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The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., late Head Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. By ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford. London: Fellowes. 2 vols. 8vo. 1844.

THIS is a most genuine, hearty, real, and vivid book—most striking, most glowing, and most pictorial. It gives Dr. Arnold to the life, and portrays the man completely. We may say this without professing to have had more than an exoteric knowledge of Dr. Arnold's character, before we read it, to test the likeness by. There is a kind of intuitive power, however, by which we recognise a good portrait even when we did not know the original. Truth and nature tell their own tale: we see when the features are harmonious, when the face is a characteristic one, when the composition is a whole. This book is a clear, full, and rich representation of a particular species of religious mind;-what species we mean, we shall have occasion to explain farther on. We will take Dr. Arnold, for the present, simply as Mr. Stanley lays him before us, without any comments of our own. And we cannot forbear thus early thanking Mr. Stanley most sincerely for the taste and feeling with which he has managed his own editorial part of the business, and for the tact which has enabled him to carry out the representation of Dr. Arnold's character, opinions, and system, in their very strongest light and most ticklish collision with existing parties, and yet to distinguish throughout between loving the warrior and identifying himself with the combat: which has made him combine the most intense feeling for Arnold in the conflict, and as portrayed and developed by it, with a real, though unobtrusive equilibrium as to the sides of the conflict themselves. "Mallem equidem cum Platone errare quam cum aliis vera sentire," he thinks most justly not to be necessary to show the deference of a disciple, and the affection of a son. His neutrality has not thrown the least shade of coldness or insipidity on his portrait, while it has done much to engage the interest of opposite minds in it.

years

There is a congeniality often between a man's birth-place and his future tastes. The port of West Cowes in the Isle of Wight, then proud and flourishing in all the naval and military stir of the French war, was the birth-place and nurse of the earlier of Dr. Arnold; and the noise and sight of equipments naval and military, fresh arrivals and departures, weather-beaten visages, wide-spread sails and cocked-hats, gave early a strong geographical and historical turn to his imagination, mixed with a considerable amount of pugnacity; which vented itself in the battles of paper fleets, and the combats of Homeric heroes dramatized from Pope's translation. A genuine love of the sea through life,

and an amusing philosophical form of the true sailor contempt for "landlubbers," was a result of these scenes. The scenery, if scenery it was to be called, of the midland counties, affected him with sensations little short of disgust. "I must satisfy," he says, thirty years after, "a physical want in my nature, which craves after the enjoyment of nature, and for nine months in the year can find nothing to satisfy it. I agree with old Keble, that one does not need mountains and lakes for this; the Thames at Laleham-Bagley Wood, and Shotover at Oxford, were quite enough for it. I only know of five counties in England which cannot supply it; and I am unluckily perched down in one of them. These five are Warwick, Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Bedford. I should add, perhaps, Rutland, and you cannot name a seventh; for Suffolk, which is otherwise just as bad, has its bit of sea coast.”—The age of the Pisistratidæ would certainly have found Arnold one of the " Paralii," or coast party. For a considerable quantity of stupidity which came before him as schoolmaster of Rugby, he would very charitably account for from the circumstance, that the poor boys had been pent up in those plebeian farm-yards of nature, the midland counties, and had never seen the sea. It was a consolatory reflection to him, however, that perhaps they were not quite so mischievous as they would have been with a wilder origin and more spirited natures. The reflection is a true one, and is capable of a large application.

"He was from his earliest years," says his biographer, "exceedingly fond of ballad poetry, which his Winchester 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 schoolfellows were introduced as the dramatis personæ, 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 of his composition which has been preserved is a little tragedy, written before he was seven years old, on Piercy Earl of Northumberland,' 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 received 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 recognising by their shape, at a glance, the different counties of the dissected map of England."

At Winchester, Russell's Modern Europe, Gibbon, and Mitford, succeeded to the task of feeding his historical cravings. It is remarkable, that when, in his professorial chair, he quoted Dr. Priestley's Lectures on History, it was from his recollection of the book, when he read it at eight years old. The child is father of the man. When we afterwards read of "my friends Herodotus and Livy, that I am reading now for the fiftieth time;" and the geographical zeal with which the editor of Thucydides announces the intelligence of his "six maps, all entirely original," we know where to go back to for his enthusiasm. The native, genuine, and almost poetical ground which the sciences of history and geography occupied in Dr. Arnold's mind, is indeed remarkable. The maps for Thucydides were "Aunt Delafield's cards" over again. There is something very characteristic in the toys and minutiæ, the rà ioɣára, to use the Aristotelian word, the hobbies of science. Maps were great favourites with Arnold. Maps, with their lines of latitude and longitude, their ridges of mountains, and ruggednesses of coast, are absolute pictures to some minds. They represent the terraqueous globe, and put before us, in one striking and definite shape, the great fact of the human race, and the whole idea of this earthly state. A map is the modern unclassical representative of the goddess Terra, and makes us realize, in the Lucretian sense, the ground on which we stand, the greatness of space, and the solidity of matter.

Arnold came up to Oxford just in time to be one of a clever and high-principled, High-church and Tory set, which was then predominant among the under-graduates of Corpus Christi College. Judge Coleridge gives us his affectionate recollections of it:

"There was 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 communicating 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 f the University at an age when others frequently are but on he threshold."-Vol. i. pp. 13, 14.

"He was a mere boy," continues Judge Coleridge, "when he first came to us, 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, I rather think, admitted by Mr. Cooke at once int: 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 vehe ment in argument; fearless too in advancing his opinions—which, a 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 presumption, 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 of 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 common room engaged with him at once, with little order or consideration, 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."-Vol. i. pp. 11, 12.

His Oxford character is summed up in the same graphic

way:

"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 pugnacious 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."-Vol. i. pp. 22, 23.

The warm-hearted, tender, affectionate, lively, sincere character, soon comes before us in another connexion. Arnold was born to be a pater-familias, as well in the mere literal as in the larger sense of the word. He was made for the parental and didactic relationship to others. There is a great difference between first-rate minds on this point. Some have no natural taste or liking for the particular office of influencing minds; their hearts and intellects expand within themselves, spread over the earth air and sea of speculation, and pervade all metaphysical nature, before they definitely take up the notion of impressing their views upon any one being but themselves. The pleasure of getting their views received, seeing them take, and watching their entrance into other minds, is one which they do not feel or appreciate. It is just the reverse with another class with them the very process of expansion in their own minds takes the form of communication with other minds; and they have no sooner a view at all, than they want to see it out abroad, and doing its work. The very life of an opinion, even as an inward one, is connected in their idea with its external power; and the internal and external go on together. This constitutes perhaps the very soul of the genuine magister. The teaching instinct carries a man naturally into what Archbishop Whately has called the heresy of the oi népe-into putting himself into the relation of guide and informant to others-into instituting the society and forming the school, or whatever other shape there may be of the active centrality of one mind. amongst others.

Arnold became a married man and a tutor as soon as he could well be either, i. e. after a very short residence upon his college fellowship. College society, bright and captivating as it was-even Oriel, full of original thinkers as it was-was not the sphere for him: his instinct marked out a more insulated and independent line. He had soon his nucleus about him. He was of the latter class of minds that we have mentioned; and, as he used to say of himself, "could hardly live without tuition." His boyish vigour and spirits, his intuitive love of communicating and teaching, and the particular class of affectionate feelings which were so strong in him, all fitted him to deal with the young rather than the old, and carried him into the society of his inferiors rather than of his equals. The scene at Laleham soon rose up, under his care, into a perfect little garden and paradise of tutorial and domestic felicity. Children and pupils grew up under his eye; and his own stock of knowledge was rapidly growing too. He had time for his favourite pursuits; he had the full enjoyment of literary activity and literary leisure; and he had a beautiful river and luxuriant scenery to feed his eyes. Many a tutor has had exactly the same scene around him, but very few have been able to enjoy