running stream, which I think it ought to be if it would form or feed other minds; for it is ill drinking out of a pond, whose stock of water is merely the remains of the long-past rains of the winter and spring, evaporating and diminishing every successive day of drought. We are reading now Plato's Phædo, which I suppose must be nearly the perfection of human language. The admirable precision of the great Attic writers is to me very striking. When you get a thorough knowledge of the language, they are clearer than I think an English writer can be, from the inferiority of his instrument. I often think that I could have understood your uncle better if he had written in Platonic Greek. His Table-Talk marks him, in my judgment, . as a very great man indeed, whose equal I know not where to find in England. It amused me to recognize, in your contributions to the book, divers anecdotes which used to excite the open-mouthed admiration of the C.C.C. Junior Common Room in the Easter and Act Terms of 1811, after your Easter vacation spent with Mr. May at Richmond. My paper is at an end, but not my matter Perhaps I may see you in the winter in town. END OF VOL. I. 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. VOL. II. THE LIFE OF THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D. CHAPTER VIII. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, SEPTEMBER, 1835, TO THERE is little to distinguish the next three years of Dr. Arnold's life from those which precede. The strong feeling against him, though with some abatement of its vehemence, still continued; the effect of it was perhaps visible in the slight falling off in the numbers of the school in 1837-38, at the time of the very height of its reputation at the Universities; and in his own profession it appeared so generally to prevail, that, on occasion of a proposal to him from the Bishop of Norwich, to preach his Consecration sermon at Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury thought it his duty to withhold his permission, solely on the ground of the unfavorable reception which he supposed it would meet among the clergy. But his letters, and some of the Sermons in the fourth volume, preached at this time, show how this period of comparative silence was yet, both in thought and action, most emphatically his period of battle; when, as if tired of acting on the defensive, he was at last roused to attack in return. The vehemence of the outcry by which he had been assailed, drove him into a more controversial atmosphere. The fact of the more positive formation of his own opinions brought him more immediately into collision with the positive opinions of others. The view with which he thus entered on his chief actual contests with what he conceived to be the two great evils of the age, is expressed in the twentieth Sermon in the fourth volume, preached September, 1836, on the opposite idols of unbelief and superstition, and on the only mode by which, in his judgment, either could be counteracted. These two contests were, on the one hand, against the school then dominant in the London University; on the other hand, against the school then dominant in Oxford. I. And first, with regard to Oxford. From the earliest formation of his opinions he had looked upon (socalled) High-Church Doctrines as a great obstruction to the full development of national Christianity. But, up to the time here spoken of, these doctrines were held in a form too vague and impalpable to come into immediate collision with any of his own views. When he wrote the pamphlet on the Roman Catholic question in 1829, he could refer to a sermon of the Rev. W. F. Hook, on the Apostolical Succession, as a rare exception to the general tone of English Clergymen. When he wrote his pamphlet on Church Reform in 1833, he could still, as if mentioning a strange phenomenon, speak of "those extraordinary persons who gravely maintain that primitive episcopacy, and episcopacy as it now exists in England, are essentially the same." (Postscript, p. 13.) No definite system seemed to stand in the way of what he conceived to be the best method of saving the English Church and nation; and if, in any instances, deeper principles than those of the old High-Church party were at work, his sense of disagreement seemed almost lost in the affectionate reverence with which he regarded the friends of his youth who held them. His foremost thought in speaking of them was of "men at once pious, high-minded, intelligent, and full of all kindly feelings; whose intense love for the forms of the Church, fostered as it has been |