Travelling Journals . APPENDIX D. I. TOUR IN NORTH OF ITALY, 1825. 1. Contrast of English and Italian peasantry 10. Plain of the Po.-Italy and Prussia 11. Cliff above the Lake of Como, (second visit) IV. TOUR IN GERMANY, 1828. TOUR IN SWITZERLAND AND NORTH OF ITALY, 1829. THE LIFE OF THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION. THOMAS ARNOLD, seventh child and youngest son of William and Martha Arnold, was born on June 13th, 1795, at West Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, where his family had been settled for two generations, their original residence having been at Lowestoff, in Suffolk. His father, who was collector of the customs at Cowes, died suddenly of spasm in the heart, on March 3rd, 1801. His two elder brothers, William and Matthew, died, the first in 1806, the second in 1820. His sisters all survived him, with the exception of the third, Susannah, who, after a lingering complaint in the spine, died at Laleham, in 1832. His early education was confided by his mother to her sister, Miss Delafield, who took an affectionate pride in her charge, and directed all his studies as a child. In 1803, he was sent to Warminster school, in Wiltshire, under Dr. Griffiths, with whose assistant master, Mr. Lawes, he kept up his intercourse long after they had parted. In 1807, he was removed to Winchester, where, having entered as a commoner, and afterwards become a scholar of the college, he remained till 1811. In after life he always cherished a strong Wykehamist feeling, and, during his head-mastership at Rugby, often recurred to his knowledge, B there first acquired, of the peculiar constitution of a public school, and to his recollections of the tact in managing boys shown by Dr. Goddard, and the skill in imparting scholarship which distinguished Dr. Gabell ;-both, during his stay there, successively head masters of Winchester. He was then, as always, of a shy and retiring disposition, but his manner as a child, and till his entrance at Oxford, was marked by a stiffness and formality the very reverse of the joyousness and simplicity of his later years; his family and schoolfellows both remember him as unlike those of his own age, and with peculiar pursuits of his own; and the tone and style of his early letters, which have been for the most part preserved, are such as might naturally have been produced by living chiefly in the company of his elders, and reading, or hearing read to him. before he could read himself, books suited to a more advanced age. His boyish friendships were strong and numerous. It is needless here to enumerate the names of those Winchester schoolfellows of whose after years it was the pride and delight to watch the course of their companion through life; but the fond recollections, which were long cherished on both sides, of his intercourse with his earliest friend at Warminster, of whom he saw and heard nothing from that time till he was called upon in 1829 to write his epitaph, are worth recording, as a remarkable instance of strong impressions of nobleness of character, early conceived and long retained. Both as a boy and a young man he was remarkable for a difficulty in early rising, amounting almost to a constitutional infirmity; and though his after life will show how completely this was overcome by habit, yet he often said that early rising was a daily effort to him, and that in this instance he never found the truth of the usual rule, that all things are made easy by custom. With this, however, was always united great occasional energy; and one of his schoolfellows gives it as his impression of him that "he was stiff in his opinions, and utterly immoveable by force or fraud, when he had made up his mind, whether right or wrong." It is curious to trace the beginnings of some of his later ina See Letter on the death of George Evelyn, in 1829. |