He was anxious to secure the administration of the rite of confirmation, if possible, once every two years; when the boys were prepared by himself and the other masters in their different boarding-houses, who each brought up his own division of pupils on the day of the ceremony; the interest of which was further enhanced, during his earlier years, by the presence of the late Bishop Ryder, for whom he entertained a great respect, and latterly by the presence of his intimate friend, Archbishop Whately. The Confirmation Hymn of Dr. Hinds, which was used on these occasions, became so endeared to his recollections, that, when travelling abroad late at night, he would have it repeated or sung to him. One of the earliest public addresses to the school was that made before the first confirmation, and published in the second volume of his sermons; and he always had something of the kind (over and above the Bishop's charge) either before or after the regular Chapel service.

The Communion was celebrated four times a year. At first some of the Sixth Form boys alone were in the habit of attending; but he took pains to invite to it boys in all parts of the school, who had any serious thoughts, so that the number, out of two hundred and ninety or three hundred boys, was occasionally a hundred, and never less than seventy. To individual boys he rarely spoke on the subject, from the fear of its becoming a matter of form or favour; but in his sermons he dwelt upon it much, and would afterwards speak with deep emotion of the pleasure and hope which a larger attendance than usual would give him. It was impossible to hear these exhortations or to see him administer it, without being struck by the strong and manifold interest, which it awakened in him; and at Rugby it was of course more than usually touching to him from its peculiar relation to the school. When he spoke of it in his sermons, it was evident that amongst all the feelings which it excited in himself, and which he wished to impart to others, none was so prominent as the sense that it was a communion not only with God, but with one another, and that the thoughts thus roused should act as a direct and especial counterpoise to that false communion and false companionship, which, as binding one another not to good but to evil, he believed to be the great source of mischief in the school at large. And when,-especially to the very young boys, who sometimes partook of the Communion, he bent himself down with looks of fatherly tenderness, and glistening eyes and trembling voice, in the administration of the elements, it was felt, perhaps, more distinctly than at any other time, how great was the sympathy which he felt with the earliest advances to good in every individual boy.

That part of the Chapel service, however, which, at least to the world at large, is most connected with him, as being the most frequent and most personal of his ministrations, was his

preaching. Sermons had occasionally been preached by the head-master of this and other public schools to their scholars before his coming to Rugby; bu: (in some cases from the peculiar constitution or arrangement of the school) it had never before been considered an essential part of the Head-master's office. The first half-year he confined himself to delivering short addresses, of about five minutes' length, to the boys of his own house. But from the second half-year he began to preach frequently; and from the autumn of 1831, when he took the chaplaincy, which had then become vacant, he preached almost every Sunday of the school year to the end of his life. It may be allowable to dwell for a few moments on a practice which has since been followed, whenever it was practicable, in the other great public schools, and on sermons, which, as they were the first of their kind, will also be probably long looked upon as models of their kind, in English preaching. They were preached always in the afternoon, and lasted seldom more than twenty minutes, sometimes less; a new one almost every time. man could hardly," he said, "preach on the same subject, without writing a better sermon than he had written a few years before." However much they may have occupied his previous thoughts, they were written almost invariably between the morning and afternoon service; and though often under such stress of time that the ink of the last sentence was hardly dry when the chapel bell ceased to sound, they contain hardly a single erasure, and the manuscript volumes remain as accessible a treasure to their possessors as if they were printed.

When he first began to preach, he felt that his chief duty was to lay bare, in the plainest language that he could use, the sources of the evils of schools, and to contrast them with the purity of the moral law of Christianity. "The spirit of Elijah," he said, "must ever precede the spirit of Christ." But as he advanced, there is a marked contrast between the severe tone of

1) Extract from a letter to the Trustees, applying for the situation:-"I had no knowledge nor so much as the slightest suspicion of the vacancy," he writes, “till I was informed of it last night. But the importance of the point is so great that I most respectfully crave the indulgence of the Trustees to the request I venture to submit to them, namely, that if they see no objection to it I may myself be appointed to the chaplaincy, waiving, of course, altogether the salary attached to the office. Whoever is chaplain, I must ever feel myself, as Head-master, the real and proper religious instructor of the boys. No one else can feel the same interest in them, and no one else (I am not speaking of myself personally, but merely by virtue of my situation) can speak to them with so much influence. In fact, it seems to me the natural and fitting thing, and the great advantage of having a separate chapel for the school— that the master of the boys should be officially as well as really their pastor, and that he should not devolve on another, however well qualified, one of his own most peculiar and solemn duties. This, however, is a general question, which I only venture so far to enter upon, in explaining my motives in urging and requesting, in this present instance, that the Trustees would present me to the Bishop to be licensed, allowing me altogether to decline the salary, because I consider that I am paid for my services already; and that being Head-master and clergyman, I am bound to be the religious instructor of my pupils by virtue of my situation."

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his early sermons in the second volume, when all was yet new to him, except the knowledge of the evil which he had to combat, and the gentler tone which could not but be inspired by his greater familiarity both with his work and his pupils-between the direct attack on particular faults which marks the course of Lent Sermons in 1830, and the wish to sink the mention of particular faults in the general principle of love to Christ and abhorrence of sin, which marks the summary of his whole school experience in the last sermon which he ever preached. When he became the constant preacher, he made a point of varying the more directly practical addresses with sermons on the interpretation of Scripture, on the general principles and evidences of Christianity, or on the dangers of their after life, applicable chiefly to the elder boys. Amongst these last should be noticed those which contained more or less the expression of his sentiments on the principles to which he conceived his pupils liable hereafter to be exposed at Oxford, and most of which, as being of a more general interest, he selected for publication in his third and fourth volumes. That their proportion to those that are published affords no measure of their proportion to those that are unpublished, may be seen at once by reference to the year's course in the fifth volume, which, out of thirty-four, contains only four, which could possibly be included in this class. That it was not his own intention to make them either personal or controversial, appears from an explanation to a friend of a statement, which, in 1839, appeared in the newspapers, that he "had been preaching a course of sermons against the Oxford errors."The origin of the paragraph was simply this: that I preached two in February, showing that the exercise of our own judgment was not inconsistent with the instruction and authority of the Church, or with individual modesty and humility, [viz., the thirty-first and thirty-second in vol. iv.] They were not in the least controversial, and neither mentioned nor alluded to the Oxford writers. And I have preached only these two which could even be supposed to bear upon their doctrines. Indeed, I should not think it right, except under very different circumstances from present ones, to occupy the boys' time or thoughts with such controversies." The general principles, accordingly, which form the groundwork of all these sermons, are such as are capable of a far wider application than to any particular school of English opinion, and often admit of direct application to the moral condition of the school. But the quick ears of boys no doubt were always ready to give such sermons a more personal character than he had intended, or perhaps had even in his mind at the moment; and at times, when the fear of these opinions was more forcibly impressed upon him, the allusion and even mention of the writers in question is so direct, that no one could mistake it.

But it was of course in their direct practical application to the boys, that the chief novelty and excellence of his sermons consisted. Yet, though he spoke with almost conversational plainness on the peculiar condition of public schools, his language never left an impression of familiarity, rarely of personal allusion. In cases of notorious individual misconduct, he generally shrunk from any pointed mention of them, and on one occasion when he wished to address the boys on an instance of untruthfulness which had deeply grieved him, he had the sermon before the regular service, in order to be alone in the Chapel with the boys, without the presence even of the other masters.' Earnest and even impassioned as his appeals were, himself at times almost overcome with emotion, there was yet nothing in them of excitement. In speaking of the occasional deaths in the school, he would dwell on the general solemnity of the event, rather than on any individual or agitating details; and the impression thus produced, instead of belonging to the feeling of the moment, has become part of an habitual rule for the whole conduct of life. Often he would speak with severity and bitter disappointment of the evils of the place; yet there was hardly ever a sermon which did not contain some words of encouragement. "I have never," he said in his last sermon, "wished to speak with exaggeration it seems to me as unwise as it is wrong to do so. I think that it is quite right to observe what is hopeful in us, as well as what is threatening; that general confessions of unmixed evil are deceiving and hardening, rather than arousing; that our evil never looks so really dark as when we contrast it with any thing which there may be in us of good." (Serm. vol. v. p. 460.)

Accordingly, even from the first, and much more in after years, there was blended with his sterner tone a strain of affectionate entreaty-an appeal to principles, which could be appreciated only by a few-exhortations to duties, such as self-denial, and visiting the poor, which some at least might practice, whilst none could deny their obligation. There also appeared most evidently what indeed pervaded his whole school life-the more than admiration with which he regarded those who struggled against the stream of school opinion, and the abiding comfort which they afforded him. In them he saw not merely good boys and obedient scholars, but the companions of every thing high and excellent, with which his strong historical imagination peopled the past, or which his lively sense of things unseen

1) On another occasion, the practice of drinking having prevailed to a great extent in the school, he addressed the boys at considerable length from his place in the great school, saying that he should have spoken to them from the pulpit, but that as there were others present in the chapel, he wished to hide their shame. And then, (says one who was present,)" in a tone of the deepest feeling, as if it wrung his inmost heart to confess the existence of such an evil amongst us," he dwelt upon the sin and the folly of the habit, even where intoxication was not produced-its evil effects both on body and mind-the folly of fancying it to be manly-its general effect on the school.

realized in the invisible world. There were few present in the chapel who were not at least for the moment touched, when, in one of his earliest sermons, he closed one of these earnest appeals with the lines from Milton which always so deeply moved him, the blessing on Abdiel.

But more than either matter or manner of his preaching, was the impression of himself. Even the mere readers of his sermons will derive from them the history of his whole mind, and of his whole management of the school. But to his hearers it was more than this. It was the man himself, there more than in any other place, concentrating all his various faculties and feelings on one sole object, combating face to face the evil, with which directly or indirectly he was elsewhere perpetually struggling. He was not the preacher or the clergyman who had left behind all his usual thoughts and occupations as soon as he had ascended the pulpit. He was still the scholar, the historian, and theologian, basing all that he said, not indeed ostensibly, but consciously, and often visibly, on the deepest principles of the past and present. He was still the instructor and the schoolmaster, only teaching and educating with increased solemnity and energy. He was still the simple-hearted and earnest man, labouring to win others to share in his own personal feelings of disgust at sin, and love of goodness, and to trust to the same faith in which he hoped to live and die himself.

It is difficult to describe, without seeming to exaggerate, the attention with which he was heard by all above the very young boys. Years have passed away, and many of his pupils can look back to hardly any greater interest than that with which, for those twenty minutes, Sunday after Sunday, they sat beneath that pulpit, with their eyes fixed upon him, and their attention strained to the utmost to catch every word that he uttered. It is true, that, even to the best, there was much, and to the mass of boys, the greater part of what he said, that must have passed away from them as soon as they had heard it, without any corresponding fruits. But they were struck, as boys naturally would be, by the originality of his thoughts, and what always impressed them as the beauty of his language; and in the substance of what he said, much that might have seemed useless, because for the most part impracticable to boys, was not without its effect in breaking completely through the corrupt atmosphere of school opinion, and exhibiting before them once every week an image of high principle and feeling, which they felt was not put on for the occasion, but was constantly living amongst them. And to all it must have been an advantage, that, for once in their lives, they had listened to sermons, which none of them could associate with the thought of weariness, formality, or exaggeration. On many there was left an impression to which, though unheeded at the time, they re