the Atrium. And I think, farther, that Pompeii is just a thing for pictures to represent adequately ; I could understand it from Gell's book, but no book can give me the impressions or the knowledge which I gain from every look at the natural landscape. Then, poetically, Pompeii is to me, as I always thought it would be, no more than Pompeii ; that is, it is a place utterly unpoetical. An Osco-Roman town, with some touches of Greek corruption, — a town of the eighth century of Rome, marked by no single noble recollection, nor having — like the polygonal walls of Ciolano — the marks of a remote antiquity and a pure state of society. There is only the same sort of interest with which one would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One is not authorized to ascribe so sol- emn a character to the destruction of Pompeii ; it is not a peculiar monument of God's judgments, it is the mummy of a jnan of no worth or dignity, — solemn, no doubt, as every thing is which brings life and death into such close connexion, but with no proper and peculiar solemnity, like places rich in their own proper interest, or sharing in the general interest of a remote antiquity, or an uncorrupted state of society. The towns of the Ciolano are like the tomb of a child, — Pompeii is like that of Lord Chesterfield. July 29, 1840. 12. Rieti is so screened by the thousand elms to which its vines are trained, that you hardly can see the town till you are in it. It stands in the midst of the " Rosea Rura,"this marvellous plain of the Velinus, a far fairer than the Thessalian Tempe. Immediately above it are some of the rocky •but exquisitely soft hills of the country, — so soft and sweet that they are like APPENDIX C. 477 the green hills round Como. or the delicate screen of the head of Derwent- water ; the Apennines have lost all their harsher and keep only their finer features — their infinite beauty of outline, and the endless enwrapping Qf their combes, their cliffs, and their woods. But here is water every where which gives a universal freshness to every thing. Rieti, I see stands just at an opening of the hills, so that you may catch its towers on the sky be- tween them. We have crossed the Velino to its left bank, just below its confluence with the Torrano, the ancient Tereno, as I believe, up whose valley we have just been looking, and see it covered with corn, s'.andino- in shocks, but not carried. It has been often a very striking sight to see°the little camp of stacks raised round a farm-house, and to see multitudes of peo- ple assembled, threshing their corn, or treading it out with mules' or horses' feet. Still the towns stand nobly on the mountains. Behold Grecio before us, — two church towers, and the round towers of its old bastions, and the line of its houses on the edge of one cliff, and with other cliffs risino- behind it. The road has chosen to go up a shoulder of hill on the left of the valley for no other visible reason than to give travellers a station like the Bowness Terrace, from which they might have a general view over it. It is really like " the garden of the Lord," and the " Seraph guard " might keep their watch on the summit of the opposite mountains, which, seen under the morning sun, are invested in a haze of heavenly light, as if shrouding a more than earthly glory. Truly may one feel with Von Canitz,1 that if the glory of God's perishable works be so great, what must be the glory of the imperish- able,— what infinitely more, of Him who is the author of both ! And if I feel thrilling through me the sense of this outward beauty — innocent in- deed, yet necessarily unconscious, — what is the sense one ought to have of moral beauty,— of God the Holy Spirit's creation,— of humbleness and truth, and self-devotion and love ! Much more beautiful, because made truly after God's image, are the forms and colours of kind and wise and holy thoughts, and words, and actions ; more truly beautiful is one hour of old Mrs. Price's21 patient waiting for the Lord's time, and her cheerful and kind interest in us all, feeling as if she owed us any thing, — than this glorious valley of the Velinus. For this will pass away, and that will not pass away: but that is not the great point; — believe with Aristotle that this should abide, and that should perish; still there is in the moral beauty an inherent excellence which the natural beauty cannot have ; for the moral beauty is actually, so to speak, God, and not merely His work : His living and conscious ministers and servants are — it is permitted us to say so — the temples of which the light is God Himself. Banks of the Metaurus, July 21, 1840. 13. " Livy says, ' the farther Hasdrubal' got from the sea, the steeper became the banks of the river.' We noticed some steep banks, but probably they were much higher twenty-three centuries ago ; for all rivers have a tendency to raise themselves, from accumulations of gravel, &e. ; the wind- ings of the stream, also, would be much more as Livy describes them, in the natural state of the river. The present aspect of this tract of country is the result of 2,000 years of civilization, and would be very different in those times. There would be much of natural forest remaining, the only cultivation being the square patches of the Roman messores, and these only on the best land. The whole plain would look wild, like a new and half-settled country. One of the greatest physical changes on the earth is produced by the extermination of carnivorous animals ; for then the grami- nivorous become so numerous as to eat up all the young trees, so that the forests rapidly diminish, except those trees which they do not .eat, as pines and firs." • 1 See the story and poem in Serm. vol. iv. note B. 2 An old woman in the Almshouses at Rugby, alluded to in p. 153,431. 478 LIFE op DR- ARNOLD. July 23, 1840. 14. Between Faenza and Imola, just now, I saw a large building stand- ing back from the road, on the right, with two places somewhat like lodges in front, on the road side. On one of them was the inscription " Labor om- nia vicit," and the lines about iron working, ending " Argutse lamina serrae." On the other were Horace's lines about drinking, without fear of " insanae leges." Therefore, I suppose that these buildings were an iron foundry, and a public or cafe ; but the classical inscriptions seemed to me character- istic of that foolery of classicalism which marks the Italians, and infects those with us who are called " elegant scholars." It appears to me that in Christian Europe the only book from which quotations are always natural and good as inscriptions for all sorts of places, is the Bible ; because every calling of life has its serious side, if it be not sinful ; and a quotation from the Bible relating to it, is taking it on this serious side, which is at once a true side, and a most important one. But iron foundries and publics have no connection with mere book literature, which, to the people concerned most with either, is a thing utterly uncongenial. And inscriptions on such places should be for those who most frequent them : a literary man writing up something upon them, for other literary men to read, is like the imperti- nence of two scholars talking to each other in Latin at a coach dinner. Bologna, July 23, 1840 15 And now this is the last night, I trust, in which I shall sleep in the Pope's dominions ; for it is impossible not to be sickened with a government such as this, which discharges no one function decently. The ignorance of the people is prodigious, — how can it be otherwise? The booksellers' shops sad to behold, — the very opposite of that scribe, instructed to the kingdom of God, who was to bring out of his treasures things new and old, — these scribes, not of the kingdom of God, bring out of their trea- sures nothing good, either new or old, but the mere rubbish of the past and the present. Other governments may see an able and energetic sovereign arise, to whom God may give a long reign, so that what he began in youth he may live to complete in old age. But here every reign must be short ; for every sovereign comes to the throne an old man, and with no better ed- ucation than that of a priest. Where, then, can there be hope under such a system, so contrived as it should seem for every evil end, and so necessa- rily exclusive of good ? I could muse long and deeply on the state of this country, but it is not my business ; neither do I see, humanly speaking, one gleam of hope. " 1517," said Niebuhr, " must precede 1688 ;" but where are the symptoms of 1517 here 1 And if one evil spirit be cast out, there are but seven others yet more evil, if it may be, ready to enter. Wherefore I have no sympathy with the so-called Liberal party here any more than has Bun- sen. They are but types of the counter evil of Popery, — that is of Jacobin- ism. The two are obverse and reverse of the coin, — the imprinting of one type on -the one side, necessarily brings out the other on the other side ; and so in a perpetual series ; for [Newmanism] leads to [Socialism,] and [So- cialism] leads to [Newmanism,] — the eternal oscillations of the drunken mima, — the varying vices and vfleness of the slave, and the slave broken loose. " Half of our virtue," says Homer, " is torn away when a man be- comes a slave," and the other half goes when he becomes a slave broken loose. Wherefore, may God grant us freedom from all idolatry, whether of flesh or of spirit; that fearing Him1 and loving Him, we may fear and bow down before no idol, and never worshipping what ought not to be worship- ped, may so escape the other evil of not worshipping what ought to be wor- shipped. Good night, my darlings. 1 " He fears God thoroughly, and he fears neither man nor Devil beside," was his characteristic description of a thoroughly courageous man. APPENDIX C. 479 July 24, 1840. 16. As we are going through this miserable state of Modena, it makes me feel most strongly what it is to be ifov&tyaq noXfmq tioMrtjq. What earthly thing could induce me to change the condition of an English private gentle- man for any conceivable rank or fortune, or authority in Modena 1 How much of my nature must I surrender ; how many faculties must consent to abandon their exercise before the change could be other than intolerable ? Feeling this, one can understand the Spartan answer to the great King's satrap, •' Hadst thou known what freedom was, thou wouldst advise us to defend it not with swords, but with axes." Now there are some, English- men unhappily, but most unworthy to be so, who affect to talk of freedom, and a citizen's rights and duties, as things about which a Christian should not care. Like all their other doctrines, this comes out of the shallowness of their little minds, " understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm." True it is, that St. Paul, expecting that the world was shortly to end, tells a man not to care even if he were in a state of personal slavery. That is an endurable evil which will shortly cease, not in itself only, but in its consequences. But even for the few years during which he supposed the world would exist, he says, " if thou mayest be made free, use it rather." For true it is that a great part of the virtues of human nature can scarcely be developed in a state of slavery, whether personal or politi- cal. The passive virtues may exist, but the active ones suffer. Truth, too, suffers especially ; if a man may not declare his convictions when he wishes to do so, he learns to conceal them also for his own convenience ; from being obliged to play the hypocrite, for others, he learns to lie on his own account. And as the ceasing to lie is mentioned by St. Paul, as one of the first marks of the renewed nature, so the learning to lie is one of the surest marks of nature unrenewed True it is, that the first Christians lived under a despotism, and yet that truth and the active virtues were admi- rably developed in them. But the first manifestation of Christianity was in all respects of a character so extraordinary as abundantly to make up for the absence of more ordinary instruments for the elevation of the human mind. It is more to the purpose to observe, that immediately after the Apos- tolic times, the total absence of all civil self-government was one great cause which ruined the government of the Church also, and prepared men for the abominations of the priestly dominion ; while on the other hand Guizot has well shown that one great cause of the superiority of the Church to the heathen world, was because in the Church alone there was a degree of freedom and a semblance of political activity; the great bishops, Athana- sius and Augustine, although subjects of a despotic ruler in the State, were themselves free citizens and rulers of a great society, in the management of which all the political faculties of the human mind found sufficienf exercise. But when the Church is lost in the weakness and falsehood of a Priesthood, it can no longer furnish such a field, and there is the greater need therefore of political freedom. But the only perfect and entirely wholesome freedom, is where the Church and the State are both free, and both one. Then, indeed, there is Civitas Dei, then there is agfari} xa{ rtXiiorctTr] noUreia. And now this discussion has brought me nearly half through this Duchy of Modena, for we must be more than half way from Rubbiera to Reggio. July 28, 1840. 17. Left Amsteg, 6.50. The beauty of the lower part of this valley is perfect. The morning is fine, so that we see the tops of the mountains, which rise 9000 feet above the sea directly from the valley. Huge preci- pices, crowned with pines, rising out of pines, and with pines between them, succeed below to the crags and glaciers. Then in the valley itself, green hows, with walnuts and pears, and wild cherries, and the gardens of these pictu- resque Swiss cottages, scattered about over them ; and the roaring Reuss, the only inharmonious element where he is,— yet he himself not incapable of beino- 480 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. made harmonious, if taken in a certain point of view, at the very hottom of all. This is the Canton Uri, one of the Wald Staaten, or Forest Cantons, which were the original germ of the Swiss Confederacy. But Uri, like Sparta, has to answer the question, what has mankind gained over and above the ever precious example of noble deeds, from Murgarten. Sempach, or Thermopylae. What the world has gained by Salamis and Platsea, and by Zama, is on the other hand no question, any more than it ought to be a question what the world has gained by the defeat of Philip's armada, or by Trafalgar and Waterloo. But if a nation only does great deeds that it may live, and doe? not show some worthy object for which it has lived, and Uri and Switzerland have shown but too little of any such, then our sympathy with the great deeds of their history can hardly go beyond the generation by which those deeds were performed ; and I cannot help thinking of the mer- cenary Swiss of Novara and Marignano, and of the oppression exercised over the Italian bailiwicks and the Pays de Vaud. and all the tyrannical exclusiveness of these little barren oligarchies, as much as of the heroic deeds of the three men, Tell and his comrades, or of the self-devotion of my namesake of Winkelried, when at Sempach he received into his breast " a sheaf of Austrian spears." Steamer on the Lake of Luzern, July 29, 1840. 18. We arrived at Fluelen about half-past eight, and having had some food, and most commendable food it was, we are embarked on the Lake of Luzern and have already passed Briinnen, and are outside the region of the high Alps. It would be difficult certainly for a Swiss to admire our lakes, because he would ask, what is there here which we have not, and which we have not on a larger scale. I cannot deny that the meadows here are as green as ours, the valleys richer, the woods thicker, the cliffs grander, the mountains by measurement twice or three times higher. And if Switzerland were my home and country, the English lakes and mountains would certainly never tempt me to travel to see them, destitute as they are of all historical interest. In fact, Switzerland is to Europe what Cumberland and West- moreland are to Lancashire and Yorkshire ; the general summer touring place. But all country that is actually beautiful, is capable of affording to those who live in it the highest pleasure of scenery, which no country, how- ever beautiful, can do to those who merely travel in it ; and thus while I do not dispute the higher interest of Switzerland to a Swiss, (no Englishman ought to make another country his home, and therefore I do not speak of Encrlishmen,) I must still maintain that to me Fairfield is a hundred times more beautiful than the Righi, and Windermere than the Lake of the Four Cantons. Not that I think this is overvalued by travellers, it cannot be so ; but most people undervalue greatly what mountains are when they form a part of our daily life, and combine not with our hours of leisure, of wander- ing, and of enjoyment, but with those of home life, of work and of duty. Luzern, July 29. We accomplished the passage of the lake in about three hours, and most beautiful it was all the way. And now, as in 1827, I recog- nize the forms of our common English country, and should be bidding adieu to mountains, and preparing merely for our' Rugby lanes and banks, and Rucrby work, were it not for the delightful excrescence of a tour which we hope to make to Fox How, and three or four days' enjoyment of our own mountains, hallowed by our English Church, and hallowed scarcely less by our English Law. Alas, the difference between Church and Law, and clergy and lawyers ; but so in human things the concrete ever adds unwor- thiness to the abstract. I have been sure for many years that the subsiding of a tour, if I may so speak, is quite as delightful as its swelling ; I call it its subsiding, when one passes by common things indifferently, and even great tilings with a fainter interest, because one is so strongly thinking of horn e and of the returning to ordinary relations and duties. APPENDIX C. 481 August 6, 1840. 19. Arrived at St. Omer. — And Pave is dead, and we have left our last French town except Calais, and all things and feelings French seem going to sleep in me, — cares of carriage — cares of passport — cares of inns — cares of postillions and of Pave, and there revive within me the habitual cares of my life, which for the last, seven weeks have slumbered. In many things the beginning and end are different, in few more so than in a tour. " Ccelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currant," is in my case doubly false. My mind changes twice, from my home self to my travelling self, and then to my home self back again. On this day seven weeks I travelled this very stage ; its appearance in that interval is no doubt altered ; flowers are gone by, and corn is yellow which was green ; but I am changed even more — changed in my appetites and in my impressions ; for then I craved locomo- tion and rest from mental work — now I desire to remain still as to place, and to set my mind to work again ; — then I looked at every thing on the road with interest, drinking in eagerly a sense of the reality of foreign objects — now I only notice our advance homeward, and foreign objects seem to be things with which I have no concern. But it is not that I feel any way tired of things and persons French, only that I do so long for things and per- sons English. I never felt more keenly the wish to see the peace between the two countries perpetual ; never could I be more indignant at the folly and wickedness which on both sides of the water are trying to rekindle the flames of war. The one effect of the last jvar ought to be to excite in both nations the greatest mutual respect. France, with the aid of half Europe, could not conquer England; England, with the aid of all Europe, never could have overcome France, had France been zealous and united in Napo- leon's quarrel. When Napoleon saw kings and princes bowing before him at Dresden, Wellington was advancing victoriously in Spain; when a mil- lion of men in 1815 were invading France, Napoleon engaged for three days with two armies, each singly equal to his own, and was for two days victo- rious. Equally and utterly false are the follies uttered by silly men of both countries, about the certainty of one beating the other. 'Ov nolo diacpeofi avO-yoiTToq av&ooMov, is especially applicable here. When Englishmen and Frenchmen meet in war, each may know that they will meet in the other all a soldier's qualities, skill, activity, and undaunted courage, with bodies able to do the bidding of the spirit either in action or in endurance. Eng- land and France may do each other incalculable mischief by going to war, both physically and morally ; but they can gain for themselves, or hope to gain nothing. It were an accursed wish in either to wish to destroy the other, and happily the wish would be as utterly vain as it would be wicked. August 6, 1840. 20. Left Dover. 7.45. What am I to say of this perfect road and perfect posting ; of the greenness and neatness of every thing, the delicate miniature scale of the country, — the art of the painter held in honour, and extending even to barns and railings, — of the manifest look of spring and activity and business which appears in every body's movements ? The management of the Commissioner at Dover in getting the luggage through the Custom House, was a model of method and expedition, and so was the attendance at the inns. All this fills me with many thoughts, amongst which the prevailing one certainly is not pride ; for with the sight of all this there instantly comes into my mind the thought of our sad plague spots, the canker worm in this beautiful and goodly fruit corrupting it within. But I will not dwell on this now, — personally, I may indulge in the unspeakable delight of being once again in our beloved country, with our English Church and English Law. 482 LIFE 0F DR- ARNOLD. August 9, 1840. 21. Left Milnthorpe, 6.21. My last day's journal, I hope, dearest, and then the faithful inkstand which has daily hung at my button-hole may retire to his deserved rest. Our tea last night was incomparable ; such ham, such bread and butter, such cake, and then came this morning a charge of 4s. 6cZ. for our joint bed and board ; when those scoundrels in Italy, whose very life is roguery, used to charge double and triple for their dog fare and filthy rooms. Bear witness Capua, and that vile Swiss Italian woman whom I could wish to have been in Capua (Casilinum) when Hannibal besieged it, and when she must either have eaten her shoes, or been eaten herself by some neighbour, if she had not been too tough and indigestible. But, dear- est, there are other thoughts within me as I look out on this delicious valley (we are going down to Levens) on this Sunday morning. How calm and beautiful is every thing, and here, as we know, how little marred by any ex- treme poverty. And yet do these hills and valleys, any more than those of the Apennines, send up an acceptable incense ? Both do as far as nature is concerned — our softer glory and that loftier glory each in their kind render their homage, and God's work so far is still very good. But with our just laws and pure faith, and here with a wholesome state of property besides, is there yet the Kingdom of God here any more than in Italy ? How can there be ? For the Kingdom of God is the perfect development of the Church of God : and when Priestcraft destroyed the Church, the Kingdom of God became an impossibility. We have now entered the Winster Valley, and are got precisely to our own sla^s again, which we left yesterday week in the Vosges. The strawberries and raspberries hang red to the sight by the road side ; and the turf and flowers are more delicately beautiful than any thing which I have seen abroad. The mountains, too, are in their softest haze; I have seen Old Man and the Langdale Pikes rising behind the nearer hills most beautifully. We have just»opened on Windermere, and vain it is to talk of any earthly beauty ever equalling this country in my eyes ; when mingling with every form and sound and fragrance, comes the full thought of domestic affections, and of national, and of Christian ; here is our own house and home — here are our own country's laws and language, and here is our English Church. No Mola di Gaeta, no valley of the Velino. no Salerno or Vietri, no Lago di Pie di Lugo can rival to me this vale of Windermere, and of the Rotha. And here it lies in the perfection of its beauty, the deep shadows on the unruffled water — the haze investing Fairfield with every thing solemn and undefined. Arrived at Bowness, 8.20. Left it at 8.31. Passing Ragrigg Gate, 8.37. On the Bowness Terrace, 8.45, Over Troutbeck Bridge, 8.51. Here is Ecclerigg, 8.58. And here Lowood Inn, 9.4^. And here Waterhead and our ducking bench, 9.12. The valley opens — Ambleside, and Rydal Park, and the gallery on Loughrigg. Rotha Bridge. 9.16. And here is the poor humbled Rotha, and Mr. Brancker's cut, and the New Millar Bridge, 9.21. Alas ! for the alders gone and suc- ceeded by a stiff wall. Here is the Rotha in his own beauty, and here is poor T. Flemming's Field, and our own mended gate. Dearest children, may we meet happily. Entered FOX HOW, and the birch copse at 9.25, and here ends journal. — Walter first saw us, and gave notice of our approach. We found all our dear children well, and Fox How in such beauty, that no scene in Italy appeared in my eyes comparable to it. We breakfasted, and at a quarter before eleven, I had the happiness of once more going to an English Church, and that church our own beloved Rydal Chapel. X. TOUR IN SOUTH OF FRANCE. Between Angouleme and Bordeaux, July 7, 1841. 1. Left Barbiceaux 10.35, very rich and beautiful. It is not properly southern, for there are neither olives nor figs ; nor is it northern, for the APPENDIX C. . 483 vines and maize are luxuriant. It is properly Prance, with its wide land- scapes, no mountains, but slopes and hills ; its luminous air, its spread of cultivation, with the vines and maize and walnuts, mixed with the ripe corn, as brilliant in colouring as it is rich in its associations. I never saw a brighter or a fresher landscape. Green hedges line the road; the hay, just cut, is fragrant ; every thing is really splendid for man's physical well being : — it is Kent six degrees nearer the sun. Nor are there wanting church towers enough to sanctify the scene, if one could believe that with the stone church there was also the living Church, and not the accursed Priestcraft. But, alas ! a Priest is not a Church, but that which renders a Church im- possible. St Jean de Luz, July 11th, 1841. 2. It is this very day year that we were at Mola di Gaeta together, and I do not suppose it possible to conceive a greater contrast than Mola di Ga- eta on the 11th of July, 1840, and St. Jean de Luz on the 11th of July 1841. The lake-like calm of that sea, and the howling fury of this ocean, — the trees few and meagre, shivering from the blasts of the Atlantic, and the umbrageous bed of oranges, peaches and pomegranates, which there de- lighted in the freshness of that gentle water ; — the clear sky and bright moon, and the dark mass of clouds and drizzle, — the remains of Roman palaces and the fabled scene of Homer's poetry, and a petty French fishing town, with its coasting Chasse Marees: these are some of the points of the con- trast. Yet those vile Italians are the refuse of the Roman slaves, crossed by a thousand conquests ; and these Basques are the very primeval Iberians, who were the most warlike of the nations of the West, before the Kelts had ever come near the shores of the Mediterranean. And the little pier, which I have been just looking at, was the spot where Sir Charles Penrose found the Duke of Wellington alone at the dead of night, when anxious about the weather for the passage of the Adour, he wished to observe its earliest signs before other men had left their beds. Near Agen, July 14. 3. For some time past the road has been a terrace above the Tower bank of the Garonne, which is flowing in great breadth and majesty below us From these heights, in clear weather, you can see the Pyrenees, but now the clouds hang darkly over them. .... One thing I should have no- ticed of Agen, that it is the birth-place of Joseph Scaliger, in some respects the Niebuhr of the seventeenth century, but rather the Bentley. morally far below Niebuhr ; and though, like Bentley, almost rivalling him in acuteness, and approaching somewhat to him in knowledge, yet altogether without his wisdom. Auch,July 14,1841. 4. At supper we were reading a Paris paper, Le Siecle ; but the one thing which struck me, and rejoiced my very heart, was an advertisement in it of a most conspicuous kind, and in very large letters, of La Sainte Bible, announcing an edition, in numbers, of De Sacy's French translation of it. I can conceive nothing but good from such a thing. May God prosper it to His glory, and the salvation of souls ; it was a joyful and a blessed sight to see it. Bourges, July 18. 5 We found the afternoon service going on at the Cathe- dral, and the Archbishop, with his priests and the choristers, were going round the church in procession, chanting some of their hymns, and with a great multitude of people following them. The effect was very fine, and I again lamented our neglect of our cathedrals, and the absurd confusion in so many men's, minds between what is really Popery and what is but wisdom and beauty, adopted by the Roman Catholics and neglected by us. 484 L1FE 0F DR- ARNOLD. Paris, July 20,1841. 6. I have been observing the people in the streets very carefully, and their general expression is not agreeable, that of the young men especially. The newspapers seem all gone mad together, and these disturbances at Toulouse are very sad and unsatisfactory. If that advertisement which I saw about La Sainte Bible be found to answer, that would be the great specific for France. And what are our prospects at home with the Tory Government ? and how long will it be before Chartism again forces itself upon our notice? So where is the hope, humanly speaking, of things bet- tering, or are the loifioi. and lifiai, nolffiot, and azow 7i oXefimv, ready to her- ald a new advent of the Lord to judgment ? The questions concerning our state appear to me so perplexing, that I cannot even in theory see their solution. We have not and cannot yet solve the problem, how the happi- ness of mankind is reconcilable with the necessity of painful labour. The happiness of a part can be secured easily enough, their ease being provided for by others' labour; but how can the happiness of the generality be se- cured, who must labour of necessity painfully ? How can he who labours hard for his daily bread — hardly, and with doubtful success — be made wise and good, and therefore how can he be made happy ? This question un- doubtedly the Church was meant to solve; for Christ's Kingdom was to undo the evil of Adam's sin ; but the Church has not solved it, nor attempted to doso ; and no one else has gone about it rightly. This is the great bar to education. How can a poor man find time to be educated ? You may es- tablish schools, but he will not have time to attend them, for a few years of early boyhood are no more enough to give education, than the spring months can do the summer's work when the summer is all cold and rainy. But I must go to bed, and try to get home to you and to work, for there is great need of working. God bless you, my dearest wife, with all our darlings. Boulogne, July 23, 1841. 7. Our tour is ended, and I grieve to say that it has left on my mind a more unfavourable impression of France than I have been wont to feel. I do not doubt the great mass of good which must exist, but the active ele- ments, those, at least, which are on the surface, seem to be working for evil. The virulence of the newspapers against England is, I think, a very bad omen, and the worship which the people seem to pay to Napoleon's memory is also deeply to be regretted. But it is the misfortune of France that her " past " cannot be loved or respected ; her future and her present cannot be wedded to it ; yet how can the present yield fruit, or the future have promise, except their roots be fixed in the past ? The evil is infinite, but the blame rests with those who made the past a dead thing, out of which no healthful life could be produced . . . . Much as I like coming abroad, I am never for an instant tempted to live abroad ; not even in Germany, where assuredly I would settle if I were obliged to quit England. But not the strongest Tory or Conservative values our Church or Law more than I do, or would find life less liveable without them. Indeed it is very-hard to me to think that those can value either who can see their defects with indifference ; or that those can value them worthily, that is, can appreciate their idea, who do not see wherein they fall short of their idea. And now I close this journal for the present, praying that God may bless us, and keep us in worldly good or evil in Himself and in His Son. Amen. THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF DR. ARNOLD'S PUBLISHED WORKS. THEOLOGICAL WORKS. I. Six volumes of Sermons: — 1st. Sermons preached at Laleham, 1829. 2nd. Sermons preached in the School Chapel at Rugby. With five Sermons on the Social State of England, and an Essay on the Interpretation of Scripture, 1832. [These last are omitted in a smaller edition of this volume, entitled " Sermons preached in Rugby Chapel," 1832, which contains two Sermons not in the larger edition.] 3rd. Selection of Sermons, 1832-34, with a Preface on the Study of Theology, and two Appendices on Atheism, and on the Doctrine of Apostolical Succession. 4th. Selection of Sermons, ]»35-1841, entitled "Christian Life, its Course, its Helps, and its Hindrances ;" with a Preface on the Oxford School of Theology, and Notes on Tradition, Rationalism, and Inspiration. 5th. Sermons preached 1841-1842, (posthumous,) entitled " Christian Life, its Hopes, its Fears, and its Close." 6th. Sermons mostly on the Interpretation of Scripture (posthumous). II. Two Sermons on Prophecy, with Notes, 1839. III. Fragments on Church and State. HISTORICAL AND PHILOLOGICAL WORKS. I. Edition of Thucydides, 1st edition, 1830, 33, 35. 2nd edition, 1840, 41, 42. The first volume contains a Preface on the previous editions of Thucydides, (omit- ted in the 2nd edition,) and Appendices. 1. On the social progress of States. 2. On the Spartan constitution. 3. (Omitted in the 2nd edition) on the constitution of the Athenian tribes. The 2nd contains a collation of a Venetian MS., and two Appendices on the date of the Pythian Games, and on the topography of Mognra, Corinth, Sphacteria, and Amphipolis. The third contains a Preface on the general importance of Greek History to politi- cal science, and an Appendix on the topography of Syracuse. II. History of Rome, in 3 volumes, 1838, 40, 42, which was broken off by his death at the end of the second Punic war. III. Articles on Roman History in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, written 1821-27, on the lives of" Hamilcar," " Hannibal," " The Gracchi," « Sul- la," " Caesar." " Augustus," " Trajan." and " the Historians of Rome." IV. " Introductory Lectures on Modern History." 1842. 436 LIST 0F DR- ARNOLD'S PUBLISHED WORKS. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. I. " The Christian Duty of conceding the Roman Catholic Claims." 1828. II. Englishman's Register — Articles in, signed A. 1831. III. Tract on the Cholera, addressed to the inhabitants of Rugby. 1831. IV. Letters to the Sheffield Courant, on the Social Distress of the Lower Orders. 1831, 32. V. Preface on " Poetry of Common Life," to a collection of poetry under that name. Published by J. C. Piatt, Sheffield. 1832. VI. " Principles of Church Reform," with " Postscript." 1833. VII. Lecture before Mechanics' Institute, at Rugby, on the Divisions of Knowledge. 1839. VIII. Letters to the Hertford Reformer, on Chartism, and on Church and State. 1839, 40, 41. IX. Paper on the revival of the order of Deacons. 1841. In addition to these were various articles in periodical journals. 1. On Southey's Wat Tyler. ) British c _2Q 2. On Cunningham s De Kance. ) 3. On Niebuhr's "History of Rome." In Quarterly Review, vol. xxxii. 1825. 4. On " Letters of an Episcopalian." Ed. Review, vol. xliv. 1826. 5. On " Dr. Hampden." Edinb. Review, vol. lxiii. 1836. 6. On " Rugby School," and on " the Discipline of Public Schools, by a Wyke- hamist," in the Quarterly Journal of Education, vols. vii. ix 1834-35. Of these miscellaneous works it is proposed to republish those which possess any permanent interest, in a separate volume, with some others which were left in MS. The monument erected to Dr. Arnold's memory in Rugby Chapel was executed by Mr. Thomas. The Epitaph was written by Chevalier Bunsen, in imitation of those on the tombs of the Scipios, and of the early Christian inscriptions on similar subjects. The final regulations for the distribution of the fund which has been or is to be collected for the purpose of founding institutions at Rugby and at Oxford to Dr. Arnold's memory, will, it is believed, be arranged by the com- mittee appointed for that purpose, in the course of the present year. INDEX. Abbott, Jacob, 225, 235, 301. Alexander, 137. Animal Magnetism, 306. Antichrist, 68, 130, 161,310, 353. Appii Forum, 475. Aristocracy, 184, 309,320, 357, 368. Aristotle, 34, 65, 395. Arnold, Thomas, Birth, 25. — Education at School, 26. — Entrance at Oxford, 28. — Marriage and settlement at Lale- ham, 40. — Election at Rugby, 55. — Purchase of Fox How, 153— Profes- sorship at Oxford, 404, 411.— Death, 443. — Character as a boy, 26. — As a young man, 37. — At Laleham, 40 — Religious belief, 42. — General views in later life, 125. — Domestic life, 150. — Intercourse with friends, 152. — with the poor, 152. — Formation of his opinions, 359. Articles of the Church of England, 221, 240, 274, 366. Arts, Degree in, 298, 303. Asia Minor, 248. Association, British, 344. Athanasian Creed, 322, 366. Atheism, 195. Attic Society, 35. Austria, 375. Avignon j 344, 465. Balston, Henry, illness and death, 373, 385. Barante, 285. Basque language, 421. Blackstone, Rev. F. C, 35. Buccaneers, 358. Bunsen, Chevalier, 50, 222, 241, 326, 331. Bunyan,292. Butler, 292. Canons, 367. Carlyle, Thomas, 320, 354, 421, 426. Caution, 387, 405. Chartism, 327, 339, 343, 349, 354, 356. Chartres, 463, 464. China, war with, 364. Chivalry, 161. Cholera, 306. Church, endowment and building of, 351. 6 ' extension, 369. government, 238, 242. consent of, 298. property, 294. of England, 233, 250, 386, 387. —Divines of, 292, 343. Reform, first thoughts of, 52, 68. — Pamphlet on, 235. Rates, 294. • History of, 138, 238, 468. Views of its ends and nature, 144, 265, 290,293, 328, 356, 382, 384. — In what sense a society, 172. ■ and state, work on, 53, 144. — Identity of, 72, 147, 229, 313, 332, 355, 479, 482, 483. Civilization, 246, 468. Classics, 98. Clerical profession, 337. — Education, 237, 344. ' Clubs, 235, 393. Cobbett, 242. Coleridge, Mr. Justice, Letter from, 28, Elevation to the Bench, 238. Samuel Taylor, 257, 288, 343, 358. ' Cologne, 453.— Archbishop of, 313 Colonization, 165, 283, 357, 359, 368, 426. Colosseum, 452. Commentary, design of, 140, 198, 199. Communion at Rugby, 110. Como, Lake of, 448, 453, 455, 457. Confession, 227. Confirmations, 111. Conservatism, 132, 161, 178, 242, 268, 356. 488 INDEX. Consumption, 252, 373. Conversion of barbarian nations, 53, 140. Convicts, 283, 357. Corn Laws, 185, 354. Cornish, Rev. George, 32. Corpus Christi College, 28. Corfu, 363. Crau, plain of, 341, 465. Crucifixes, 192, 468. Cyprian, 375, 401. Cyrus, a type of Christ, 360. Daniel, Prophecies of, 66, 358. Davison, Rev. John, 359. Deacons, Revival of, 335: 350, 371. Delafield, Mrs. Frances, 234. Debt, national, 184. Discipline, Church, 145.— School, 87. Dissentars, 250, 356, 396 — Admission of, to Universities, 230, 266. Dyson, Rev. Francis, 32. Edinburgh Review, article in, 262. Egyptian hieroglyphics, 331. Elections, 463. Elbe, 454. Elphinstone's India, 420 Englishman's Register, 176, 181, 185, 186, 191,355. Episcopacy, respect for, 164, 233, 315. —Not essential, 229, 361, 375. Evangelicals, 73, 177,181. Evidences of Christianity, 190.— Inter- nal, 375. of Theism, 195. Eucharist, doctrine of, 298, 333, 348. Examiner, office of, 299. Expulsion from public schools, 70, 92, 240. Fagging, 89. Fanaticism, 279. Festivals of the Church, 111. Feudality, dislike to, 161, 466. Fifth Form at public schools, 240. Fleury's Ecclesiastical History, 237. Flogging, 87. Flowers, love of, 155, 368. Foundationers of Rugby school, 338. Fox How, 153, 352, 482. Franklin, Sir John, 282. France, 309, 460, 465, 467. Freemasonry, 393. Froude's Remains, 324. Gaius, Institutes of, 288, 289. Gell, J. P., 255. — Appointed principal of a college in Van Diemen's Land, 336— Letter from, 435. Geology, 35, 344. Germany, 453, 460. Gibbon, 139. Girls, education of, 384. Gladstone on Church and State, 335. on Church I'rinciples, 383. Goethe, 294. Grammars, 240, 298. Greek History, 137. Greece, influence of, 247. — Ancient and modern, 389. Grotins, 237. Guizot, 384, 460. Hampden, Rev. Dr., 39, 26J, 273. Hannibal, like Nelson, 388. — His march, 402. Hare, Rev. Augustus, 35. — His death, 228. Archdeacon, 35. Hawkins, Rev. Dr., 39. — Prediction on the election at Rugby, 55. — Bampton Lectures, 126, 375. Hearn, Rev. James, 44. Hebrew, attempts to learn, 243, 331. Hebrews, Epistle to, doubts respecting, 329. Hertford Reformer, letters to, 327, 353. Heresy, 221,222. Herodotus, 34, 104, 458. Hey's Lectures, 237. Homer, 105. Hooker, 292. Hull, W. W, 35. Idolatry, 279, 297, 468. Illyrians, 235. Impartiality in religion, 294. India, interest in, 60, 361, 420. Influence over scholars, 1< HSTORY OF RASSELAS. By Dr. Johnson 37,'« i'RIVATE DEVOTIONS. By Hannah More 31% PRACTICAL PIETY. Bv Hannah More 75 iONGS OF THI', AFFECTIONS. By Mrs. Hemans.. 31H JSEFUL LETTER WRITER. Compiled from the best I sources 37 X ACRA PRIVATA, By Bishop Wilson 3J# THE SEASONS. By James Thomson 37^ GEMS FROM AMERICAN POETS 37« VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. By Oliver Goldsmith 37>i ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. By Oliver Gold- smith 37 % EXILES OF SIBERIA. By Madame Cotton 31% PURE GOLD Bv Eminent Writers 3l# PAUL AND VIRGINIA. By St. Pierre 31# SCRIPTURE PROMISES. By Sam'l Clarke, D. D....37X COURSE OF TIME. By Robert Pollok 37% TOKEN TOKEN OF OF TOKEN OF REMEMBRANCE. AFFECTION. LOVE. TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP. TOKEN OF THE HEART. Each volume' consists of appropriate poetical extracts from the principal writers of the day. 37 >£ each. 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He has a high reputation among ttie French learned for his industry; while his official positu n, which connects him with the archives of the kingdom, nas given him access to a rich source of unexplored au'.iorities, of which he has made abundant use in his early volumes, and which promise to be of still greater importance in those yet to come. Even in its mere facts, therefore, this history is considerably in advance of all previously written." D. Appleton 6f Co. have just Published THE STANDARD PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY OF THF FRENCH AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES, IN TWO PARTS. PART I., FRENCH AND ENGLISH.— PART II., ENGLISH AND FRENCH. The First Part comprehending words in common use. Terms connected with Science. Terms belonging to the Fine Arts. 4000 Historical Names. 41)01) Geographical Names, 1100 terms lately published, with the PRONUNCIATION OF EVERY WORD According to the French Academy and the most eminent Lexicographers and Grammarians, TOGETHER WITH 750 CRITICAL REMARKS, In which the various methods of pronouncing employed by different authors are investigated and compared with each ether. The Second Part, containing a copious vocabulary of English words and expressions, with the pronunciation according to Walker THE WHOLE PRECEDED BY A PRACTICAL AND COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM OF FRENCH PRONUNCIATION, BY GABRIEL SURENNE, F.A.S.E., French Teacher in Edinburgh ; Corresponding Member of the French Grammatical Society of Paris ; Lecturer on Military History in tin: Scottish Naval and Military Academy ; and author of several works on Education. Reprinted from a duplicate cast of the stereotype plates of the last Edinburgh Edition. One stout volume. 12mo. 900 pages AUTHOR'S PREFACE. No French Pronouncing Dictionary having as yet appeared in French Education, the public are now presented with one, the nature and compass of which will give an idea of the numerous and laborious investigations made by the Author, to ren- der the present work useful and acceptable. It is now upwards ofsix years since this work was undertaken, and the resolutiou of bringingit to light, arose from a di- versity of opinion in Pronunciation, which he discovered long ago in the various Dictionaries and Grammars made use of by him in preparing his former course of Lectures on French and English Comparative Philology. In the course of his labours, had the Author fmnd but little difference among French writers, probably no criticism would have appeared in the present work: but as he went along, his attention was arrested by so many opposite views in the mode of sounding letters and words, that nothing short of a full investigation could Eatisfy him. The result of his inves- tigations is embodied in the Dictionary, and hence the origin of the critical remarks with which it abounds; the nature and extent of which, of themselves, would form a volume conveying mnuh solid instruction, as well as offering a sad picture of ihe uncertainties of French Pronunciation, of which nine-tenths perhaps of the Author's countrymen are not aware. Even upon the mere sounds of oi, there are many conflicting opinions, and the vacillating pen of Laudais. the last writer upon Parisian pronunciation, by whom oi is represented sometimes by oa, and sometimes by w, has increased the perplexity in nu small degree. The method employed by the Author for representing the sounds of words, is intended to meet the British eye ; and he has been careful to make use of none but genuine French letters, that the reader may not be deceived, nor induced to follow a vicious system of articulation. As to the pronunciation of Foreign Historical and Geographical names, it is laid down in the same manner, as if a French- man at Paris were reading aloud ; in this case nothing would be left to him but to Frenchify every proper name, with the ex- ception of a few living Authors. In ending this j>art of the Preface, it is of importance to observe that no syllable in this Work is invested with the sylla- bical accent, because, as yet, excepting two or three Grammarians along with the Author, no writer in France, nor even the Academy itself, has thought proper to enforce this part of delivery, how unfortunately neglected. The Phraseology, forming the second essential part of this Dicticyiary, is based on that of the Academy, the sole and le- gitimate authority in France ; and every effort of the Author has been so directed, as to render it both copious and practical. With this view, an improved method of elucidating new meanings, by employing parentheses, has been introduced, and it is hoped that the utility and Lenefits resulting from this improvement, will not fail to be duly appreciated. Another novelty to which the Author may lay claim, is the placing of Historical and Geographical Names below each page ; and, by this arrangement, the facility of being acquainted with their definition and pronunciation at a single glance, will be found of no small advantage. — As to the English or second part of this Dictionary, the reader will find it to consist of 8 copious vocabulary of terms, with their pronunciation, according to the system of Walker. The various meanings of the words are translated into French ; and when the expressions happen to be substantives, the French gender is pointed out by means of proper signs. Lastly, that competent judges may be aware of the authorities on which the pronunciation and critical remarks pervading this Dictionary are founded, the titles and dates of the works which have been consulted, with brief reflections on their pro- fessed object, will he found in the Introduction following this Preface. Inconclusion, if the present result of a long, patient and laborious investigation of comparative pronunciation, as yet un- published in France, be thought of some use in French Education, and deserving the attention as well as the support of tni Teachers and Professors of the French Language in the British Empire, the Author will feel himself amply rewarded ; and at the same time, bound to improve gradually the stereotyped plates, that the Dictionary, by approaching perfection, may be ren- dered still more worthy of general approbation. A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS, IN VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS OF LITERATURE, PUBLISHED BY D. APPLETON h Co., New-York, GEO. S. APPLETON, Philadelphia. For sale by the several Booksellers throughout the United States. (Elassifieb Into*. AGRICULTURE. Falkner on Manures. Smith's Productive Farming. Farmer's Treasure. Oy Falkner and Smith. ARTS, MANUFACTURES, &c. Ewbank's Mechanics and Hydraulics. Hodge on the Steam-Engine. Lafever's Modern Architecture. " Stair-case Construction. L're'j Dictionary of Arts, Manuf., and Mines. BIOGRAPHY. Kamilton (Alex.), Life of. Philip's Life of Milne. CHEMISTRY. Fresonius's Chemical Analysis. Liebig's Chemical Letters. Parnell's Applied Chemistry. EDUCATION. Hazen's Symbolical Speller. Keightley's Mythology of Greece and Italy. Taylor's Homo Education HISTORY. Frost' History of United Slates Nary. H " Army. Guizot's History of Civilization. L'Ardeche's History of Napoleon. Taylor's Natural History of Society. JUVENILE. Boone, Daniel, Adventures of. Boy's Manual. Cameron's Farmer's Daughter. Child's Delight. Copley's Early Friendships Copley's Poplar Giove. Cortes, Adventures of. De Foe's Robinson Crusoe. Evans's Joan of Arc. " Evenings with the Chroniclers. Guizot's Young Student. Girl's Manual. Holyday Tales. Howitt's Love and Money. " Work and Wages. " Little Coin, much Care. " Which is the Wiser? " Who shall be Greatest " Hope on, Hope ever. " Strive and Thrive. " Sowing and Reaping. " No Sense like Common Sense. " Alice Franklin. Jerram's Child's Story-Book. Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. Looking-Glass for the Mind. Lucy and Arthur Log Cabin, or World before You. Martineau's Crofton Boys. " Peasant and Prince. Marryat's Masterman Ready. Old Oak Tree. Prize Story Book. Pratt's Du wirings of Genius. Sandham's Twin Sisters. Smith, Capt., Adventures oC Sherwood's Duty is Safety. •' Jack the Sailor. " Think before yon Act. Taylor's Young Islandeis. ery Little Tales. Youth's Book of Nature. MEDICAL. Chavasse's Advice to Mothers. Hall's Principles of Diagnosis. Smith on Nervous System. MISCELLANEOUS. Arthur's Tired of Housekeeping. Austin's German Writers. Carly'e's Heroes, Hero Worship. Cotton's Exiles of Siberia. D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. Deleuze on Animal Magnetism. Ellis's Mothers of England. " Wives of England. " Daughters of England. " Women of England. " First Impressions. " Danger of Dining Out. " Somervllle Hall. Embury's Nature's Gems. Foster's Miscellanies. " Christian Moraft. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. " Essays. Johnson's Rasselas. Lover's Handy Andy. " £. s. d. — Treasure Trove. Maxwell's Hector O'Halloran. More's Domestic Tales. " Rural Tales. Pure Gold. Sinclair's Scotland and Scotch. '' Shetland and Shetlanders. St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia. Taylor's Physical Theory of Another Life. Useful Letter-Writer. Woman's Worth. POETRY. Burns's Poetical Works. Cowper's " Gems from American Poets. Hemans's Poetical Works. ". Songs of the Affections. Lewis's Records of the Heart. Milton's Poetical Works. " Paradise Lost. " " Regained Moore's Lallah Rookh. Pollok's Course of Time. Scott's Poetical Works. " Lady of the Lake. " Marmion. " La/ of the Last Minstrel. Bouthey's Poetical Works. Thomson's S»asons. Token of Affection, by various writers " Friendship. Token of Love. " the Heart. " Remembrance. Young's Night Thoughts. RELIGIOUS. A Kempis's Imitation of Christ. Anthon's Catechism on Homilies. Beaven's Help to Catechising. Bible Expositor. Book of Common Prayer. Burnet's Hist, of Reformation. " Exposition of XXXIX. Artic.es. Bradley's Practical Sermons. " Sermons at Clapham and Glasbon*. Churton's Early English Church. Christmas Bells. Cruden's Concordance, N. T. Clarke'6 Scripture Promises. Evans's Rectory of Valehead Faber on Election. Gresley on Preaching. " English Churchman. Hare's Sermons. Hooker's Works. James's True Christian. " Widow Directed. " Young Man from Home. " Christian Professor. " Anxious Inquirer after Salvation. " Happiness, its Nature and Source* Kip's Double Witness. Kingsley's Sacred Choir. Lyra Apostolica. Magee on Atonement. Manning on Unity of the Church. Marshall's Notes on Episcopacy. More's Private Devotion. " Practical Piety. Maurice's Kingdom of Christ. Newman's Parochial Seimons. " Sermons on Subjects of the Dlf Ogilby on Lay-Baptism, " Lectures on the Church. Palmer on the Church. Paget's Tales of the Village. Pearson on the Creed. Philip's Devotional Guides. " The Hannahs. " The Marys. " The Marthas. " The Lydias. " Love of the Spirit. Sherlock's Practical Christian. Smith on Scripture and Geology. Spencer's Christian Instructed. Spincke's Manual of Devotion. Sprague's Lectures to Young People " True and False Relig;on. Sutton's Learn to Live. ' Learn to Die. " On Sacrament. Stuart's Letters to Godchild. Taylor on Episcopacy. " .^Golden Grove. " Spiritual Christianity Wayland's Human Responsibility Wilson's Sacra Privata. Wilberforce's Communicant's Manual. VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. Cooloy's American in Egypt. Olmsted's Whaling Voyage. Silliman's Ameiican Scenery Southgate'e Turkey and Persia. Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. A KEMPIS— OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST: Four books by Thomas a Kempis. One elegant volume, 16mo. $1 00. "The author of this invaluablo work was born about the year 1380, and has always been honoured by the Church for his eminent sanctity. Of the many pious works composed by him, nis ' Imitation of Christ' (being collections of his devotional thoughts and meditations on impor- tant practical subjects, together 'vith a separate treatise on the Holy Communion) is the most celebrated, and has ever been admired ana vaiued oy devout Christians of every name. It has passed through numerous editions and translations, the first of which into English is said to have been made by the illustrious Lady Margaret, mother of King Henry VII. Messrs. 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The Sermons of this Divine are much admired for thuir plain, yet chaste and elegant style; they will be found admirably adapted for family reading and preaching, where no pastor is located. Recommendations might be given, if space would admit, from several of our Bishops and Clergy- alsofrom Ministers of various denominations. The following are a few of the English and American critical opinions of their merit: — " Bradley's ityle is sententious, pithy, and colloquial. He is simple without being quaint, sad he almost holds conversation with his hearers, without descending from the dignity of the ■acred chair."— Eclectic Review. " We earnestly desire that every pulpit may ever be the vehicle of discourses as judicious ana practical, as scriptural and devout, as these." — Christian Observer. " The style is so simple that the most unlearned can understand them ; the matter so instroc tive that the best informed can learn something ; the spirit so fervent that the most engaged Christian can be animated and warmed by thoir perusal "—Christian Witnew. 1 sippleton . i *ogut of Valuable Publications BURNET.— THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION Of the Church of England, by Gilbert Burnet, D. D., late Lord Bishop ol Salisbury — with the Collection of Records and a copious Index, revise. and corrected, with additional Notes and a Preface, by the Rev. E Nares, D. D.,late Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford Illustrated with a Frontispiece and twenty-three engraved Portraits, form ing four elegant 8vo. volumes. $8 00. A cheap edition is printed, containing the History in three vols, without the Records — which form the fourth vol. of the above. Price, in boards, $2 50. To the student either of civil or religious history, no epoch can be of more importance than that of the Reformation in England. The History of Bishop Burnet is one of the most celebrated and bv far the most frequently quoted of any that has been written of this great event. Upon tha original publication of the first volume, it was received in Great Britain with the loudest and most extravagant encomiums. The author received the thanks of both Houses of .Parliament, and was requested by them to continue the work. In continuing it, he had the assistance of the most learned and eminent divines of his time; and he confesses his indebtedness for important aid to Lloyd, Tillotson,and Stillinglleet, three of the greatest of England's Bishops. The present edition of this great work has been edited with laborious care by Dr. Niires, who professes to have corrected important errors into which the author fell, and to have made such improvements in the order of the work as will render it far more useful to tho reader or historical student. Preliminary explanations, full and sufficient to the clear understanding of the author, are given, and marginal references are made throughout the book, so as greatly to facilitate and lender accurate its consultation. It will of course find a place in every theologian's libraiy — and will, by no means, we trust, be confined to that comparatively limited sphere — V. Y. Tribune. BURNET.-AN EXPOSITION OF THE XXXIX ARTICLES Of the Church of England. By Gilbert Burnet, D. D , late Bishop of Salisbury. With an Appendix, containing the Augsburg Confession, Creed of Pope Pius IV., &c. Revised and corrected, with copious Notes and Additional References, by the Rev. James R. Page, A. M. One handsome 8vo. vol- ume. $2 00. The editor has given to our clergy and our students in theology an edition ofthis work, which must necessarily supersede every other, and we feel he deserves well at the hands of the Church, which he has so materially served. — Church of England Quarterly Review. BURNS— THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS Of Robert Burns, with Explanatory and Glossarial Notes, and a Life of the Author, by James Currie, M. D., illustrated with six steel engravings, one volume, 16mo. $1 25. Forming one of the series of " Cabinet Edition of Standard British Poets." This is the most complete American edition of Burns. It contains the whole of the poetry com- prised in the edition lately edited by Cunningham, as well as some additional pieces ; and such notes have been added as are calculated to illustrate the manners and customs of Scotland, so as to render the whole more intelligible to the English reader. He owes nothing to the poetry of other lands — he is the offspring of the soil : he is as natural to Scotland as the heath is to her hills — his variety is equal to his originality ; his humour, his gayety, his tenderness and his pathos, come all in a breath ; they come freely, for they come of their own accord ; the contrast is never offensive ; the comic slides easily into the serious, the serious into the tender, and the tender into the pathetic— Mian Cunningham. CAMERON— THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER: A Tale of Humble Life, by Mrs. Cameron, author of " Emma and Her Nurse," " the Two Mothers," etc., etc., one volume, 18mo., frontispiece. 37 1-2 cts. Wo welcome, in this little volume, a valuable addition to the excellent series of " Tales far the People and their Children." The story conveys high moral truths, in a most attractive form — Hunt's Merchant's Mag. CARLYLE— ON HEROES, HERO WORSHIP, And the Heroic in History. Six Lectures, reported with Emendations and Ad- ditions, by Thomas Carlyle, author of the "French Revolution," "Sartor Resartus," &c. Elegantly printed in one vol. 12mo. Second edition. $1. CHILD'S DELIGHT; A Gift for the Young. Edited by a lady. One volume small 4to. Embel- lished with six steel Engravings coloured in the most attractive style. This is the gem of the season. In stylo of embellishment and originality of matter, it standi uut.e. We cordially recommend the volume to our juvenile friends. — U. S. Qaictte, Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications CHURTON.— THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH; Or, Christian History of England in early British, Saxon, and Norman Times. By the Rev. Edward Churton, M. A With a Preface by the Right Rev. Bishop Ives. Onevol.l6mo. $1 00. The following delightful pages place before us some of the choicest examples — both clerical and lay— of the true Christian spirit in the EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH. In truth, those pago* we crowded with weighty lessons. * * * Extract from Editor's Preface. CLARKE.— SCRIPTURE PROMISES Vnder their proper heads, representing the Blessings Promised, the Duties to which Promises are made. By Samuel Clarke, D. D. Miniature size, 37 1-2 cents. In this edition every passage of Scripture has been compared and verified. The volume is like an arranged museum of gems, and precious stones, and pearls of inestimable value. Th4 divine promises comprehend a rich and endless vaiiety. — Dr Wardlaw. COOLEY— THE AMERICAN IN EGYPT. With Rambles through Arabia-Petraea and the Holy Land, during the years 1839-40. By James Ewing Cooley. Illustrated with numerous steel En gravings, also Etchings and Designs by Johnston. One handsome volume, octavo, of 610 pages. $2 00. No other volume extant gives the reader so true a picture of what he would be likely to see *nd meet in Egypt. No other book is more practical and plain in its picture of precisely what the traveller himself will meet. Other writers have one account to give of their journey on paper, and another to relate in conversation. Mr. Cooley has but one story for the fireside circle and the printed page. — Brother Jonathan. CHAVASSE.-ADVICE TO MOTHERS On the Management of their Offspring, during the periods of Infancy, Child- hood, and Youth, by Dr. Pye Henry Chavasse, Member of the Royal Col- lege of Surgeons, London, from the third English edition, one volume, l8mo. of 180 pages. Paper 25 cents, cloth 37 1-2. All that I have attempted is, to have written useful advice, in a clear stylo, stripped of oil technicalities, which mothers of every station may understand. * * * I have adopted a con- versational form, as being more familiar, and as an easier method of making myself understood. — Extract from Author' 's Preface. COPLEY.— EARLY FRIENDSHIPS. By Mrs. Copley. With a frontispiece. One volume, 18mo. 37-12 cents. A continuation of the little library of popular works for " the People and their Children." lt» design is, by giving the boarding-school history of a young girl, whose early education had been conducted on Christian principles, to show the pre-eminent value of those principles in moulding and adorning the character, and enabling their possessor successfully to meet the temptations and trials of life. It is attractively written, and full of interest. — Com. Adv. COPLEY— THE POPLAR GROVE: Or, little Harry and his Uncle Benjamin. By Mrs. Copley, author of" Early Friendships," &c, &c. One vol. 18mo. frontispiece, 37 1-2 cents. An excellent little story this, showing how sound sense, honest principles, and intelligent industry, not only advance their possessor, but, as in the case of Uncle Benjamin the gardener, enable him to become the benefactor, guide, and friend of relations cast down from a loftier spher* in life, 'and, but for him, without lesource. It is a tale for youth of all classes, that cannot be read without profit. — JY. Y. Amtrican. CORTES.— THE ADVENTURES OR. Ilernan Cortes, the Conqueror of Mexico, by the author of "Uncle Philip'i Conversations," with a Portrait. One volume, 18mo. 37 1-2 cents, 'orming one of the series of " A Library for my Young Count/ymen.' The story is full of interest, and is told in a captivating style. Such books add all the charm* of romance to the value of history. — Prov. Journal. COTTON.— ELIZABETH; OR, THE EXILES OF SIBERIA. By Madame Cotton. Miniature size, 31 1-4 cents. Forming one of the series of " Miniature Classical Library." The extensive popularity of this little tale U well known. 6 Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. COWPER.— THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS Of William Cowper, Esq., including the Hymns and Translations from Mad Guion, Milton, &c, and Adam, a Sacred Drama, from the Italian of Bat- tista Andreini, with a Memoir of the Author, by the Rev. Henry Stebbing, A. M. One volume, 16mo., 800 pages, $1 50, pr in 2 vols. $1 75. Forming one of the Series of " Cabinet Edition of Standard British Poets." Morality never found in genius a more devoted advocate than Cowper, nor has mora! wisdom, in its plain and severe precepts, been ever more successfully combined with the delicate spirit of poetry than in his works. He was endowed with all the powers which a poet could want who »as to be the moralist of the world— the reprover, but not the satirist, of men — the teacher o/ •imple truths, which were to be rendered gracious without endangering their simplicity. CRUDEN— CONCORDANCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By Alexander Cruden, M. A., with a Memoir of the Author by W. Youngman, Abridged from the last London Edition, by Wm. Patton, D. D. Portrait. One volume, 32mo., sheep, 50 cents. *** Contains all the words to be found in the large work relating to the New Testament. DE FOE— PICTORIAL ROBINSON CRUSOE. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. By Daniel De Foe. With a Memoir of the Author, and an Essay on his Writings, with upwards of 300 spirited Engravings, by the celebrated French artist, Grandville One elegant volume, octavo, of 500 pages. $1 75. Crusoe has obtained a ready passport to the mansions of the rich, and the cottages of the poor, and communicated equal delight to all ranks and classes of the community. Few works have been more generally read, or more justly admired ; few that have yielded such incessant amuse- ment, and, at tho same time, have developed so many lessons of practical instruction. — Sir IValtcr Scott. The Messrs. Appleton & Co., of New York, have just published a beautiful edition of "The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." Not the miserable abridgment generally circulated, but De Foe's genuine work, Robinson Crusoe in full and at length, a story which never palls upon the reader, and never can lose its popularity while the English language endures. — Pcr.iuitjlcanian. D'ISRAELI.— CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE, And the Literary Character illustrated, by I. D'Israeli, Esq., D. C. L., F. S. A. First and Second Series. The Literary Character, illustrated by the Histo- ry of Men of Genius, drawn from their own feelings and confessions, by I. D'Israeli, Esq. Curiosities of American Literature, compiled, edited, and arranged by Rev. Rufus W. Griswold. The three works in one volume, large 8vo. Price $3 50. This is the double title of a large and beautifully printed octavo volume, which has just made hs appearance in the World of Letters. With the first part every body is already familiar. The deep research, the evident enthusiasm in his subject, and the light and pungent humor displayed by D'Israeli in it, are the delight of all classes of readers, and will undoubtedly send him down a •heerful journey to posterity, if only on account of tfie pleasant company in which he has managed »o agreeably to introduce himself. The other portion of this work — that relating to the Curiosi- ties of American Literature — is entirely new to the public; yet we shall be disappointed if it is not uirectly as popular as the other. Mr. Griswold has performed his task in a manner highly creditable to his taste, while displaying most favorably his industry, tact, and perseverance. — Ye* York Tribune. DE LEUZE — PRACTICAL INSTRUCTION IN ANIMAL Magnetism, by J. P. F. De Leuze, translated by Thomas C. Hartshorn. Re- vised edition, with an Appendix of Notes by the Translator, and Letteri from eminent Physicians and others, descriptive of cases in the U. States. One volume, 12mo. $1 00. The translator of this work has certainly presented the piofession with an uncommonly well digest id treatise, enhanced in value by his own notes and the corroborative testimony of eminent 9fcf»icians. — Boston Med $• Surg. Journal. 7 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. ELLIS— THE DAUGHTERS CF ENGLAND; Their position in Society, Character, and Responsihilities. By Mrs. Ellis. In one handsome volume, 12mo., cloth gilt. 50 cents. ELLIS— THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND; Their Social Duties and Domestic Hahits. By Mrs. Ellis. One handsome volume, 12mo., cloth gilt. 50 cents. ELLIS— THE WIVES OF ENGLAND; Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influences, and Social Obligations. By Mrs. Ellis. One handsome volume, 12mo., cloth gilt. 50 cents. ELLIS— THE MOTHERS OF ENGLAND; Their Influence and Responsibility. By Mrs. Ellis. One handsome volume, J2mo., cloth gilt. 50 cents. This is an appropriate and very valuable conclusion to the series of works on the subject o( frmale duties, by which Mrs. Ellis has pleased, and we doubt not profited, thousands of readers. Her counsels demand attention, not only by their practical, sagacious usefulness, but also by the riieek and modest spirit in which they are communicated. — Watchman. ELLIS.-THE MINISTER'S FAMILY; Or Hints to those who would make Home happy. By Mrs. Ellis. One vol- ume, 18mo. 37 1-2 cents. ELLIS— FIRST IMPRESSIONS; Or Hints to those who would make Home happy. By Mis. Ellis. One vol ume, I8mo. 37 1-2 cents. ELLIS— DANGERS OF DINING OUT; Or Hints to those who would make Home happy. By Mrs. Ellis. One vol ume, 18mo. 37 1-2 cents. ELLIS— SOMERVILLE HALL; Or Hints to those who would make Home happy. By Mrs. Ellis. One vol- ume, 18mo. 37 1-2 cents. The above four volumes form a portion of series of" Tales for the People and their Children." " To wish prosperity to such books as these, is to desire the moral and physical welfare of the human species." — Bath Chronicle. EVANS— EVENINGS WITH THE CHRONICLERS; Or Uncle Rupert's Tales of Chivalry. By R. M. Evans. With seventeen illustrations. One volume, 16mo., elegantly bound, 75 cents. This would have been a volume after our own hearts, while we were younger, and it ii ncarcely less so now when we are somewhat older. It discourses of thoso things which iharmed all of us in early youth — the daring deeds of the Knights and Squires of feudal warfare — the true version of the " Chevy Chase," — the exploits of the stout and stalwart Warriors of England, Scotland, and Germany. In a word, it is an attractive book, and rendered more so to young read- era by a series of wood engravings, beautifully executed. — Courier 8[ Enquirer. EVANS— THE HISTORY OF JOAN^OF ARC. By R. M. Evans, author of "Evenings with the Chroniclers," with twenty- four elegant illustrations. One volume, 16mo. Extra gilt. 75 cents. In the work before us, we have not only a most interesting biography of this female prodigy, including wh;it she was and what she accomplished, but also a faithful account of the relations that exir'ed between England and France, and of the singular state of things that marked the period when this wonderful personage appeared upon the stage. The leading incidents of hot ?ife are related with exquisite simplicity and touching pathos ; and you cannot repress your admi- ration for her heroic qualities, or senrcely repress your tears in view of her ignominious end. To Vho youthful reader we heartily recommend this volume. — Albany Advertiser. 8 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. EVANS -THE RECTORY OF VALEHEAD; Or, the Records of a Holy Home. By the Rev. R. W. Evans. From the twelfth English edition. One volume, 16mo. 75 cents. Universally and cordially do we recommend this delightful volume W6 bolieve no person could read this work, and not be the better for its pious and touching lessons. It is a pa"e taken "rom the book of life, and eloquent with all the instruction of an excellent pattern ; it is a com- mentary on the affectionate warning, " Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth." We hnve not for some time seen a work we could so deservedly praise, or so conscientiously reconi- nibud — Literary Qaiette. EMBURY— NATURE'S GEMS; OR,AMERICAN FLOWERS in their Native Haunts. By Emma C. Embury. With twenty plates of Plants carefully colored after Nature, and landscape views of their Iocalitie-s, from drawing^jtaken on the spot, by E. W. Whitefield. One imperial oc- tavo volume, printed on the finest paper, and elegantiy bound. This beautiful work will undoubtedly form a "Gift-Book" for all seasons of the year. It is illustrated with twenty colored engravings of indigenous flowers, taken from drawings made on the spot where they were found ; while each flower is accompanied by a view of some striking feature of American scenery. The literary plan of the book differs entirely from that of any other work on a similar subject which has yet appeared. Each plate has its botanical and local de- scription, though the chief part of the volume is composed of original tales and poetry, illustrative »fthe sentiments of the flowers, or associated with the landscape. No pains or expense has been ared in the michanical execution of the volume, and the fact that it is purely American both in its graphic and literary departments, should recommend it to general notice. EWBANK — HYDRAULICS AND MECHANICS. A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and other Machines for raising Water, including the Steam and Fire Engines, ancient and modern ; with Observations on various subjects connected with the Mechanic Arts ; including the Progressive Development of the Steam Engine. In five books. Illustrated by nearly three hundred Engravings. By Thomas Ewbank. One handsome volume of six hundred pages. $3 50. This is a highly valuable production, replete with novelty and interest, and adapted to gratify equally the historian, the philosopher, and the mechanician, being the result of a protracted and extensive research among the arcana of historical and scientific literature. — Nat. Intelligencer. FABER — THE PRIMITIVE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION; Or, an Historical Inquiry into the Ideality and Causation of Scriptural Elec- tion, as received and maintained in the primitive Church of Christ. By George Stanley Faber, B. D., author of "Difficulties of Romanism,' "Difficulties of Infidelity," &c. Complete in one volume, octavo. $1 75. Mr. Faber verifies his opinion by demonstration. We cannot pay a higher respect to his work than by recommending it to all. — Church of England Quarterly Review. FALKNER— THE FARMER'S MANUAL. A Practical Treatise on the Nature and Value of Manures, founded from Experiments on various Crops, with a brief Account of the most Recent Discoveries in Agricultural Chemistry. By F. Falkner and the Author of " British Husbandry." 12mo., paper 'cover 31 cents, cloth 50 cents. It is the object, of the present treatise to explain the nature and constitution of manures gene- rally— to point out the means of augmenting the quantity and preserving the fertilizing power of farm-yard manure, tho various sources of mineral and other artificial manures, and the cause of thsir frequent failuies. — iuthor's Preface. FARMER'S TREASURE, THE ; Containing " Falkner's Farmer's Manual," and " Smith's Productive Farm- ing," bound together. 12mo., 75 cents. FOSTER— ESSAYS ON CHRISTIAN MORALS, Experimental and Practical. Originally delivered as Lectures at Broa&mead Chapel, Bristol. By John Foster, author of " Essays on Decision of Char- acter, etc. One volume, 18mo., 50 cents. This volume contains twenty-six Essays, some of which are of the highest order of sublimit) and exisilonce. 9 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. FOSTER— BIOG., LIT., AND PHIL. ESSAYS, Contributed to the Eclectic Review, by John Foster, author of" Essays on De- cision of Human Character," etc. One volume, 12mo., $1 25. These contributions well deserve to class with tliose of Macauley, Jeffrey, and Sidney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review. They contain the productions of a more original and profound thinker than either, whose master-mind has exerted a stronger influence upon his readers, and has left a deeper impression upon our literature ; and whose peculiar merit it was to present the doctrines and moralities of the Christian faith, under a form and aspect which redeemed the familiar from triteness, and threw a charm and freshness about the severest truths. — London Patriot. FROST— THE BOOK OF THE NAVY: Comprising a General History of the American Marine, and particular accounts of" all the most celebrated Nava. Battles, from the Declaration of Independ ence to the present time, compiled from the best authorities. By John Frost, LL. D. With an Appendix, containing Naval Songs, Anecdotes, &c. Embellished with numerous original Engravings, and Portraits of distinguished Naval Commanders. One volume, 12mo., $1 00. This is the only popular and yet authentic single view which we have of the naval exploits o! our country, arranged with good taste and set forth in good language — U. S. Gazette. This volume is dedicated to the Secretary of the Navy, and is altogether a very faithful and attractive historical record. It deserves, and will doubtless have, a very extended circulation —Nat. Intelligencer. FROST— THE BOOK OF THE ARMY: Comprising a General Military History of the United States, from the period of the Revolution to the present time, with particular accounts of all the most celebrated Battles, compiled from the best authorities. By Johr Frost, LL. D. Illustrated with numerous Engravings, and portraits & distinguished Commanders. One volume, 12mo., $1 25. This work gives a complete history of military operations, and their causes and effects, fron the opening of the Revolution to the close of the last war, with graphic descriptions of the cela brated battles and characters of the leading generals. It is illustrated with numerous portraits oi steel and views of battles, from original drawings by Darley and others. The importance of pop ular works of the class to which this and the " Book of the Navy " belong, must be obvious to al who recognize the value of national recollections in preserving a true national spirit. FRESENIUS— CHEMICAL ANALYSIS. Elementary Instruction in Chemical Analysis. By Dr. C. Rhemigius Frese- nius. With a Preface by Prof. Liebig. Edited by I. Lloyd Bullock. One neat volume, 12mo. Paper, 75 cents ; cloth, $1 00. This Introduction to Practical Chemistry is admitted to bo the most valuable Elementary In- structor in Chemical Analysis fo scientific operatives, and for pharmaceutical chemists, which has ever been presented to the public. GUIZOT.-THE YOUNG STUDENT; \)r, Ralph and Victor. By Madame Guizot. From the French, by Samuel Jackson. One volume of 500 pages, with illustrations. Price 75 cents, or in three volumes, $1 12. This volume of biographical incidents is a striking picture of juvenile life. To all that num- berless class of youth who are passing through their literary education, whether in boarding- schools or academies, in the collegiate course, or the preparatory studies connected with them, we know nothing more piecisely fitted to meliorate their character, and direct their course, subordi- nate to the higher authority of Christian ethics, than this excellent delineation of " The Young Student," by Madame Guizot. * * * The French Academy were correct in their judgment, when lliey pronounced Madame Guizot's Student the best book of the year.— Courier fy Enquirer. GUIZOT.-GENERAL HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION In Europe, from the full of the Roman Empire/ to the French Revolution. Translated from the French of M. Guizot, Professor of History to la Facul- te des Lettres of Paris, and Minister of Public Instruction. Third Ameri- can edition, with Notes, by C. S. Henry, D. D. One handsome volume, 12-no., $1 00. M. Guizot in his instructive Locturos has given us an epitome of modern history, distinguished by all the merit which, in another department, renders Blacltstone a subject of such peculiar and mibounded praise — a work closely condense t, including nothing useless, omitting nothing essen tial : written with graee, aud conceived and arranged with consummate ability. — Bost. Traveller 10 Appleto?i's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. GRISWOLD— CURIOSITIES OF AMER. LITERATURE: Compiled, edited, and arranged by Rev. Rufus W. Griswold. See D'Israeli GIRL'S MANUAL: Comprising a summary View of Female Studies, Accomplishments, and Prin ciples of Conduct. Frontispiece. One volume, 18mo , 50 cents. GOLDSMITH-PICTORIAL VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. The Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver Goldsmith. Illustrated with upwards of 100 engravings on wood, making a beautiful volume, octavo, of 300 pages. $1 25. The same, miniature size, 37 1-2 cents. We love to turn back over these rich old classics of our own language, and re-juvenate ouf- ielvcs by the never-failing associations which a re-perusal always calls up. Let any one who has not read this immortal tale for fifteen or twenty years, try the experiment, and we will warrant that he rises up from the task — the pleasure, we should have paid — a happier and a better man. In the good old Vicar of Wakefield, all is pure gold, without dross or alloy of any kind. This much we have said to our last generation readers. This edition of the work, however, we take it, was got up for the benefit of tile rising generation, and we really envy our young friends the plea- sure which is before such of them as will read it for the first time. — Savannah Republican. GOLDSMITH— ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, By Oliver Goldsmith. Miniature size, 37 1-2 cents. Forming one of the seiies of" Miniature Classical Library." GRESLEY— PORTRAIT OF A CHURCHMAN, By the Rev. W. Gresley, A. M. From the Seventh English edition. On* elegant volume, 16mo., 75 cents. " The main part of this admirable volume is occupied upon the illustration of the practical working of Church principles when sincerely received, setting forth their value in the commerce o( daily life, and how surely they conduct those who embrace them in the safe and quiet puth of holy life." GRESLEY— A TREATISE ON PREACHING, In a Series of Letters by the Rev. W. Gresley, M. A. Revised, with Supple- mentary Notes, by the Rev. Benjamin I. Haight, M. A., Rector of All Saints' Church, New York. One volume, 12mo. $1 25. Advertisement. — Tn preparing the American edition of Mr. Gresley's valuable Treatise, a few foot-notes have been added by the Editor, which are distinguished by brackets. The more extend- ed notes at the end have been selected from the best works on the subject — and which, with o»e or two exceptions, are not easily accessible to the American student. HAMILTON— THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON, Edited by his son, John C. Hamilton. Two volumes, 8vo., $5 00. We cordially recommend the perusal and diligent study of these volumes, exhibiting, as tlioj do, much valuable matter relative to tbe Revolution, the establishment of the Federal Constitu- tion, and other important events in the annals of our country. — JV. Y. Review. HEMANS— THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS Of Felicia Hemans, printed from the last English edition, edited by her Sister. Illustrated with 6 steel Engravings. One beautifully printed and portable volume, 16mo., j|> , or in two volumes, $ Of this highly accomplished poetess it has been truly said, that of all her sex " few have writ- ten so much and so well." Although her writings possess an energy equal to their high-toned beauty, yet are they so pure and so refined, that not a line of them could feeling spare or delicacy- blot fiom herpages. Her imagination was rich, chaste, and glowing. Her chosen tli2mes are tba ttarile, the hearth-stone, and the death-bed. In her poems of Creur de Lion, Ferdinand of Ara- fon, and Bernard del Carpio, we see beneath the glowing colors with which she clothes her irteua, the feelings of a woman's heart. Her earlier poems, Records of Woman and Forest Sanctuary, itand unrivalled. In short, her works will ever be read by a pious and enlightened community. HEMANS— SONGS OF THE AFFECTIONS, By Felicia Hemans. One volume, 32mo., gilt 31 cents. Forming one of the series of" Miniature Classical Library." HARE— SERMONS TO A COUNTRY CONGREGATION, By Augustus William Hare, A. M., late Fellow of New College, and Reotor of Alton Barnes. One volume, royal 8vo., $2 25. 11 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. HALL— THE PRINCIPLES OF DIAGNOSIS, By Marshall Hall, M. D., F. R. S., &c. Second edition, with many improve- ments. By Dr. John A. Sweet. One volume, 8vo., $2 00. This work was published in accordance with the desire of some of the most celebrated physi- cians of I his country, who were anxious that it should be brought within the reach of all classei t>{ medical men, to whose attention it offers strong claims as the best work on the subject. HAZEN.— SYMBOLICAL SPELLING-BOOK. Tl.c Symbolical Spelling-Book, in two parts. By Edward Hazen. Contain- ing 268 engravings. 18 3-4 cents. This work is used in upwards of one thousand different schools, and pronounced to be one as* the best works published. HODGE— THE STEAM-ENGINE: Its Origin and gradual Improvement, from the time of Hero to the present day, as adapted to Manufactures, Locomotion, and Navigation. Illustrated with 48 Plates in full detail, numerous wood cuts, &c. By Paul R. Hodge, C. E. One volume folio of plates, and letter-press in 8vo. $10 00. This work should be placed in the " Captain's Office " of every steamer in our country, and also with every engineer to whom is confided the control of the engine. From it they would de- rivo all the information which would enable them to comprehend the caus* and effects of every ardinary accident, and also the method promptly and successfully to repair any injury, and to rem- edy any defect. HOLYDAY TALES: Consisting of pleasing Moral Stories for the Young. One volume, square 16nio., with numerous illustrations. 37 1-2 cents. This is a most capital little book. The stories are evidently written by an able hand, and that too in an exceedingly attractive style. — Spectator. HOOKER.-THE COMPLETE WORKS Of that learned and judicious divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, with an account of his Life and Death. By Isaac Walton. Arranged by the Rev. John Keble, M. A. First American from the last Oxford edition. With a complete general Index, and Index of the texts of Scripture, prepared expressly for this edition. Two elegant volumes, 8vo., $4 00. Contents. — The Editor's Preface comprises a general survey of the former edition of Hooker's Works, with Historical Illustrations of the period. After which follows the Life of Hooker, by Isaac Walton. His chief work succeeds, on the " Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity." It commences with a lengthened Preface designed as an address " to them who seek the refor- mation of the Laws and Orders Ecclesiastical of the Church of England." The discussion is divi- ded into eight books, which include an investigation of the topics. After those eight books of the 11 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," follow two Sermons, "The certainty and perpetuity of Faith in the elect ; especially of the Prophet Habakkuk's faith ;" and " Justification, Works, and how the foundation of faith is overthrown." Next are introduced " A supplication made to the Council by Master Walter Travers," and " Mr. Hooker's answer to the supplication that Mr Travers made to the Council." Then follow two Sermons — " On the nature of Pride," and a " Remedy against Sorrow and Fear." Two Sermons on part of the epistle of the Apostle Jude are next in- serted, with a prefatory dedication by Henry Jackson. The last article in the works of Mr. Hooker is a Sermon on Prayer. The English edition in three volumes sells at $10 00. The American is an exact reprint, at less than hall' the price. HUDSON— THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY HUDSON, By the author of "Uncle Philips Conversations." Frontispiece. 18mo., cloth. 37 cents. Forming one of the series of" A Library for my Young Countrymen." This little volume furnishes us, from authentic sources, the most important facts in this ce'e- oiatod adventurer's life, and in a style that possesses more than ordinary interest. — Evening Posi. HOWITT— THE CHILD'S PICTURE AND VERSE-BOOK; Commonly called "Otto Speckter's Fable-Book." Translated from the Ger- man by Mary Howitt. Illustrated with 100 engravings on wood. Square 12mo., in ornamental binding, $ A celebrated German review says, ''Of this production, which makes itself an epoch in the warld of children, it is superfluous to speak. The Fable-Book is throughout all Germany in the • amds of parents and children, and will always be new, because evsry year fresh children are born K 12 Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. HOWITT.— LOVE AND MONEY; An Every-Day Tale, by Mary Hewitt. 18mo., two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents LITTLE COIN, MUCH CARE; Or, How Poor People Live. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, 3S cents SOWING AND REAPING ; Or, What will Come of It. By Mary Howitt. 13mo., two Plates, 38 cents. ALICE FRANKLIN; A Sequel to Sowing and Reaping — a Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo. two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents. WORK AND WAGES; Or, Life in Service — a Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents. STRIVE AND THRIVE; A Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents. WHO SHALL BE GREATEST; A Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents. WHICH IS THE WISER; Or, People Abroad— a Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, 33 cents. HOPE ON, HOPE EVER; Or, The Boyhood of Felix Law — a Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents. NO SENSE LIKE COMMON SENSE; A Tale. By Mary Howitt. 18mo., two Plates, cloth gilt, 38 cents. *,,* The above ten volumes form a portion of the series published under the general title of '■Tales for the People and their Children." Of late years many writers have exerted their talent? in juvenile literature, with great success. Miss Martineau has made poli"'.cal economy as familiar to boys as it formerly was to statesmen. Our own Miss Sedgwick has produced some of the most beautiful moral stories, for the edification and delight of children, which have ever been written. The Hon. Horace Mann, in addresses to adults, has presented the claims of children for good education, with a power and eloquence of style, and an elevation of thought, which shows his heart is in his work. The stories of Mary Howitt Harriet Martineau, R**s. Copley, and Mrs. Ellis, which form a part of" Tales for the Peo- ple and their Children," will bt (bund valuable additions to juvenile literature ; at the same time they may be read with profit by parents for the good lessons they inculcate, and by all other read- ers for the literary excellence they display. We wish they could be placed in the hands and engraven on the minds of all the you'n in the country. They manifest a nice and accurate observation of human nature, and especially the na- tuic of children, a fine sympathy with every thing good and pure, and a capability of infusing it in the minds of others — great beauty and simplicity of style, and a keen eye to practical life, with all its faults, united with a deep love for ideal excellence. Messrs Appleton & Co deserve the highest praise for the excellent manner in which thev have "got up" their juvenile library, and we sincerely hope that its success will be so great as to induce them to make continual contributions to its treasures. The collection is one which should be owned by every parent who wishes that the moral and intellectual improvement of his children should keep pace with their growth in years, and ths development of their physical poweri American Traveller JERRAM— THE CHILD'S OWN STORY-BOOK; Or, Tales and Dialogues for the Nursery. By Mrs. Jerram (late Jane Eliza- beth Holmes). Illustrated with numerous Engravings. 50 cents. There are seventy stories in this volume. They are admirably adapted for the countless youth for whose edification they are narrated. — Boston Oazette. JOHNSON.-THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, Prince of Abyssinia — a Tale. By Samuel Johnson, LL. D. 32mo., giH leaves, 38 cents. *** Forming one of tho series of" Miniature Classical Library. M 13 Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. JAMES— THE TRUE CHRISTIAN, Exemplified in a Series of Addresses, by Rev. John Angell James. One vol 18mo, 38 cents. These addresses arc amongst the choicest effusions of the admirable author. — Chr. Jntell. THE ANXIOUS INQUIRER A)V* Salvation Directed and Encouraged. By Rev. John Angell Jame*. One volume, 18mo., 38 cents. Upwards of twenty thousand copies of this excellent little volume have been sold, which fu|]f Mfe9ts the high estimation the work has attained with the religious community. HAPPINESS, ITS NATURE AND SOURCES. By Rev. John Angell James. One volume, 32mo., 25 cents. This is written in the excellent author's best vein. A better book wo have not in a long tim« see n. — Evangelist. THE CHRISTIAN PROFESSOR: Addressed in a Series of Counsels and Cautions to the Members of Christian Churches. By Rev. John Angell James. Second edition. One volume, 18mo., 63 cents. A most excellent work from the able and prolific pen of Mr. James. — Chr. Intelligencer THE YOUNG MAN FROM HOME. In a Series of Letters, especially directed for the Moral Advancement of Youth. By Rev. John Angell James. Fifth edition. One volume, 18mo., 38 cents. The work is a rich treasury of Christian counsel and instruction. — Albany Advertiser THE WIDOW DIRECTED To the Widow's God. By Rev. John Angell James. One volume, 18mo., 38 cents. The book is worthy to be read by others besides the class for which it is especially designed ; md we doubt not that it is destined to come as a friendly visitor to many a house of mourninft Kid as a healing balm to many a wounded heart. — JV. Y. Observer KEIGHTLEY— THE MYTHOLOGY OF GREECE And Italy, designed for the use of Schools. By Thomas Keightley. Nume- rous wood-cut illustrations. One volume, 18mo., half bound, 44 cents. This i9 a neat little volume, and well adapted to the purpose for which it was prepared. It presents, in a very compendious and convenient form, every thing relating to the subject, of impor- tance to the young student. — L. J. Star. KINGSLEY— THE SACRED CHOIR: A Collection of Church Music, consisting of Selections from the most distin- guished Authors, among whom are the names of Haydn, Mozart, Beetho- ven, Pergolessi, &c. &c, with several pieces of Music by the Author, also a Progressive Elementary System of Instruction for Pupils. By George Kingsley, author of the Social Choir, &c. &c. Fourth edition. 75 cent*. Mr. George Kingsley : Sir, — We have examinedthe " Sacred Choir " enough to lead us to ap- preciate the work as the best publication of Sacred Music extant. Tt is beautifully printed and iabstantially bound, conferring credit on the publishers. We bespeak for the " Sacred Cnoir " extensivo circulation O. S. Bowdoin, Sinceiely ycurs, E. O. Goodwin / D. Ingraham. KIP— THE DOUBLE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH, By Rev. Wm. Ingraham Kip, author of" Lenten Fast." One volume, 12mo Second edition. Boards 75 cents, cloth $1 00. This is a sound, clear, and able production — a book much wanted for these times, and one that we feel persuaded will prove eminently useful. It is ahappy delineation of that double withes* which the Church bears against Romanism and ultra-Protestantism, and points out her middle path as the only one of truth and safety. — Banner of the Cross. 14 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. LAFEVER— BEAUTIES OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE; Consisting of forty-eight Plates of Original Designs, with Plans, Elevations, and Sections, also a Dictionary of Technical Terms ; the whole forming a complete Manual for the Practical Builder. By M. Lafever, Architect. One volume, large 8vo., half bound, $6 00. STAIR-CASE AND HAND-RAIL Construction. The Modern Practice of Stair-case and Hand-rail Construction, practically explained, in a Series of Designs. By M. Lafever, Architect With Plans and Elevations for Ornamental Villas. Fifteen Plates. One volume, large 8vo., $3 00. Mr. Lafever's " Beauties of Architecture," and his " Practice of Stair-case and Hand-rail con- struction," constitute two volumes rich in instruction in those departments of business. They tie a necessary acquisition not only to the operative workman, but to all landlords and proprietors of houses, who would combine both the ornamental and useful in their family (iiv.llings. and also understand the most economical and profitable modes by which their edifices can be erected and repaired. LEWIS-RECORDS OF THE HEART, By Sarah Anna Lewis. One volume, 12mo., $1 00. We have read some of the pieces with much pleasure. They indicate poetic genius of no o»- dinary kind, and are imbued with much feeling and pathos. We welcome the volume as a credit able accession to the poetic literature of the country. — Boston Traveller. LIEBIG— FAMILIAR LETTERS ON CHEMISTRY, And its relation to Commerce, Physiology, and Agriculture. By Justus L.e- big, M. D. Edited by John Gardner, M. D. One volume. 13 centa in paper, 25 cents bound. The Letters contained in this little volume embrace some of the most important points of ifie Science of Chemistry, in their application to Natural Philosophy, Physiology, Agriculture, and Commerce. LETTER-WRITER, The Useful Letter- Writer, comprising a succinct Treatise on the Epistolary Art, and Forms of Letters for all ordinary Occasions of Life. Compiled from the best authorities. Frontispiece. 32mo., gilt leaves, 38 cents. Forming one of the series of "Miniature Classical Library." LOOKING-GLASS FOR THE MIND; Or, Intellectual Mirror. Being an elegant Collection of the most delightful little Stories and interesting Tales ; chiefly translated from that much ad- mired work, L'ami des Enfans. Illustrated with numerous wood-cuts From the twentieth London edition. One volume, 18mo , 50 cents. Forming one of the series of" Tales for the People and their Children." LOG CABIN: Or, The World before You. By the author of " Three Experiments of Liv ing," " The Huguenots in France and America," etc. One volume, 18mo., 50 cents. Every person who takes up this volume will rea'd it with interest. It is truly what the writer intended it should be — " A Gnide to Usefulness and Happiness." LOVER.-HANDY ANDY: A Tale of Irish Life, by Samuel Lover. Illustrated with twenty-three char- acteristic steel Engravings. One volume, 8vo., cloth $1 25, boards $1 00. Cheap edition, two Plates, paper, 50 cents. This boy Handy will be the death of us. What is the police force abent to allow the uttering *•( a publication that has already brought us to the brink of apopleitT fifty times ? — Sport. Review. L. S. D.— TREASURE TROVE : A Tale, by Samuel Lover. One volume, 8vo., with two steel Engraving* Paper cover, 25 cents. Tnis is a capital thing. The gay and the grave, the " lively and severe." are nnivj with a i-kilfL. hand, and there is a latent tone of sound morality running through "L. 8. D." which wiK lire a lasting value to its pagei. — Commercial Advertiser. 15 Appletoris Catalogue of Valuable Publications. LUCY AND ARTHUR; A Book for Children. Illustrated with numerous engravings, elegantly hour* in cloth. 50 cents. Lucy and Arthur is a charming story of the nurserk, prepared oy an experienced author. So eure it for the family. — American Traveller. LYRA APOSTOLICA. From the Fifth English edition. One elegantly printed volume, 75 cents. In this elegant volume there are forty-five sections, and one hundred and seventy-nine Vrk poems, all short, and many of them sweet. — ftfew York American. MAGEE.-ON ATONEMENT AND SACRIFICE: Discourses siw<* SiBseittiSions on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice, mi 1 ,., the Principal Arguments advanced, and the Mode of Reasoning employed, by the Opponents of those Doctrines, as held by tha Established Church. By the late Most Rev. William M'Gee, D. D., Arch- bishop of Dublin. Two volumes, 8vo., $5 00. This is one of the ablest critical and polemical works of modern times. The profound biblica] information on a variety of topics which the Archbishop brings forward, must endear his name to all lovers of Christianity. — Orme. MANNING.-THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH, By the Rev. Henry Edward Manning, M. A., Archdeacon of Chichester. Or*e volume, 16mo., $1 00. Part I. The History and Exposition of the Doctrine of Catholic Unity. Part II. The Moral Design of Catholic Unity. Part III. The Doctrine of Catholic Unity applied to the Actual Stats of Christendom. We commend it earnestly to the devout and serious perusal of all Churchmen, and particularly of all clergymen, as the ablest discussion we ever met with of a deeply and vitally important sub- ject.— Churchman. MARRYAT— MASTERMAN READY; Or, The Wreck of the Pacific. Written for Young Persons, by Capt. Marry- at. Complete in 3 vols., 18mo., with Frontispiece, cloth gilt, $1 25. Forming a portion of the series of" Tales for the People and their Children." We have never seen any thing from the same pen we like as well as this. It is the moden Crusoe, and is entitled to take rank with that charming romance. — Commercial Advertiser. MARSHALL— NOTES ON THE EPISCOPAL POLITY Of the Holy Catholic Church, with some account of the Developments of Mo dern Religious Systems, by Thomas William Marshall, B. A., of the Dio cese of Salisbury. Edited by Jonathan M. Wainwright, D. D. With a new and complete Index of the Subjects and of the Texts of Scripture One volume, 12mo., $1 25. I. Introduction. II. Scripture Evidence. III. Evidence of Antiquity. IV. Admission oi Adversaries. V. Development of Modern Religious Systems. A more important work than this has not been issued for a long time. We earnestly recowi mend it to the attention of every Churchman. — Banner of the Cross. MARTINEAU.-THE CROFTON BOYS; A Tale for Youth, by Harriet Martineau. One volume, 18mo., Frontispiece Cloth gilt, 38 cents. Forming one of the series of "Tales for the People and their Children." It abounds in interest, and is told with the characteristic ability and spirit of the distinguished wither — Evening Post. / THE PEASANT AND THE PRINCE; A Tale of the French Revolution, by Harriet Martineau. One volume, 18mo. Frontispiece. Cloth gilt, 38 cents. Forming one of the series of " Tales for the Poople and their Children.' This is a most inviting little history of Louis the Sixteenth and his family. Here, in a style even more familiar than Scott's Tabs of a Grandfather, wo have a graphic epitome of many fasts connected with the days of the " Revolution." — Courier &■ Enquirer. 16 Appltton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. MAURICE.— THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST; Or, Hints respecting the Principles, Constitution, and Ordinances of the Cath- olic Church. By Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, M. A. London. One volume, 8vo., 600 pages, $2 50. On the theory of the Church of Christ, ali should consult the work of Mr. Maurice, the mott philosophical writer of the day. — Prof. Oarbetfs Bampton Lectures, 1842 MILTON— THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS Oi John Milton, with Explanatory Notes and a Life of the Author, by the Rev Henry Stebbing, A. M. Illustrated with six steel Engravings. One vol- ume, 16mo., $1 25. Forming one of the series of "Cabinet Edition of Standard Poets." *** The Latin and Italian Poems are included in this edition. Mr. Stebbing's Notes will be found very useful in elucidating the learned allusions with which the text abounds, and they are also valuable for the correct appreciation with which the writer di- rects attention to the beauties of the author. PARADISE LOST, By John Milton. With Notes, by Rev. H. Stebbing. One volume, 18rno., cloth 38 cents, gilt leaves 50 cents. PARADISE REGAINED, By John Milton. With Notes, by Rev. H. Stebbing. One volume, 18mo., cloth 25 cents, gilt leaves 38 cents. MAXWELL-FORTUNES OF HECTOR O'HALLORAN And his man Mark Antony O'Toole, by W. H. Maxwell. One volume, 8vo., two plates, paper, 50 cents, twenty-four plates, boards, $1 00, cloth, $1 25 It is one of the best of all the Irish stories, full of spirit, fun, drollery, and wit. — Cour. $/■ Enq MOORE.-LALLAH ROOKH ; An Oriental Romance, by Thomas Moore. One volume, 32mo., frontispiece, cloth gilt, 38 cents. Forming a portion of the series of" Miniature Classical Library." This exquisite Poem has long been the admiration of readers of all classes. MORE-PRACTICAL PIETY, By Hannah More. One volume, 32mo., frontispiece, 38 cents. Forming one of the series of" Miniature Classical Library." "Practical Piety " has always bee deemed the most attractive and eloquent of all Hannah More's works. PRIVATE DEVOTION: A Series of Prayers and Meditations, with an Introductory Essay on Prayer, chiefly from the writings of Hannah More. From the twenty-fifth London edition. One volume, 32mo., Frontispiece, cloth gilt, 31 cents. Forming one of the series of" Miniature Classical Library." Upwards of fifty thousand copies of this admirable manual have been sold in the IT. States. DOMESTIC TALES And Allegories, illustrating Human Life. By Hannah More. One volume, 18mo., 38 cents. Contents.— I. Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. II. Mr. Fantora the Philosopher. III. Two Shoemakers. IV Giles the Poacher. V. Servant turned Soldier VI. General Jail Delivery. RURAL TALES, By Hannah More. One volum'e, 18mo.^38 cents. Contents.— I. Parley the Porter. II. All for the Best. III. Two Wealth" Farmer*. IV Tom White. V. Pilgrims. VI. Valley of Teais. Forming a portion of the series of" Tales for the People and their Children •* These two volumes comprise that portion of Hannah More's Repository Tales which ai» adapted to general usefulness in this country. 17 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. NAPOLEON— PICTORIAL HISTORY Of Napoleon Bonaparte, translated from the French of M. Laurent de L'Ar deche, with Five Hundred spirited Illustrations, after designs by Horace Vernet, and twenty Original Portraits engraved in the best style. Com- plete in two handsome volumes, 8vo., about 500 pages each, $3 50 ; cheap edition, paper cover, four parts, $2 00. The work is superior to the long, verbose productions of Scott and Bourienne — not in style alone, but in truth — being written to please neither Charles X. nor the English aristocracy, but (at tho cause of freedom. It has advantages over every other memoir extant. — American Traveller. NEWMAN— PAROCHIAL SERMONS, Bv John Henry Newman, B. D. Six volumes of the English edition in two volumes, 8vo., $5 00. SERMONS BEARING ON SUBJECTS Of the Day, by John Henry Newman, B. D. One volume, 12mo., $1 25. As a compendium of Christian duty, these Sermons will be read by people of all denomina- tions ; as models of style, they will be valued by writers in every department of L erature. — United States Oaiette. OGILBY.— ON LAY-BAPTISM: An Outline of the Argument against the Validity of Lay-Baptism. By John D. Ogilby, D. D., Professor of Eccles. History. One vol., 12mo., 75 cents. From a cursory inspection of it, we take it to be a thorough, fearless, and able discussion of the subject which it proposes — aiming less to excite inquiry, than to satisfy by learned and ingenious argument inquiries already excited. — Churchman. CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND And America. Three Lectures — I. The Church in England and America Apostolic and Catholic. II. The Causes of the English Reformation. Ill Its Character and Results. By John D. Ogilby, D. D. One vol., 16mo., 75 cents. " I believe in one Catholic and Apostolic Church." Nicene Creed Prof. Ogilby has furnished the Church, in this little volume, with a most valuable aid. We Jiinkitis designed to became a text-book on the subject of which it treats. — True Catholic. OLD OAK TREE : Illustrated with numerous wood-cuts. One volume, 18mo., 38 cents. The precepts conveyed are altogether unexceptionable, and the volume is well calculated to prove attractive with children. — Saturday Chronicle. OLMSTED— INCIDENTS OF A WHALING VOYAGE: To which is added, Observations on the Scenery, Manners, and Customs, and Missionary Stations of the Sandwich and Society Islands, accompanied by numerous Plates. By Francis Allyn Olmsted. One vol., 12rno., $1 50. The work embodies a mass of intelligence interesting to the ordinary reader as well as to tho philosophical inquirer. — Courier Sr Enquirer PAGET— TALES OF THE VILLAGE, By the Rev. Francis E. Paget, M. A. Three elegant volumes, 18mo., $1 7f The first series, or volume, presents a popular view of the contrast in opinions and modes of thought between Churchmen and Romanists ; the second sets forth Church principles, as opposed to what, in England, is termed Dissent; and the third places in contrast the chatacter of the Churchman and the Infidel. At any time these volumes w/>uld be valuable, especially to the young. At present, when men's minds are much turned to such subjects, they cannot fail of being eagerly sought for. — New-York American PALMER— A TREATISE ON THE CHURCH Df Christ. Designed chiefly for the use of Students in Theology. By the Rev. William Palmer, M. A., of Worcester College, Oxford. Edited, with Notes, by the Right Rev. W. R. Whittingham, D. D., Bishop of the Prot. Epis. Church in the Diocese of Maryland. Two volumes, 8vo., $5 00. Th» chief design of this work is to supply some answer to the assertion so frequently made, that individuals are not bound to submit to any ecclesiastical authority whatever : or that, if they ire, they must, inconsistency, accept Romanism with all its claims and errors. — Preface. 18 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. PARNELL.— APPLIED CHEMISTRY, In Manufactures, Arts, and Domestic Economy. Edited by E. A. Parnell. Illustrated with numerous wood Engravings, and specimens of Dyed and Printed Cottons. Paper cover 75 cents, cloth $1 00. The Editor's aim is to divest the work, as far as practicable, of all technical terms, ic is to edapt it to the requirements of the general reader. The above forma the first division of the work. It is the author's intention to continue i from time to time, so as to form a complete Practical Encyclopaedia of Chemistry applied to the Arts. The subjects to immediately follow will be, Manufacture of Glass, Indigo, Sulphuric Acid Zine, Potash, Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, &c. PEARSON— AN EXPOSITION OF THE CREED, By John Pearson, D. D., late Bishop of Chester. With an Appendix, contain- ing the principal Greek and Latin Creeds. Revised and corrected by the Rev. W. S. Dobson, M. A., Peterhouse, Cambridge. One vol., 8vo., $2 00. The following may be stated as the advantages of this edition over all others • First — Great care has been taken to correct the numerous errors in the references to the texts of Scripture, which had crept in by reason of the repeated editions through which this admirable work has passed , and many references, as will be seen on turning to the Index of Texts, have oeen added. Secondly — The Quotations in the Notes have been almost universally identified and the refer- ence to them adjoined. Lastly — The principal Symbola or Creeds, of which the particular Articles have been cited by Ihe Author, have been annexed ; and wherevei the original writers have given the Symbola in a scattered and disjointed manner, the detached parts have been brought into a successive and con- nected point of view. These have been added in Chronological order, in the form of an Appen- dix.— Vide Editor PHILIP— THE LIFE AND OPINIONS Of Dr. Milne, Missionary to China. Illustrated by Biographical Annals of Asiatic Missions, from Primitive Protestant Times : intended as a Guido to Missionary Spirit. By Rev. Robert Philip. One vol., 12mo., 50 cents. The work is executed with great skill, and embodies a vast amount of valuable missionary inte ligence, besides a rich variety of personal incidents, adapted to gratify not only the missionary or the Christian, but the more general reader. — Observer. 1 YOUNG MAN'S CLOSET LIBRARY, By Robert Philip. With an Introductory Essay, by Rev. Albert Barnes. One volume, 12mo., $1 00. LOVE OF THE SPIRIT, Traced in His Work : a Companion to the Experimental Guides. By Robert Philip. One volume, 18mo., 50 cents. DEVOTIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL Guides. By Robert Philip. With an Introductory Essay by Rev. Albert Barnes. Two volumes, 12mo., $1 75. Containing Guide to the Per- plexed, Guide to the Devotional, Guide to the Thoughtful, Guide to the Doubting, Guide to the Conscientious, Guide to Redemption. LADY'S CLOSET LIBRARY: The Marys, t r Beauty of Female Holiness ; The Marthas, or Varieties of Fe- male Piety , The Lydias, or Development of Female Character. By Rob- ert Philip. Each volume, 18mo., 50 cents The MATERNAL series of the above popular Library is now ready, entitled The Hannahs ; or, Maternal Influence of Sons. By Robert Philip. One volume, ISmo., 50 cents. The author of this excellent work is known to the public as one of the most prolific writers o» the day, and scarcely any writer in the department which he occupies has acquired so extensive and well-merited a popularity. — Evangelist. POLLOK— THE COURSE OF TIME, By Robert Pollok. With a Life of the Author, and complete Analytical In dex, prepared expressly for this edition. 32mo., frontispiece, 38 centg. Forming one of the series of " Miniature Classical Library." Few modern Poems exist which at once attained such acceptance and celebrity as thu. 19 Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. PRATT.-DAWNINGS OF GENIUS; Or, the Early Lives of some Eminent Persons of the last Century. By Anns Pratt. One volume, 18mo., frontispiece, 38 cents. Forming one of the series of" A Library for my Young Countrymen." Contents. — Sir Humphrey Davy — Rev. George Crabbe — Baron Cuvier — Sir Joshua Reyr.<4d* — Lindley Murray — Sir James Mackintosh— Dr. Adam Clarke. PRIZE STORY-BOOK: Consisting chiefly of Tales, translated from the German, French, and Itali&n together with Select Tales from the English. Illustrated with numerouo Engravings from new designs. One thick volume, IGino., cloth gilt. PURE GOLD FROM THE RIVERS OF WISDOM: A Collection of Short Extracts from the most Eminent Writers — Bishop Hall, Jeremy Taylor, Barrow, Hooker, Bacon, Leighton, Addison, Wilberforce, Johnson, Young, Southey, Lady Montague, Hannah More, etc. One volume, 32mo., frontispiece, cloth gilt, 31 cents. Forming one of the series of " Miniature Classical Library." PUSS IN BOOTS: A pure Translation in Prose, from the original German. Illustrated with 1 original Designs, suitable for the Tastes of the Young or Old, by the cele- brated artist, Otto Speckter. One vol., square 12mo., cloth gilt. SAINT PIERRE— PAUL AND VIRGINIA: A Tale, by J. B. H. De Saint Pierre. One volume, 32mo., frontispiece, cloth gilt, 31 cents. Forming one of the series of" Miniature Classical Library." SANDHAM— THE TWIN SISTERS: A Tale for Youth, by Mrs. Sandham. From the twentieth London edition One volume, 18mo., frontispiece, cloth gilt, 38 cents. Forming a portion of the series of" Tales for the People and their Children." The moral is excellent throughout. Its merit renders it a pleasant book for even grown-up children. — Boston Post. SCOTT— THE POETICAL WORKS Of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Containing Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, Lady of the Lake, Don Roderick, Rokeby, Ballads, Lyrics, and Songs, with a Life of the Author. Illustrated with aix steel Engravings. One volume, 16mo., $1 25. LADY OF THE LAKE : A Poem, by Sir Walter Scott. One volume, 18mo., frontispiece, cloth 25 cents, gilt edges 38 cents. MARMION: A Tale of Flodden Field, by Sir Walter Scott. One volume, 18mo., frontis- piece, cloth 25 cents, gilt edges 38 cents. r LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL: A Poem, by Sir Walter Scott. One volume, 18mo., frontispiece, cloth 25 cents, gilt edges 38 cents. Walter Scott is the most popular of all the poets of the pfesent day, and deservedly so. lie describes that which is most easily and generally understood with more vivacity and effect than a«y other writer. His style is clear, flowing, and transparent; his sentiments, of which hi§ ityla is an easy and natural medium, are common to him with his readers. — Hailitt. SPINCKES.-MANUAL OF PRIVATE DEVOTIONS: 'Complete,) collected from the writings of Archbishop Laud, Bishop Andrews, Bishop Ken, Dr. Hickes, Mr. Kettlewell, Mr. Spinckes, and other eminent old English divines. With a Preface by the Rev. Mr. Spinckes. Edited by Francis E. Paget, M. A. One elegant volume, 16mo., $1 00. Km a manual of private devotions, it will be found most valuable. — JVno- York American. 20 Applcton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. SPENCER— THE CHRISTIAN INSTRUCTED In the Ways of the Gospel and the Church, in a series of Discourses delivered at St. James's Church, Goshen, New-York. By the Rev. J. A. Spencer, M. A., late Rector. One volume, 16mo., $1 25. This is a very useful volume of Sermons : respectable in style, sound in doctrine, and affec- tionate in tone, they are well adapted for reading in the family circle, or placing on the family book-shelf, * * * We think it a work of which the circulation is likely to promote true reli- gion and genuine piety. It is enriched with a body of excellent notes selected from.the writings of the dead and living ornaments of the Church in England and this country. — True Catholic. SPRAGUE— TRUE AND FALSE RELIGION. Lectures illustrating the Contrast between true Christianity and various other Systems. By William B. Sprague, D. D. One volume, 12mo., %\ 00. LECTURES TO YOUNG PEOPLE, By W. B. Sprague, D. D. With an Introductory Address, by Samuel Millert D. D. Fourth edition. 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DISCE VIVERE— LEARN TO LIVE: Wherein is shown that the Life of Christ is and ought to be an Express Pat- tern for Imitation unto the Life of a Christian. By Christopher Sutton, D. D. One volume, 16mo., <$1 00. In the " Disce Vivere," the author moulded his materials, after the manner of a Kempis, into an " Imitatio Christi ;" each chapter inculcating some duty, upon the pattern of Him who gave Himself to be the beginning and the end of all perfection. — Editor's Preface. SWART— LETTERS TO MY GODCHILD, By the Rev. J. Swart, A. M., of the Diocese of Western New-York. One volume, 32mo., cloth, gilt leaves, 38 cents. The design of this little work, as expressed by the author in the preface, is, the discharging of Sponsorial obligations. We have read it with interest and pleasure, and deem it well fitted to se- cure its end. — Primitive Standard. 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By the author of Uncle Philip's Conversations. One volume, 18mo., frontispiece, 38 cents. Forming one of the series of " Library for my Young Country men." It will be read by youth with all the interest of a novel, and certainly with much more profit DISCOURSES ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. Select Discourses on the Functions of the Nervous System, in opposition to Phrenology, Materialism, and Atheism ; to which is prefixed a Lecture on the Diversities of the Human Character, arising from Physiological Pecu- liarities. By John Augustine Smith, M. D. One vol., 12mo., 75 cents. PRODUCTIVE FARMING. A Familiar Digest of the Most Recent Discoveries of Liebig, Davy, Johnston, and other celebrated Writers on Vegetable Chemistry, showing how the results of Tillage might be greatly augmented. By Joseph A. Smith. One volume, 12mo., paper cover 31 cents, cloth 50 cents. SOUTHGATE.-TOUR THROUGH TURKEY And Persia. Narrative of a Tour through Armenia, Kurdistan, Persia, and Mesopotamia, with an Introduction and Occasional Observations upon the Condition of Mohammedanism and Christianity in those countries. By the Rev. Horatio Southgate, Missionary of the American Episcopal Church. Two volumes, 12mo., plates, $2 00. SOUTHEY— THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS Of Robert Southey, Esq., LL. D. The ten volume London edition in one ele- gant volume, royal 8vo., with a fine portrait and vignette, $3 50. At the age of sixty-three I have undertaken to collect and edit my poetical works, with the lasl corrections that I can expect to bestow upon them. They have obtained a reputation equal to my wishes. * * Thus to collect and revise them is a duty which I owe to that part of the pub- lic by whom they have been auspiciously received, and to those who will take a lively concern in my good name when I shall have departed.— Extract from Author's Preface. The beauties of Mr. Southoy's poetry arc such, that this edition can hardly fail to find a place in tbt library of every man fond of elegant literature— Eclectic Review 22 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. TAYLOR— THE SACRED ORDER AND OFFICES Of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained ; to which is added, Clerus Domini, a Discourse on the Office Ministerial, by the Right Rev. Bishop Jeremy Taylor, D. D. One volume, 16mo., $1 00. The reprint in a portable form of this eminent divine's masterly defence of £piscopacy, cannot fail of being welcomed by every Churchman. The publishers have presented this jewel in a fitting casket. — .AC Y. American. ■ THE GOLDEN GROVE: A choice Manual, containing what is to be Believed, Practised, and Desired or prayed for ; the Prayers being fitted for the several Days of the Week. To which is added, a Guide for the Penitent, or a Model drawn up for the Help of Devout Souls wounded with Sin. Also, Festival Hymns, &c. By the Right Rev. 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Each volume consists of nearly one hundred appropriate extract! flora the beit writer! of Bnf bndand America, 23 Appleton's Catalogue of Valuable Publications. THOMSON— THE SEASONS, A Poem, by James Thomson. One vol., 32mo., cloth, gilt leaves, 38 cento. Forming one of the series of" Miniature Classical Library." Place " The Seasons " in any light, and the poem appears faultless. — S. C. Hall. URE.-DiCTIONARY OF ARTS, Manufactures, and Mines, containing a clear Exposition of their Principles and Practice. By Andrew Ure, M. D., F. R. S., &c. Illustrated with 1240 Engravings on wood. One thick volume of 1340 pages, bound in leather $5 00, or in two volumes, $5 50. In every point of view, a work like the present can but he regarded as a benefit done to theoret- icaV and practical science, to commerce and industry, and an important addition to a species (A literature the exclusive production of the present century, and the present state of peace and civi- lization— Mhentrum. Dr. Ure's Dictionary, of which the American edition is now completed, is a stupendous proof of persevering assiduity, combined with genius and taste. For all the benefit of individual enter- prise in the practical arts and manufactures, and for the enhancement of general prosperity through the extension of accurate knowledge of political economy, we have not any work worthy to be compared with this important volume. We are convinced that manufacturers, merchants, tradei- men, students of natural and experimental philosophy, inventive mechanics, men of opulence, members of legislatures, and all who desire to comprehend something of the rapidly accelerating progress of those discoveries which facilitate the supply of human wants, and the augmentation of social comforts with the national weal, will find this invaluable Dictionary a perennial source of salutary instruction and edifying enjoyment. — National Intelligencer. VERY LITTLE TALES, For Very Little Children, in single Syllables of three and four Letters — first series. One volume, square 18mo., numerous illustrations, cloth, 38 cents Second Scries, in single Syllables of four and five Letters. One volume, square 18mo., numerous illustrations — to match first series — 38 cents. WAYLAND.-LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN Responsibility. By Francis Wayland, D. D. One volume, 18mo., 38 cents. Contents. — I. The Nature of the Subject. II. Individual Responsibility. III. Individual Responsibility (continued). IV. Peisecution on account of Religious Opinions. V. Propagation of Truth. VI. Voluntary Associations. VII. Ecclesiastical Associations. VIII. Official Respon eibility. IX. The Slavery Question. WILBERFORCE— MANUAL FOR COMMUNICANTS; Or, The Order for administering the Holy Communion ; conveniently arrang- ed with Meditations and Prayers from old English divines : being the Eu- charistica of Samuel Wilberforce, M. 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YOUTH'S BOOK OF NATURE; Or, The Four Seasons Illustrated, being Familiar Descriptions of Natural His- tory, made during Walks in the Country, by Rev. H. B. Draper. Illustra- ted with upwards of 50 wood Engravings. One vol., square 16mo., 75centa. One of the most faultless volumes for the young that has ever been issued. — Chr. Reflector. 24 COMMON SCHOOL LIBRARY. D. APPLETON 8l COMPANY Would call the attention of School Committees and others, to their well-known series of the COMMON SCHOOL LIBRARY. The books composing this series have all been selected with great care, combining amusement with instruction ; and at the same time, avoiding every thing sectarian in its tendency. The volumes are strongly and neatly bound in leather. D. A. & Co. have numerous letters from District School Superintendents, and others connected with Common Schools, troin various sections of the state, speaking very highly of this series. Work and Wages. FIRST SERIES -25 By Mary Howitt. 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Guizot's History of Civilization The Farmer's Treasure. - By Mrs. Ellis do. - do. - do. - $ 50 50 50 50 1.00 75 historical and other read This series is emphatically a "TOWN LIBRARY," embracing, in addition to interestin ing matter, various works on those subjects in science and art, peculiarly interesting to the residents of towns and vil lages ; while at the same time they are not beyond the comprehension of the junior portion of the community. COMPLETE TEXT-BOOK OF HISTORY. A MANUAL OF ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORY: By W. Cooke Taylor, LL. D., of Trinity College, Dublin. REVISED, WITH ADDITIONS ON AMERICAN HISTORY, By C. S. Henry, D. D., Prof, of History in the University of N. York. One handsome volume, 8vo., of 800 pages. $2.25. *#* For convenience as a Class-book, the Ancient or Modern portion can be had separately. I Ancient History, containing the Political History, Geographical Position, and Social State of the Principal Nations of Antiquity, carefully digested from the An- cient Writers, and illustrated by the discoveries of Modern Scholars and Travellers. This portion is one of the best compends of Ancient History that ever yet has appeared. It contains a complete isxt for the collegiate lecturer; and is an essential hand- book for the student who is desirous to become acquainted with all that is memorable in general secular archaeology. 3. Modern History, containing the Rjse and Progress of the Principal European Nations, their Political History, and the Changes in their Social Condition, with a History of the Colonies founded by Europeans, and a Chapter on the United States. This Manual of Modern History, by Mr. Taylor, is the most valuable and instructive work concerning the general subjects which it comprehends, that can be found in the whole department of historical literature. Mr. Jared Sparks, in speaking of this Manual, says: "As a compend of General History adapted to the use of students, and to the time allotted to them for this branch of study, I am inclined to think this work preferable to those which have preceded it." President Shelden, of the Waterville College, says of it: "I have devoted as much time as I have been able, to an examination of 'Taylor's Manual of Ancient and Modern History ;' and I feel prepared to say, that I look upon it as the most valuable work which I have seen, for the purposes for which such a Manual is likely to be used Wherever a general text-book of history is needed, the work of Taylor, as published by you, seems to me well fitted for the purpose." The following is from President Eastbrooke, of East Tennessee University. Speaking of the Manual, he says : "It is an invaluable work. As a Text-Book or Manual of -general history, it is, in my opinion, unsurpassed. The ad- ditional chapter on the history of the United States, will make it still more acceptable to American readers " LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY: By Thomas Arnold, D.D., Author of "The History of Rome," etc., etc. With an Introduction and Notes, by Henry Reed, Prof, of English Literature in the University of Pennsylv'a. One handsome volume, 12mo. $1.25. These Lectures were considered by their author as purely introductory, and were intended to excite a more vivid interest in the study of Modern History ; and there is no book better calculated for that purpose than this ; nor has there ever been issued one so intensely interesting to Teacher as well as Pupil. *,* This volume forms a portion of the third series of the above Library THE BOOK OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE. D. APPLETON 4- Co. have just published A CYCLOPEDIA OF SEVERAL THOUSAND PRACTICAL RECEIPTS, AND COLLATERAL INFORMATION IN THE ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND TRADES: INCLUDING MEDICINE, PHARMACY, AND DOMESTIC ECONOMY. DESIGNED AS A COMPENDIOUS BOOK OF REFERENCE, FOR THE MANUFACTURER, TRADESMAN, AMATEUR, AND HEADS OF FAMILIES. BY ARNOLD JAMES COOLEY, ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS WOOD ENG-RA VINOS. Forming one handsome Volume, 8vo., of 650 pages. Price $2 25 bound. The design of the work now offered to the public, is to present an accurate and compendious collection of formula; and processes, together with a variety of useful information, suitable to the general reader, and practical purposes. In the performance of the laborious task of compilation, the principal aim has been to render this work as extensively useful as possible, as well as a correct, comprehensive, and conveniently arranged manual of reference on the subjects on which it treats. It will be found to contain directions for the preparation of several thousand articles of interest and utility, together with their properties, uses, and doses, and generally, the means of ascertaining their purity, and detecting theii presence in other compounds. In most cases, the derivation of the names, and a short historical notice of the more impor tant substances, have been appended ; and the various scientific and technical terms that occur, have been generally defined, for the purpose of rendering the work as self-explanatory as possible. As the names of substances, especially those employed in chemistry, pharmacy, and medicine, have undergone repeated alterations, and even at the present day frequently vary, as applied by different individuals, the old and new names, and the usual synonymes, English, Latin, anil Continental, have generally been introduced, fur the purpose of preventing mistakes, and facilitating reference to mo.ti elaborate works. A general, rather than a scientific arrangement has been adopted, because the object of the work is popular and uni- versal ; and though likely to be occasionally useful to men of science, it is more especially addressed to practical perscns, and the public at large. The sources from which the materials of the present work have been derived, are such as to render it deserving of the utmost confidence. The best and latest have been invariably resorted to, and innumerable volumes, both British and Con- tinental, have been consulted and compared. A large portion of the work has been derived from the personal experience of the Editor, and the processes of various laboratories and manufactories, many of which he can highly recommend, from having inspected their application on an extensive scale. The indiscriminate adoption of matter, without examination, has been uniformly avoided, and in no instance has any process been admitted, unless it rested upon some well-knowis fact of science, or came recommended on good authority. Books of practical receipts in general, hitherto have been compiled with little regard to order or science. In this respect there was a vacancy to be filled. Something between the silliness of ignorant quackery, and the profound and extensive developments of Ure's invaluable Dictionary, was wanted, adapted to domestic purposes, which might gratify the Amateur desirous to make a familiar experiment, and also impart skilful directions to the Mistress of the Household, upon numberless matters which constantly require her attention and judgment. Mr. Cooley's Cyclopaedia amply supplies the deficiency, in its application to all the ordinary purposes of life. The means to promote comfort and economy in the domicil are unfolded. Bakers, and Confectioners, and Grocers, especially, will learn from it the most advantageous methods to secure good articles at the lowest cost. Chemists and Druggists will comprehend the most approved and scientific methods to obtain the surest effects of their pharmaceutical labors. Agricul- turists will discover the most profitable manner to engage in a large variety of their numerous occupations in the Dairy the Field, the Stable, and the Farm-yard. Manufacturers and Mechanics who are engaged in the working of Copper, Iron, Tin, Lead, Glass, Perfumery, Oils, and Wool, will be benefited by the multiplicity of valuable information in their respec- tive departments. Calico Printers and Dyers, and the Workers in India Rubber, also, will derive extensive additions to their knowledge from this Volume. Bookbinders, Paper Makers, and Typographers will also find their business explained; while Dentists and Phonographers will equally be interested in the increased knowledge which they will imbibe of their respective arts and professions, from Mr. Cooley's laborious researches. Hence, his Cyclopedia or Practical Ricstm offers to all lersons advantages unparalleled by any similar production. SUPPLEMENT TO DR. URE'S DICTIONARY, D APPLETON & CO. HAVE JUST PUBLISHED, RECENT IMPROVEMENTS IN ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND MINES ; Being a Supplement to his Dictionary. BY ANDREW URE, M. D., F. R. S.% &c, &c. One volume, 8vo., of 303 pages and near 200 elaborate wood cuts, in paper cover, $1, or in sheep to match the Dictionary, $1 50. Amongst the many articles entirely new, and others treated at greater length in this supplement than in the former edi- tions of the Dictionary, will he found — Acetic Acid — Alcohol— Arrow Root (its growth and properties)— Artesian Wells (with a notice of the successful lahors of MM. Arago and Malot at Grenelle, near Paris)— Bavarian Beer (" the mystery of brewing is more philosophically studied and incomparably better understood in Munich than in London, and throughout Bavaria than in England ") Biscuits (with a complete description, with figures, of the large Automatic Bakeries at Deptford and Portsmouth.) Bitumen (its uses and manufacture.) Bread (with an account of the Flench improvements, accompanied with plans of ovens.) Brick Mak- ing (new method, accompanied with illustrations.) Calico Printing (illustrated with elaborate cuts of the most recent im- provements.) Calomel Calotype (a description of Mr. Fox Talbot's improvement on Photography.) Candles (anew pro- cess of the manufacture of.) Caoutchouc (full information of the recent application of Caoutchouc to the arts, under Book- binding, Braiding .Machine and Elastic Bands.) Chlorate of Potash. Chocolate (a new contribution from extensive ex- perimental researches.) Cofpee. Daguerreotype (an elaborate article descriptive of all the most recent improvements, ac- companied with illustrations.) Electro-Metallurgy (a full account, with illustrations, of this important application of sci "ence to the uses o life.) En smelling (account of a recent patent.) Evaporation (a new patent for generating, purifying. and condensing steam.) Fermentation (a useful companion to account of Bavaiian Beer.) Fuel (an elaborate series of experiments on the measurement of heat, and the qualities of different kinds of Coal ) Gas Light (this article contributed by an intelligent friend of Dr. Ure's may be considered as astandard treatise on the subject, itoccupies twenty-four pages, and is illustrated with many elaborate cuts.) Gelatine (accompanied with illustrations.) Guano (a full account of this impor tant aiticle for the Agriculturist, from extensive experiments on samples of every description.) Hats. Illumination, Cost of, (a valuable article on the diffusion and economy of Light, with illustrations.) Iron and Smelting (description, with fig- ures, of the best plans of the apparatus for the hot air blast, and for feeding the blast furnace with mine, limestone, and fuel.) Limps (on the construction of Lamps for burning spirits of Turpentine otherwise Camphene ) Leather (some observations on the process of Tanning.) Leather Morocco (its manufacture.) Leather Splitting (account of various modes with il- ustrations.) Malt (the quantity of malt consumed by the various breweries of London.) Metallic Analysis (recent eco- nomical method of improving. Metallic Statistics (collected to the present period) Mines, (containing a detailed ac- count of the working of Mines, with their productions, in various parts of the world.) Musquet (a safe and simple construc- tion of, with detailed cuts.) Oils (the manufacture of Seed Crushing Oil, now for the first time represented by a complete set of figures exhibiting the various parts of the Wedge Stamping Mill.) Paper (particulars of the most recent improvements' with illustrations.) Pepper. Pearl, Artificial and Beads (particulars of new machinery for the manufacture, with illus- trations.) Photography (its process ) Potter's Oven (a new patent.) Prussiaie of Potash (its manufacture, with illus- trations.) Puddling of Iron (a new plan of an economical furnace for converting cast iron into bar or malleable iron.) Sac- charometer (a new table pointing out the proportion of sugar, or the saccharine mat'er of malt, contained in the solution ol any specific gravity. Silk (new analysis of.) Silver (the extraction of from lead.) Smoke-Prevention (details of an un- exceptionable, simple and successful plan for effecting the consummation of so desirable an object ) Soda (new experiments.) Spinning (a short but systematic view of the admirable self-acting system, whereby all operations in a cotton factory ar i linked together in regular succession, and co-operate with little or no manual aid, toward turning out a perfect product.) Spirits (with a new table.) Starch (accompanied with a detailed illustration.) Steel (a new improvement, with cuts.) Still (with the most recent French improvements.) Sugar of Potatoes (fully investigated from professional resources.) 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Recently Published, the fourth American from the third London edition, A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND MINES: CONTAINING A CLEAR EXPOSITION OF THEIR PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE. ILLUSTRATED WITH 1311 WOOD ENGRAVINGS. One stout volume, 8vo, of 1340 pages, strongly bound in leather, $5 ; or in two volumes, $5 50. In every point of view, a work like the present can be regarded as a benefit done to theoretical and practical science to commerce and industry, and an important addition to a species of literature the exclusive production of the present cen. lury, and the picsent state of peace and civilization. — JllheniEum. Dr Ure's Dictionary, of which the American edition is now completed, is a stupendous proof of persevering assiduity, com- bined with genius and taste. Eor all the benefit of individual enterprise in the practical arts and manufactures, and for the enhancement of general prosperity through the extension of accurate knowledge of political economy, we have not any wort worthy to be compared with this important volume. We are c mvinced that manufacturers, merchants, tradesmen, student* of natural and experimental philosophy, inventive mechanics, men of opulence, members of legislatures, and all who desire to comprehend something of the rapidly accelerating progress of those discoveries which facilitate the supply of human wants, and the augmentation of social comforts with the national weal, will find this invaluable Dictionary a perennial souiie t»f salutary instruction and edifying enjoyment. — JVat. Intel. A NEW SCHOOL AND REFERENCE DICTIONARY, Published by D. Appleton Sf Company. A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE : Containing the PRONUNCIATION, ETYMOLOGY, AND EXPLANATION OF ALL WORDS authorized by eminent writers ; to which are added, A VOCABULARY OF THE ROOTS OF ENGLISH WORDS, AND AN ACCENTED LIST OF GREEK, LATIN, AND SCRIPTURE PROPER NAMES BY ALEXANDER REID, A. M., Rector of the Circus School, Edinburgh. with a Critical Preface, BY HENRY REED, Professor of English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania. One Volume, 12mo, of near 600 p-iges, neatly bound in leather. Price $1. Among the wants of our time was a good Dictionary of our own language, especially adapted for academies and schools The books which have long been in use, were of little value to the junior students, being too concise in the definitions and immethodical in the arrangement. Reid's English Dictionary was compiled expressly to develope the precise analogies and various properties of the authorized words in general use, by the standard authors and orators who use our vernacular tongue. Exclusive of the large numbers of proper names which are appended, this Dictionary includes four especial improvements — and when their essential value to the student is considered, the sterling character of the work as a hand-book of our lan- guage will be instantly peiceived. The primitive word i3 d stinguished by a larger type ; and where there are any derivatives from it, they follow in alpha- betical order, and the part of speech is appended, thus furnishing a complete classification of all the connected analogous words of the same spec es. With this facility to comprehend accurately the determinate meaning of the English word, is conjoined a rich illustration for the linguist. The derivation of all the primitive words is distinctly given, and the phrases of the languages whence they are deduced, whether composite or simple ; so that the student of foreign languages, both ancient and modern, by a reference to any word, can ascertain the source whence it has been adopted into our own form of speech. This is a great acquisition to the person who is anxious to use words in their utmost clearness of meaning. To these advantages is subjoined a Vocabulary of the Roots of English Words, which is of peculiar value to the collegian. The fifty pages which it includes, furnishes the linguist with a wide-spread field of research, equally amusing and instructive. There is also added an Accented List to the number of fifteen thousand, of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Nanitb. Recommendations. Reid's Dictionary of the English Language is an admirable book for the use of schools. Its plan combines a greater num- ber of desirable conditions lor 6uch a work, than any with which I am acquainted ; and it seems to me to be executed in general, with great judgment, fidelity and accuracy. " J b C S. HENRY, Professor of Philosophy, History, and Belles Lettres in the Universi y of the City of New-York. April 28, 1845. Phillips' School, Boston, May 2, 1845. I have partially examined the Dictionary which you are publishing, and am much pleased with he plan and execution of the work, so far as I have been able to peruse it. Much matter is condensed into a small compass. All words in good use are selected and clearly defined. Each word is so marked as to indicate its pronunciation, and the value of the work is much enhanced bv containing the derivation of every word. I hope it will meet with that share of patronage which it richly deserves. SAMUEL S. GREENE, Master of the Phillips' School. I fully concur in the opinion expressed by Mr. Greene, and should be much pleased by the intro:luct;on of the Dictionary into our public schools. *. BAKER, Principal of the Bolston School. After such an examination of Reid's English Dictionary as I have been able to make, I may safely say, that I consider it superior to any of the school Dictionaries with which I am acquainted. Its accurate and concise definitions, and a vocabulary of the roots of English words, drawn from an author of such authority as Bos worth, are not among the least of its excellencies. Very respectfully, &.C, M. P. PARKS, Chaplain and Professor of Ethics U. S. Military Academy, West Point. 7th April, 1845. Philadelphia, May 6, 1845. I have examined Reid's English Dictionary with great care ; and am greatly pleased with it. The plan is excellent, and the author has evidently bestowed great attention to minute accuracy in the details of execution. I trope to see the book ex- tensively used. JOHN FROST, Professor Belles Lettres, Philadelphia High School Reid's Dictionary of the English Language appears to have been compiled upon sound principles, and with judgment and accuracy. It has the merit, too, of combining much more than is usually looked for in dictionaries of small size, and will, I believe, be found excellent as a convenient manual for general use and reference, and also for various purposes of education. HENKY REED, Professor of English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania. I have examined Reid's English Dictionary wi h much interest and satisfaction, and take great pleasure in recommend- ing it as admirably ad.ipted for usefulness in our common schools The julicious omission of antiquated and obsolete words, has enabled the author to condense the work within small compass, and yet retain every word in our language which is sanctioned by any modem writer of competent authority. The evident care and pains taken in the department ot orthoepy, the accurate conform ty of the orthography to the best authorities, and the elaborate etymological learning it exhibits, com bine to render this Dictionary a work of singular merit for schools anil families, for which it appears to have been specially designed by its author. The vocabulary of the roots of English wotds, and the extensive list of accented classical and scrip- ture proper names, are important and valuable additions winch cannot fail to be appreciated, especially by teachers of schools, for whom it will furnish a standard of reference of more convenient size than anv of the dictionaries now in use D. MKREDITH REESE Superintendent Common Schools for the City and County of N . 'oik OPINIONS OP THE PKESS ON NEW WORKS. The Booh of the Army — Comprising a general Military History of the United States, from the period of the Revolution to the present time ; with particular accounts of all the most celebra- ted battles. By John Frost, LL. D. 12mo. $1 25. Mr. Frost's " Book of the Navy " has been circulated to a wide extent, as combining a concise but accurate delineation of the prominent characters and scenes connected with the maritime concerns or" the United States. The counterpart of that volume is now presented to us in the Book of the Army, in which are depicted the campaigns of the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812; and also the conflicts with the Indians in our own boundaries. The volume is full of por- traits, sketches of scenery, delineations of buttles, and picto- rial illustrations of remarkable events. 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