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ment, he not only acknowledged, but applied them with greater appreciation and stronger confidence. "He was the first Englishman," says his pupil and biographer, "who drew attention in our public schools, to the historical, political and philosophical value of philology, and of the ancient writers, as distinguished from the mere verbal criticism and elegant scholarship of the last century." Nor was this all which gave life to classical study in his hands. He entered into the spirit of the great authors of antiquity; if he was reading a historian with his class, he too, was a historian for the time; if they were studying a poet, he showed them by his own expressive earnestness, what it was to share a poet's feeling and a poet's power; whatever, in short, the text-book, it was to the teacher and to all his responsive pupils, the living companionship of the writers, as much so as if the writer were their contemporary and their countryman. "Do'nt you find the repetition of the same lessons irksome?" was a question to which Arnold could honestly reply, "No, there is a constant freshness in them; I find something new in them every time I go over them." Where would be the still prevailing distrust of the classics if they were taught in this way? Who would stay to wrangle about the philology or the mental discipline involved in the study, if it thus comprehended not only all that lived in the past, but all that is yet living in the present?

Let Arnold speak for himself.

It may freely be confessed that the first origin of classical education affords in itself no reasons for its being continued now. When Latin and Greek were almost the only written languages of civilized man, it is manifest that they must have furnished the subjects of all liberal education. The question therefore is wholly changed, since the growth of a complete literature in other languages; since France, and Italy, and Germany, and England, have each produced their philosophers, their poets, and their historians, worthy to be placed on the same level with those of Greece and Rome.

But although there is not the same reason now which existed three or four centuries ago for the study of Greek and Roman literature, yet there is another no less substantial. Expel Greek and Latin from your schools, and you confine the views of the existing generation to themselves and their immediate predecessors: you will cut off so many centuries of the world's experience, and place us in the same state as if the human race had first come into existence in the year 1500. For it is nothing to say that a few learned individuals might still study classical literature; the effect produced on the public mind would be no greater than that which has resulted from the labors of our oriental scholars; it would not spread beyond themselves, and men in general after a few generations would know as little of Greece and Rome, as they do actually of China and Hindoostan. But such an ignorance would be incalculably more to be regretted. With the Asiatic mind, we have no nearer connection or sympathy than that which is derived from our common humanity. But the mind of the Greek and of the Roman is in all the essential points of its constitution our own; and not only so, but it is our own mind developed to an extraordinary degree of perfection. Wide as is the difference between us with respect to those physical instruments which minister to our uses or our pleasures; although the Greeks and Romans had no steam-engines, no printing-presses, no mariner's compass, no telescopes, no microscopes, no gunpowder; yet in our moral and po

litical views, in those matters which most determine human character, there is a perfect resemblance in these respects. Aristotle, and Plato, and Thucydides, and Cicero, and Tacitus, are most untruly called ancient writers; they are virtually our own countrymen and contemporaries, but have the advantage which is enjoyed by intelligent travelers, that their observation has been exercised in a field out of the reach of common men; and that having thus seen in a manner with our eyes what we can not see for ourselves, their conclusions are such as bear upon our own circumstances, while their information has all the charm of novelty, and all the value of a mass of new and pertinent facts, illustrative of the great science of the nature of civilized man.

Now, when it is said, that men in manhood, so often throw their Greek and Latin aside, and that this very fact shows the uselessness of their early studies, it is much more true to say that it shows how completely the literature of Greece and Rome would be forgotten, if our system of education did not keep up the knowledge of it. But it by no means shows that system to be useless, unless it followed that when a man laid aside his Greek and Latin books, he forgot also all that he had ever gained from them. This, however, is so far from being the case, that even where the results of a classical education are least tangible, and least appreciated even by the individual himself, still the mind often retains much of the effect of its early studies in the general liberality of its tastes and comparative comprehensiveness of its views and notions.

All this supposes, indeed, that classical instruction should be sensibly conducted; it requires that a classical teacher should be fully acquainted with modern history and modern literature, no less than with those of Greece and Rome. What is, or perhaps what used to be, called a mere scholar, can not possibly communicate to his pupils the main advantages of a classical education. The knowledge of the past is valuable, because without it our knowledge of the present and the fature must be scanty; but if the knowledge of the past be confined wholly to itself, if, instead of being made to bear upon things around us, it be totally isolated from them, and so disguised by vagueness and misapprehension as to appear incapable of illustrating them, then indeed it becomes little better than laborious trifling, and they who declaim against it may be fully forgiven.—Miscellaneous Works, pp. 348–350.

The studies which Arnold introduced or developed at Rugby, were not numerous. The table shows how prominent a place was assigned to Scriptural instruction, including exegesis and church history; besides which we find history, modern as well as ancient, geography, mathematics, and the modern languages, of which not only French, but German, was taught. Arnold laid no great stress upon any of these studies but the first, the Scriptural; not that he neglected or undervalued any of them, but that he was not disposed to agree with those who thought the introduction of such a branch as modern history, for example, to be in itself a proof of progress. The "favorite notion of filling boys with useful information" was no favorite with him. "It is not so much an object," he said, "to give boys useful information,' as to facilitate their gaining it hereafter for themselves, and to enable them to turn it to account when gained." Modern history, therefore, was not to be made much of at the expense of ancient history, or of any other study which was equally essential to the end in view. "I assume it certainly," he wrote in relation to the study of modern languages, "as the foundation of all my view of the case, that boys at a public school will never learn to speak or pronounce French well under any circumstanoes. 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 occasion to speak it, as in going abroad, for instance, they will be able to do it very rapidly." Whether we agree or not with all these statements, they show the consistency of him who made them.

The sixth form of the school was that which Arnold himself instructed. He taught them on the principles which he maintained for the whole school. There was no effort to cram them with facts or with rules, no long-winded discourse of any kind or upon any subject. If he was lecturing, he spoke to the point. If he was hearing a recitation, he said as little as possible, teaching the boys by questions rather than by explanations, and so keeping them at work for themselves. In neither case, however, was there any thing like an appearance of isolation or of indifference on his part; his pupils saw that he was working with them, and that what he would not do was simply working for them, while they sat idle. His great aim was to develop the intellect of every boy, to teach each one exactly in such a way as to make him independent so far as was desirable. "You come here not to read, but to learn how to read," was one of his sayings expressive of his leading principle of instruction. "I call that the best theme," he observed," which shows that the boy has read and thought for himself," and to enable every one thus to read and think for himself was always the grand object. "My own lessons with the sixth form," he writes to an intimate friend, "are directed now, to the best of my power, to the furnishing rules or formulæ for them to work with, viz.: rules to be observed in translation, principles of taste as to the choice of English words, as to the keeping or varying idioms and metaphors, &c.; or in history, rules of evidence or general forms, or for the dissection of campaigns, or the estimating the importance of wars, revolutions, &c. This, together with the opening, as it were, the sources of knowledge, by telling them where they can find such and such things, and giving them a notion of criticism, not to swallow things whole, as the scholars of an earlier period too often did,—this is what I am laboring at, much more than giving information."

We gladly give way to his biographer to complete the portrait of Arnold as the teacher of the sixth form.

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 began, 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 and 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 elevation 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 society, 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 exhortations; 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. * * The interest in their work, which this method excited in the boys, was considerably enhanced by the respect which, even without 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 favorite 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 knowl edge really was. In poetry it was almost impossible not to catch something of the delight and almost fervor, 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 afterward, 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 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.-Life and Correspondence, pp. 91, 93, 94.

A closer relation than that between the teacher and the mere pupil existed between the head-master and his sixth form. According to the common practice in the public schools of England, the upper class constituted a band of sub-masters, as it were, intermediate between their instructors and their schoolmates, invested with a power "to be exercised by them," as Arnold describes it, "over the lower boys for the sake of securing a regular government amongst the boys themselves." To enforce this power, certain members of the class, called præpostors, were authorized to inflict personal chastisement on those who resisted them. Against this system, involving as

it did the custom of fagging, (to which we shall presently advert,) a very strong feeling had been aroused at the time of Arnold's removal to Rugby; and amongst the reforms which many anticipated from him, none, perhaps, was more generally looked for than the abolition or at any rate the modification of the authority vested in the sixth form. He checked the abuses that he discovered, but he did no more; on the contrary he maintained the system, asserting that “a government amongst the boys themselves being necessary, the actual constitution of public schools places it in the best possible hands." But Arnold understood it as something more than a means of discipline. "He who wishes really to improve public education," he said, "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 character of the whole. It would be absurd to 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." Accordingly Arnold employed the boys of the sixth form not only as aid-de-camps to ensure order in the school, but as missionaries to infuse a higher spirit and a nobler purpose. His dependence, to the proper degree, on their coöperation, his making them his fellowworkers and his chosen friends, was touching to behold. "When I have confidence in the sixth," he once said to them, "there is no post in England which I would exchange for this; but if they do not support me, I must go."

We have not yet mentioned one of Arnold's strongest reasons for keeping up the authority of the sixth form,-the influence which the exercise of it would have upon its possessors. "They look upon themselves," he said, “as answerable for the character of the school, and by the natural effect of their position, acquire a manliness of mind and habits of conduct infinitely superior, generally speaking, to those of young men of the same age who have not enjoyed the same advantages." A precisely similar motive induced him to retain the system of fagging. "The discipline," he says, "to which boys are thus subjected, and the quickness, handiness, thoughtfulness and punctuality, which they learn from some of the services required of them, are no despicable part of education."

Fagging, as is well known, is the subjection of the younger boys of a school to the elder ones; but it is a subjection to regularly constituted authority, that is, to the members of the upper class or classes.

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