with what eyes he saw the world around him, and in what spirit he encountered the problems it presented. "I have remarked," says Carlyle, "that a true delineation of the smallest man, and his scene of pilgrimage through life, is capable of interesting the greatest man; and that all men are to an unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange emblem of every man's, and that human portraits faithfully drawn are of all pictures the welcomest on human walls."1 Of English books which have best fulfilled these conditions Bacon's Henry VII., Walton's Lives, Johnson's Lives, Boswell's Johnson, Carlyle's Life of Sterling, Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, Mr. John Morley's Rousseau and Walpole are among the best. But Dean Stanley's Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold will ever be entitled to a high rank, not only for the vividness of its presentation of a striking character and the circumstances of a life, but also for the skill with which relevant and irrelevant facts are discriminated, and for the profound sympathy of the author with its subject. The book will long remain to the student of the social, religious, and political history of the former half of the nineteenth century a treasury of valuable material, because it portrays in clear outline a central figure round which clustered some of the most remarkable personages and incidents of a stirring and eventful period. Stanley's book is a large one and deals necessarily with much ephemeral controversy, religious and political, which

1 Carlyle's Life of Sterling, Chap. I.

STANLEY'S LIFE OF ARNOLD

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may possibly not excite any strong interest in the present generation of readers. It is to be feared that these facts may have the effect of concealing from those readers much that is of permanent value in Arnold's history and performance. A smaller volume, The Life of Dr. Arnold, by Miss Emma J. Worboise, is also distinguished by care and sympathy, by a reverent and yet candid estimate of character, and especially by the emphasis with which she dwells on the religious side of Arnold's nature and influence. It is not in the vain hope of adding new material to the story which has twice been so well told, or with a view to present any new theory by which to interpret the significance of Arnold's career, that the present book is written, but simply in order to bring into special prominence those features of his own character and that of his more gifted son Matthew, which possess special interest and are likely to be of permanent value to the professional teacher.

Of his personal history during the forty-seven years in which he lived, a brief outline will here suffice. He was born in 1795, at West Cowes in the Isle of Wight, the son of a collector of customs, who died suddenly when the boy was five years old, from the same malady-angina pectoris-which afterwards proved fatal to himself. He owed much of his early education to the pious care of his mother, and more to the wisdom and unfailing devotion of his aunt, Miss Delafield, towards whom he through life evinced the strongest affection and gratitude. From 1803 to

1807 he was a pupil in the endowed school at Warminster, and was then transferred to Winchester. In 1811, at the age of sixteen, he was entered at Oxford as a scholar of Corpus Christi College. Three years later he took his degree, and gained a First Class in Classics. In 1815 he was elected a Fellow of Oriel; in 1815 he won the Chancellor's prize for Latin, and in 1817 that for an English essay. He continued in the University until 1820 at work as a tutor, having been ordained two years earlier. He then left Oxford and took a curacy at Laleham in Surrey, married Mary Penrose, and during the next eight years was chiefly occupied in historical studies and in preparing private pupils for the University. In 1828 he accepted the Head-Mastership of Rugby School, and continued in that post until his sudden death in 1842.

Of the influences which contributed to shape his character in early life, perhaps the most potent, next to those of a happy, intelligent, well-ordered home, were the political and military events which at a crisis of extraordinary interest in English history, were well calculated to fire the imagination and call. forth the latent patriotism of a young boy. He was but a little child when Pitt was at the zenith of his power, and

"Launched that thunderbolt of war

On Egypt, Hafnia, Trafalgar,"

when Nelson's victories filled all English hearts with exultation, when the name of Buonaparte was so asso

EARLY TRAINING

5

Iciated with terror and alarm that nurses used to frighten children with the threat that he was coming; and when every gazette brought exciting news of battle by field or at sea. The news of Trafalgar to a boy of ten, and of Corunna four years later, and the succession of peninsular victories ending at Vittoria in 1813, could not fail to make an enduring impression on the mind of an open-hearted, thoughtful lad, habitually predisposed to look upon human history rather as the scene of action and of noble endeavour than in any other light.

Years after, he looked back and counted his early experience of ships and warfare as among the formative influences of his life. "More than half my boys," he said in 1829, "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. 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 parishes or small country towns." 1

To such experience, and to the events of the great war, may be attributed the zest with which he afterwards described the wars of Greece and of Rome, the keen interest with which he traced with Livy the march of Hannibal over the Alps, or described the

1 Letter XII.

battle of Egospotamos or Salamis. Down to the time when he went to Oxford, all English politics were warlike. Great questions of domestic politics, such as the emancipation of the Catholics, and social and electoral reform, were for the time in abeyance, or they would probably have had, even at that early date, profound interest for him. If the combative instinct was strongly manifest in him through life, so that it is hardly too much to say that in one sense he was a man of war from his youth," the fact may be partly ascribed to the fierce national rivalries and contests in the midst of which his childhood was passed, and to the strong impulse which those contests gave to his youthful patriotism.

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Nor could the changed aspect of the literary horizon be without its influence on a young boy who was from the first a voracious reader, as sensitive to the intellectual as to the political movements of his time. The taste for the classical poetry of Pope and Dryden had declined; Cowper, Thomson, and Crabbe had sought the subjects of their verse in the incidents of familiar life, had evinced a keener sense of the beauties of outward nature, had revolted against established tradition, and had prepared the way for a revival of the healthy romanticism, which was beginning to find a fuller expression in Coleridge, Scott, Wordsworth, and Southey, and was afterwards to achieve some of its greatest triumphs in Tennyson and Browning. But although ballad poetry and Pope's Homer had ever a certain fascination for him, chiefly because of the incidental light it threw on his