his labors in the aggregate, and estimate them by the various criteria of their intrinsic character, the actual and praiseworthy success attained, and the breadth and permanency of the impression made, we must still regard the distinguished Head Master of Rugby as the greatest of British educators, to the middle of the nineteenth century. In point of native genius, and of the novelty of the educational principles which they brought into vogue, we must give to Comenius and Pestalozzi a far higher place. But what the Austrian Comenius was to the rational-mystical German mind and tendencies, and the Swiss Pestalozzi to the abstract mind and tendencies of France and Southern Europe, such was Arnold to the sturdily practical and common sense mind of the British Isles-a fit and true representative of the national character and education. Such a conclusion we find fully attested in his broad and real sympathies with every phase of mind, and every sphere-especially the humbler and more difficult—in life; in his practical grasp and outworking of whatever he grasped at all; in his intensely religious nature, which stubbornly refused to be allured away toward mysticism or dogmatism, on the one hand, or to formalism and the convenient repose of the "whited sepulchre," on the other; but which uninterruptedly flowed out, and more earnestly as his life advanced, in the expression of love and works toward God and the human kind.

A man of so vigorous personality, and who has succeeded in leaving his impress upon the institutions and life of a people, surely affords a problem of deep interest to the student of character, or to the psychologist.

For one who, like Mr. Stanley, had been his pupil and friend, who had shared his feelings, and entered more or less in the very conflicts of opinion and class-interests in which such a man of necessity moves-facts which constitute the best proofs of fitness for the labor he has undertaken, in the way in which he undertakes it-such a view of his work as he has given is the necessary dictate of good judgment and taste. Whatever fitting scruples or needful limits may have checked the discreet friend, these do not necessarily stand in the way of the reader, of the general student of character, or the special student of the moral, social, and educational movement of the time. It is hoped that, to some or all of these, an attempt to analyze the powers and expression of a mind which, if not entitled to the award of the highest

genius, was yet in its activities powerfully genetic and organizing, may not be without interest.

In speaking of this man and his life, it is not our intention-though few lives present us less occasion for that kind of remark which calls forth this qualification-to cramp our portraiture wholly within the lines that a conventional prudery, or over-discreet reticence, or call it by what name one will, has been making so habitual in formal biographies, and peculiarly in those men and women of religious character, that it has seemed at last an essential element for this whole class of cases. By the most eminently proper and Pecksniffian presentation of half-lives of remarkable religious or beneficent characters, nothing is gained, but much is in fact really lost. Timid biographers may think thus to exalt and perfect the characters of their subjects; but they do in this way really no more than to extend and fix the sway of cant and formalism. Under such teachings exclusively, every soul, endowed with vigorous personality and passions, is forced ultimately to a conviction, either that the impracticable, moral and social standard of the respectable biographies is wholly false and pretended, or that the real good of society and the interests of moral goodness in the world are to be subserved only by that course of life, at least with the majority, in which the whole carnal nature shall be satisfied in the fact, while a whole sanctified living is to be professed as a theory. Thus is the world, by those assuming—and usually also meaning-to be its best friends, prepared for the alternatives of a wholesale skepticism or hypocrisy. But these truths are too large to be disposed of in a paragraph; and they are only incidentally alluded to here, to explain the (to certain minds) incongruity of anything like the physical study of a great religious manhood and life. We take it that, so long as a human soul is in the flesh, all the incidents of the animal life, not less than of the spiritual, fully pertain to it. For the gingerly treading order of the biographers, David, and St. Augustine, and Abelard, have quite lived in vain! There are deep facts respecting the origin of every great life and its forces, not less than in respect to the working out of these. And we venture to suggest that it is in the face of such beginnings, and in spite of such affiliations as life unavoidably has, that the real radiance of a noble, reverential and beneficent human soul is most truly to be discovered.

While Dr. Arnold's parentage and his real life were such as to call for no concealment or equivocation, however, it will be seen that these remarks are by no means preparatory to any curious revelations, there being none to be made, but only in vindication of a slight and brief liberty we shall take in this instance; notwithstanding that we heartily and confidently commend it, in larger measure, to the thoughtful men and women who shall hereafter essay to expound for the reading world whatever of interest may have appertained to the lives of its more robust, many-sided and creative minds!

In respect to his mental traits, and to the education which he himself received or acquired, the first general fact that strikes us is that of the inequality, and almost inconsistency, of his powers, preferences, and attainments. There was quite enough of the many-sided and the puzzling, in his intellectual bent, to mark the genius; because there was enough of the vigorous and real to prevent any suspicion of dulness. But though a real genius, one proven in the solidest way by increase of power and influence as long as his life continued, he nevertheless contributes to overset a favorite assumption of certain prosing physiologists, by being both in intellectual powers and sensibilities decidedly precocious. His early education was private, and of the most fortunate kind, being conducted by a maiden aunt, whose sound qualifications were completed by her affection for her young charge.

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While yet not seven years of age, he kindles with so much of the "pride and circumstance" of the war then existing, as are presented to him in the naval displays of his native island sails rival fleets in his father's garden, enacting the Homeric heroes, and accompanying with speeches from Pope's translation of the Iliad; loves, recites, and, occasionally, makes ballads, and so is yclept "Poet Arnold;" but yet more composes a little tragedy, Piercy, Earl of Northumberland, already remarkable for "the accuracy of orthography, language, and blank verse metre, in which it is written, and the precise arrangement of the different acts and scenes!" The attention of the prosing physiologists is especially invited to these and like indications. They forget that genius is, in its introduction into this most ungenial world and society, not less than in its outworking while sojourning among us, gifted with almost entire immunity from the rules which hold respecting the mass of men. This large-headed, odd, bright-eyed boy, goes to Warminster School at eight,

and at twelve years becomes a commoner, and then a scholar at the College at Winchester, which he leaves at sixteen; but he keeps up a correspondence even with his Warminster teachers long after, and takes lessons for himself at Winchester for the polity of the future Rugby. Evidently a bright, forceful, large-patterned boy! But he is yet shy, retiring, stiff, and formal, and talks and writes like one whose thoughts had been too early moulded upon the stately forms of mature books, rather than evolved, in their own fresh and crescent beauty, from the forces taking shape within him. He has, even at this period, strong and numerous friendships.

At this time, history and geography are young Arnold's fortes, and his remarkable memory in these and kindred directions already shows itself. In the last year of his life, in the Professor's Chair at Oxford, he quotes Dr. Priestley's Lectures on History from recollection-the book he had not read since the age of eight years. At fourteen, he anticipates Niebuhr in finding the Roman history boastful, exaggerated, and much of it probably false. He has strong domestic affections, and an intense love of the places in which portions of his life have been passed, more especially when these possessed natural features of marked beauty. At Corpus Christi College, of which he was in his sixteenth year elected fellow, he is given to vehemence in argument, and fearless in the utterance of views, which sometimes shock his associates not a little; but he is candid, kindly, and affectionate at the same time; and, though over-positive and pugnacious in defence of his opinions, is as slow to give as to take offence; so that after a pell-mell contest, sans ceremonie, and against all odds in numbers, he comes off but the stronger friend with his opponents. In truth, he is, at this period, radical, democratic, filled with doubts respecting the grounds of some of the Thirty-nine Articles, and almost a candidate for outspoken heterodoxy. Among the ancient authors, Aristotle and Thucydides are his passion; and then Herodotus and Xenophon. The style of the last three he becomes able to imitate at will; though in composition, generally, he is stiff and labored; in debate, embarrassed and far from fluent. In entire consonance with the other facts recorded in respect to his particular intellectual bent, it is not the logic, but the ethics and rhetoric of the Stagirite, in which he especially delights. His mind is essentially of the matter-of-fact, historical order; but poetical also, at least so far as to depth of feeling

and facility in coining verse; but in mathematics and music he is wholly lacking; and so little scientific is his bent, that among the physical sciences, only the very tangible and practical one of geology seems much to have interested him. He has at this time some sense of the ludicrous; and his consequent dread of saying irrelevant things is one source of his timidity; but later in life, even this needful element of large intellectuality-the perception of the comical and absurd-seems almost wholly to have retired before a consuming seriousness and earnestness. Mr. Justice Coleridge, who furnishes many of these earlier traits, says that “his was an anxiously inquisitive mind, a scrupulously conscientious heart." He will not, for example, so readily yield his doubts about the Thirty-nine Articles-though he finally quite surmounted them-through scruples, lest his schemes of worldly success and happiness were coming in to take the place, in his mind, of real and solid arguments. We may profitably add a part of Mr. Coleridge's concluding portraiture of the Oxford undergraduate :

"At the commencement a boy-and at the close retaining, not ungracefully, inuch 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," &c.

Plainly enough, we have here material of which, not the visionary or fantastic, but the earnest and real reformer is to be made.

Having satisfactorily concluded his college course, though without very marked or brilliant manifestation of talents in any special direction, Arnold remained four years at Oxford, taking private pupils, and reading and taking notes from the libraries; these notes showing, but only occasionally, clear anticipations of some of the views and principles that later absorbed and honored his active years. His scruples of conscience satisfied, he was, in 1818, ordained deacon; in 1819, he settled in Laleham, where he spent nine years in preparing small classes of pupils for the Universities; and in August, 1820, he married Miss Mary Penrose, daughter of the Rector of Fledborough, and sister of one of his early school associ