curred in after life. Even the most careless boys would sometimes, during the course of the week, refer almost involuntarily to the sermon of the past Sunday, as a condemnation of what they were doing. Some, whilst they wonder how it was that so little practical effect was produced upon themselves at the time, yet retain the recollection, (to give the words of one who so describes himself,) that, "I used to listen to them from first to last with a kind of awe, and over and over again could not join my friends at the chapel door, but would walk home to be alone; and I remember the same effects being produced by them, more or less, on others, whom I should have thought hard as stones, and on whom I should think Arnold looked as some of the worst boys in the school."

IV. Although the Chapel was the only place in which, to the school at large, he necessarily appeared in a purely pastoral and personal relation-yet this relation extended in his view to his whole management of his scholars; and he conceived it to be his duty and that of the other masters to throw themselves, as much as possible, into the way of understanding and entering into the feelings of the boys, not only in their official intercourse, but always. When he was first appointed at Rugby, his friends had feared that the indifference which he felt towards characters and persons with whom he had no especial sympathy, would have interfered with his usefulness as Head-master. But in the case of boys, a sense of duty supplied the want of that interest in character, as such, which, in the case of men, he possessed but little. Much as there was in the peculiar humour of boys which his own impatience of moral thoughtlessness, or of treating serious or important subjects with any thing like ridicule or irony, prevented him from fully appreciating, yet he truly felt, that the natural youthfulness and elasticity of his constitution gave him a great advantage in dealing with them. "When I find that I cannot run up the library stairs," he said, "I shall know that it is time for me to go."

Thus traits and actions of boys, which to a stranger would have told nothing, were to him highly significant. His quick and far-sighted eye became familiar with the face and manner of every boy in the school. "Do you see," he said to an assistant master who had recently come, "those two boys walking together; I never saw them together before; you should make an especial point of observing the company they keep;nothing so tells the changes in a boy's character." The insight which he thus acquired into the general characteristics of boyhood, will not be doubted by any reader of his sermons; and his scholars used sometimes to be startled by the knowledge of their own notions, which his speeches to them implied. "Often and often," says one of them, "have I said to myself, 'If it was one of ourselves who had just spoken, he

could not more completely have known and understood our thoughts and ideas.'" And, though it might happen that his opinion of boys would, like his opinions of men, be too much influenced by his disposition to judge of the whole from some one prominent feature, and though his fixed adherence to general rules might sometimes prevent him from making exceptions where the case required it; yet few can have been long familiar with him without being struck by the distinctness, the vividness, and, in spite of great occasional mistakes, the very general truth and accuracy of his delineation of their individual characters, or the readiness with which, whilst speaking most severely of a mass of boys, he would make allowances, and speak hopefully in any particular instance that came before him. Often before any other eye had discerned it, he saw the germs of coming good or evil, and pronounced confident decisions, doubted at the time, but subsequently proved to be correct; so that those, who lived with him, described themselves as trusting to his opinions of boys as to divinations, and feeling as if by an unfavourable judgment their fate was sealed.

His relation to the boarders in his own house, (called by distinction the School-house, and containing between sixty and seventy boys,) naturally afforded more scope for communication than with the rest of the school. Besides the opportunities which he took of showing kindness and attention to them in his own family, in cases of distress or sickness, he also made use of the preparation for confirmation for private conversation with them: and during the later years of his life was accustomed to devote an hour or more in the evening to seeing each of them alone by turns, and talking on such topics as presented themselves, leading them if possible to more serious subjects. The general management of the house, both from his strong dislike to intruding on the privacy even of the youngest, and from the usual principles of trust on which he proceeded, he left as much as possible to the Præpostors. Still his presence and manner when he appeared officially, either on special calls, or on the stated occasions of calling over their names twice a day, was not without its effect. One of the scenes that most lives in the memory of his school-house pupils is the night muster in the rudely lighted hall-his tall figure at the head of the files of boys ranged on each side of the long tables, whilst the prayers were read by one of the Præpostors, and a portion of Scripture by himself. This last was a practice, which he introduced soon after his arrival, when, on one of these occasions. he spoke strongly to the boys on the necessity of each reading some part of the Bible every day, and then added, that as he feared that many would not make the rule for themselves, he should for the future always read a passage every evening at this time. He usually brought in his Greek Testament, and read about

half a chapter in English, most frequently from the close of St. John's Gospel: when from the Old Testament, especially his favourite Psalms, the 19th for example, and the 107th, and the others relating to the beauty of the natural world. He never made any comment; but his manner of reading impressed the boys considerably, and it was observed by some of them, shortly after the practice was commenced, that they had never understood the Psalms before. On Sunday nights he read a prayer of his own, and before he began to preach regularly in the chapel, delivered the short addresses which have been before mentioned, and which he resumed, in addition to his other work on Sundays, during the last year and a half of his life.

With the boys in the Sixth Form his private intercourse was comparatively frequent, whether in the lessons, or in questions of school government, or in the more familiar relation in which they were brought to him in their calls before and after the holidays, their dinners with him during the half year, and the visits which one or more used by turns to pay to him in Westmoreland during part of the vacation. But with the greater part of the school it was almost entirely confined to such opportunities as arose out of the regular course of school discipline or instruction, and the occasional invitations to his house of such amongst the younger boys, as he could find any reason or excuse for asking.

It would thus often happen in so large a number that a boy would leave Rugby without any personal communication with him at all; and even in the higher part of the school, those who most respected him would sometimes complain, even with bitterness, that he did not give them greater opportunities of asking his advice, or himself offer more frequently to direct their studies and guide their inquiries. Latterly, indeed, he communicated with them more frequently, and expressed himself more freely both in public and private on the highest subjects. But he was always restrained from speaking much or often, both from the extreme difficulty which he felt in saying any thing without a real occasion for it, and also from his principle of leaving as much as possible to be filled up by the judgment of the boys themselves, and from his deep conviction that, in the most important matters of all, the movement must come not from without but from within. And it certainly was the case, that, whenever he did make exceptions to this rule, and spoke rather as their friend than their master, the simplicity of his words, the rareness of their occurrence, and the stern back-ground of his ordiary administration, gave a double force to all that was said.

Such, for example, would be the effect of his speaking of swearing to a boy, not so much in anger or reproof, as assuring him how every year he would learn to see more and more how foolish and disgusting such language was; or again, the distinc

tion he would point out to them between mere amusement and such as encroached on the next day's duties, when as he said "it immediately becomes what St. Paul calls revelling." Such also would be the impression of his severe rebukes for individual faults, showing by their very shortness and abruptness his loathing and abhorrence of evil. "Nowhere," he said in speaking to some boys on bad behaviour during prayers at their boarding-house,-"Nowhere is Satan's work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule." Such also were the cases, in which, more than once, boys, who were tormented while at school with skeptical doubts, took courage at last to unfold them to him, and were almost startled to find the ready sympathy with which, instead of denouncing them as profane, he entered into their difficulties and applied his whole mind to assuage them. So again, when dealing with the worse class of boys, in whom he saw indications of improvement, he would grant indulgences, which on ordinary occasions he would have denied, with a view of encouraging them by signs of his confidence in them; and at times, on discovering cases of vice, he would, instead of treating them with contempt or extreme severity, tenderly allow the force of the temptation, and urge it upon them as a proof brought home to their own minds, how surely they must look for help out of themselves.

In his preparation of boys for Confirmation he followed the same principle. The printed questions which he issued for them were intended rather as guides to their thoughts than as necessary to be formally answered; and his own interviews with them were very brief. But the few words which he then spoke-the simple repetition, for example, of the promise made to prayer, with his earnest assurance, that if that was not true, nothing was true; if any thing in the Bible could be relied upon, it was that have become the turning point of a boy's character, and graven on his memory as a law for life.

But, independently of particular occasions of intercourse, there was a deep under current of sympathy which extended to almost all, and which from time to time broke through the reserve of his outward manner. In cases where it might have been thought that tenderness would have been extinguished by indignation, he was sometimes so deeply affected in pronouncing sentence of punishment on offenders, as to be hardly able to speak. "I felt," he said once of some great fault of which he had heard in one of the Sixth Form, and his eyes filled with tears as he spoke," as if it had been one of my own children, and, till I had ascertained that it was really true, I mentioned it to no one, not even to any of the masters." And this feeling began, before he could have had any personal knowledge of them. "If he should turn out ill," he said of a young boy of promise to one of the assistant masters, and his voice trembled with emo

tion as he spoke, "I think it would break my heart." Nor were any thoughts so bitter to him, as those suggested by the innocent faces of little boys as they first came from home,-nor any expressions of his moral indignation deeper, than when he heard of their being tormented or tempted into evil by their companions. "It is a most touching thing to me," he said once in the hearing of one of his former pupils, on the mention of some new comers, "to receive a new fellow from his father-when I think what an influence there is in this place for evil, as well as for good. I do not know any thing which affects me more." His pupil, who had, on his own first coming, been impressed chiefly by the severity of his manner, expressed some surprise, adding, that he should have expected this to wear away with the succession of fresh arrivals. "No!" he said, "if ever I could receive a new boy from his father without emotion, I should think it was high time to be off."

What he felt thus on ordinary occasions, was heightened of course when any thing brought strongly before him any evil in the school. "If this goes on," he wrote to a former pupil on some such occasion, "it will end either my life at Rugby, or my life altogether." "How can I go on," he said, "with my Roman History? There all is noble and high-minded, and here I find nothing but the reverse." The following extract from a letter to his friend, Sir T. Pasley, describes this feeling.

"Since I began this letter, I have had some of the troubles of schoolkeeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of boy-nature, which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very account; and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and moral, when if left to themselves they would have rather shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys, who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's "Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream, and take part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the Scripture says about the strait gate and the wide one,-a view of human nature, which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the nakedness of boy-nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in a whole city. And how to meet this evil I really do not know; but to find it thus rife after I have been [so many] years fighting against it, is so sickening, that it is very hard not to throw up the cards in despair, and upset the table. But then the stars of nobleness, which I see amidst the darkness, in the case of the few good, are so cheering, that one is inclined to stick to the ship again, and have another good try at getting her about."