As it was, however, the one sphere played into the other. Whatever labor he bestowed on his literary works was only part of that constant progress of self-education which he thought essential to the right discharge of his duties as a teacher. Whatever interest he felt in the strug-duced in his dealings with others, they were gles 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 schoolboys; a corresponding sense of the aggravation |

honest temper, would have been irreparable. I tion between them; every house was thus to His union of firmness with tenderness had the be as it were an epitome of the whole school. same effect in the settlement of some of the per- Whatever, in short, he was in his own departplexities of his office, which in others would ment, he wished them to be in theirs; -whathave resulted from art and management; and ever he felt about his superintendence of the even his work as a school-master cannot be whole school, he wished them to feel about that properly appreciated without remembering how, part of it especially committed to them. It was in the end of his career, he rallied round him an increasing delight to him to inspire them with the public feeling, which in its beginning and the general views of education and of life, by middle, as will appear further on, had been so which he was himself so fully possessed; and widely estranged from him. 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 successive 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 prac

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 dissatisfied, was not interference, but dismissal.tical work of his life; none in which his loss was 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."

more keenly felt to be irreparable, or his example more instinctively regarded as a living spring of action, and a source of solemn responsibility, than amongst those who were called to continue their labors in the sphere and on the scene which had been ennobled to them by his counsels and his presence. 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.

Of his intercourse with the assistant-masters it is for obvious reasons impossible to speak with that detail which the subject deserves. But though the co-operation of his colleagues was necessarily thrown into the shade by the activity and vigor of his own character, it must not be lost sight of in the following account, whether it be regarded as one of his most characteristic means of administration, or as an instance of the powerful influence he exercised over those with whom he was brought into close contact. It was one of his main objects to increase in all possible ways their importance and their interest in the place. "Nothing delights me more,' he said, in speaking of the reputation enjoyed by one of his colleagues, "than to think that boys are sent here for his sake rather than for mine." In matters of school discipline he seldom or never acted without consulting them. Every three weeks a council was held, in which all school matters were discussed, and in which every one was free to express his opinion, or propose any measure not in contradiction to any fundamental principle of school administration, and in which it would not unfrequently happen that he was himself opposed and outvoted. He was anxious that they, like himself, should have time to read for their own improvement, and he was also glad to encourage any occasional help that they might render to the neighboring clergy. But from the first he maintained that the school business was to occupyness, not έk Tapeрyov, but as a substantive and most their main and undivided interest. The practice, which owing to their lower salaries had before prevailed, of uniting some parochial cure with their school duties, was entirely abolished, and the boarding-houses, as they respectively became vacant, he placed exclusively under their care. The connection thus established between the masters and the boys in the several houses he labored to strengthen by opening in various ways means for friendly communica- |

LETTER TO A MASTER ON HIS APPOINTMENT.

The qualifications which I deem essential to the due performance of a master's duties here, may in brief be expressed as the spirit of a Christian and a gentleman,—that a man should enter upon his busi

important duty; that he should devote himself to it he has chosen to follow-that belonging to a great as the especial branch of the ministerial calling which 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 publicspirited, liberal, and entering heartily into the interest, honor, and general respectability and distinction of the society which he has joined; and that he should have sufficient vigor of mind and thirst for knowledge, to persist in adding to his own stores without neglecting

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.

But whatever interest attaches to the more external circumstances of his administration, and to his relations with others who were concerned in it, is of course centred in his own personal government 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 institutton and so little of himself, that, in spite of his efforts to make it work independently 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 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 Rubgy but ARNOLD.

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 vehement 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 influenced them, whether they had derived it from what was spoken in school, in the pulpit, or in private. And, therefore, when either in direct religious teaching, or on particular occasions, Christian principles were expressly introduced 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 not saying what he did not mean,-the power of doing what was right, and speaking 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.

What was his great object has already appeared from his letters; namely, the hope of making the school a place of really Christian education. These words in his mouth meant With his usual and undoubted confidence in something very different from the general pro- what he believed to be a general law of Provifessions which every good teacher must be sup- dence, he based his whole management of the posed to make, and which no teacher even in the school on his early-formed and yearly-increasworst times of English education could have ing conviction that what he had to look for, both openly ventured to disclaim; but it is exceed- intellectually and morally, was not performance ingly difficult so to explain them, as that they but promise; that the very freedom and indeshall not seem to exceed or fall short of the pendence of school life, which in itself he thought truth. It was not an attempt merely to give so dangerous, might be made the best preparamore theological instruction, or to introduce tion for Christian manhood; and he did not sacred words into school admonitions; there hesitate to apply to his scholars the principle may have been some occasions for religious which seemed to him to have been adopted in advice that might have been turned to more ad- the training of the childhood of the human race vantage, some religious practices which might itself. He shrunk from pressing on the conhave been more constantly or effectually en- science of boys rules of action which he felt couraged. His design arose out of the very they were not yet able to bear, and from enforcnature of his office: the relations of an instruc-ing actions which, though right in themselves, tor to his pupils was to him, like all the other relations of human life, only in a healthy state, when subordinate to their common relation to God. The idea of a Christian school, again, was to him the natural result, so to to speak, of the very idea of a school in itself; exactly as the idea of a Christian state seemed to him to be involved in the very idea of a state itself. The intellectual training was not for a moment anderrated, and the machinery of the school was left to have its own way. But he looked upon the whole as bearing on the advancement of the one end of all instruction and education; the boys were still treated as school-boys, but as

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 believe 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." "I hold fast," he said, "to the great truth, that 'blessed is he that overcometh;'" and he writes in 1837: "Of

all the painful things connected with my em- | he seemed to stand before them, not merely as ployment, nothing is equal to the grief of seeing the head-master, but as the representative of a boy come to school innocent and promising, the school. There he spoke to them as memand tracing the corruption of his character from bers together with himself of the same great inthe influence of the temptations around him in stitution, whose character and reputation they the very place which ought to have strengthened had to sustain as well as he. He would dwell and improved it. But in most cases those who on the satisfaction he had in being head of a come with a character of positive good are ben- society, where noble and honorable feelings efited; it is the neutral and indecisive charwere encouraged, or on the disgrace which he acters which are apt to be decided for evil by felt in hearing of acts of disorder or violence, schools, as they would be, in fact, by any other such as in the humbler ranks of life would rentemptation." der them amenable to the laws of their country; or again, on the trust which he placed in their honor as gentlemen, and the baseness of any instance 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 jailer, 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."

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 and mind?" was one of the chief questions on which his mind was constantly at work, and which in the judgment of some he was disposed to answer too readily in the affirmative. 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 principle and moral thoughtfulness, as the great and distinguishing mark between good and evil. Hence his wish that as much as possible should be done by the boys, and but little for them; hence arose his practice, in which his own delicacy of feeling and uprightness of purpose powerfully assisted him, of treating the boys as gentlemen and reasonable beings, or making them respect themselves by the mere respect he showed to them; of showing that he appealed and trusted to their own common sense and conscience. 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 manner, 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 entrance every morning to prayers before the first lesson, or on the more special emergencies which might require his presence,

The means of carrying out these principles were of course various; they may, however, be classed under the divisions of the general discipline of the school, the system of instruction, the chapel services, and his own personal intercourse and influence. In considering his general management of the discipline of the school it will only be possible to touch on its leading features. 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 background, and by kindness and encouragement attracting the good and noble feelings of those with whom he had to deal." For the younger part of the school, he made a point of maintaining, to a certain extent, the old discipline of public schools. He says:

"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 frequent 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 liberal

journal, that it was even for these offences and | the character of the whole. It would be absurd

for this age degrading, he replied with characteristic emphasis:

to say that any school has as yet fully solved this problem. I am convinced, however, that, "I know well of what feeling this is the expression: it in the peculiar relation of the highest form to originates in that proud notion of personal independence the rest of the boys, such as it exists in our great which is neither reasonable nor Christian-but essen- public schools, there is to be found the best tially barbarian. It visited Europe with all the curses means of answering it. This relation requires of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now within many respects to be improved in its charthose of Jacobinism. At an age when it is almost im-acter; some of its features should be softened, possible to find a true manly sense of the degradation others elevated; but here, and here only, is the of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging engine which can effect the end desired." 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 noble manhood ?"

44

Nothing so shook his hopes of doing good as weakness or misconduct in the Sixth Form. "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 But his object was, of course, far higher than to confidence in the Sixth," was the end of one of check particular vices. What I want to see in his farewell addresses, there is no post in the school," he said, "and what I cannot find, England which I would exchange for this; but is an abhorrence of evil: I always think of the if they do not support me, I must go." It may psalm, Neither doth he abhor anything that is well be imagined how important this was as an evil.' Amongst all the causes, which in his instrument of education, independently of the judgment contributed to the absence of this weight of his own personal qualities. Exactly feeling, and to the moral childishness, which he at the age when boys begin to acquire some deconsidered the great curse of public schools, the gree of self-respect, and some desire for the chief seemed to him to lie in the spirit which respect of others, they were treated with confiwas there encouraged of combination, of com- .dence by one whose confidence they could not panionship, of excessive deference to the public but regard as worth having; and found themopinion prevalent in the school. Peculiarly re-selves in a station where their own dignity could pugnant as this spirit was at once to his own not be maintained, except by consistent good reverence for lawful authority, and to his dis- conduct. And exactly at a time when manly like of servile submission to unlawful authority; aspirations begin to expand, they found themfatal as he deemed it to all approach to sym- selves invested with functions of government, pathy between himself and his scholars-to all great beyond their age, yet naturally growing free and manly feeling in individual boys-to out of their position; whilst the ground of solall real and permanent improvement of the in- emn responsibility, on which they were constitution itself-it gave him more pain when stantly taught that their authority rested, had a brought prominently before him, than any other general, though of course not universal, tenevil in the school. At the very sight of a knot dency to counteract any notions of mere personal of vicious or careless boys gathered together self-importance. round 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 without 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.'"

Against this evil he felt that no efforts of good individual example, or personal sympathy with individual masters, could act effectually, unless there were something to counteract it constantly amongst the boys themselves. He therefore determined to use and to improve to the utmost the existing machinery of the Sixth Form.

"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 yet be so superior as to raise

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 deathbed would be slight: he therefore intended 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 distinctly religious, were invested with a moral character; and his desire to raise the general standard of