of the confidence which he inspired. Amidst all the plans that came before him, he felt, and he made others feel, that whatever might be the merits of the particular question at issue, there were principles behind which lay far more deeply seated than any mere question of school government, which he was ready to carry through at whatever cost, and from which no argument or menace could move him.

Of the mere external administration of the school, little need here be said. Many difficulties which he encountered were alike provoked and subdued by the peculiarities of his own character. The vehemence with which he threw himself into a contest against evil, and the confidence with which he assailed it, though it carried him through perplexities to which a more cautious man would have yielded, led him to disregard interests and opinions which a less earnest or a less sanguine reformer would have treated with greater consideration. His consciousness of his own integrity, in like manner, and his contempt for worldly advantage, sometimes led him to require from others more than might be reasonably expected from them, and himself to adopt measures which the world at large was sure to misinterpret, whilst at the same time these very qualities, in proportion as they became more appreciated, ultimately secured for him a confidence beyond what could have been gained by the most deliberate circumspection. But whatever were the temporary exasperations and excitements thus produced in his dealings with others, they were gradually removed by the increasing control over himself and his work which he acquired in later years. The readiness which he showed to acknowledge a

fault when once convinced of it, as well as to persevere in kindness even when he thought himself injured, succeeded in healing breaches which, with a less forgiving or less honest temper, would have been irreparable. His union of firmness with tenderness had the same effect in the settlement of some of the perplexities of his office, which in others would have resulted from art and management; and even his work as a schoolmaster cannot be properly appreciated without remembering how, in the end of his career, he rallied round him the public feeling, which in its beginning and middle, from causes not here necessary to be described, had been so widely estranged from him.

With regard to the Trustees of the school, entirely amicable as were his usual relations with them, and grateful as he felt to them for the active support and personal friendliness with which he was met by them, he from the first maintained that in the actual working of the school he must be completely independent, and that their remedy, if they were dissatisfied, was not interference, but dismissal. On this condition he took the post, and any attempt to control either his administration of the school, or his own private occupations, he felt bound to resist "as a duty," he said on one occasion, "not only to himself, but to the master of every foundation school in England."

To the co-operation of his assistant masters he at once looked as essential to his own success. It was one of his main objects to increase in all possible ways their importance. What he was in his department, he wished every one of them to be in theirs.

By raising their salaries he obviated the necessity of their taking any parochial duty which should divert their attention from the school, and procured from the Bishop of the diocese the acknowledgment of their situations as titles for orders. A system of weekly councils was established, in which all school matters were discussed, and he seldom or never acted in any important point of school discipline without consulting them; and it was his endeavour, partly by placing the boarding-houses under their care, partly by an elaborate system of private tuition, which was introduced with this express purpose, to encourage a pastoral and friendly relation between them and the several classes of boys intrusted to them; and he laboured generally to inspire them with the same views of education and of life by which he was animated himself, rejoicing to hear of any instances of boys being sent to the school for the sake of his colleagues' instructions rather than of his own. His views will perhaps be best explained by the two following letters.

LETTER OF INQUIRY FOR A MASTER.

What I want is a man who is a Christian and a gentleman, an active man, and one who has common sense, and understands boys. I do not so much care about scholarship, as he will have immediately under him. the lowest forms in the school; but yet, on second thoughts, I do care about it very much, because his pupils may be in the highest forms; and besides, I think that even the elements are best taught by a man who has a thorough knowledge of the matter. However, if one must give way,

I prefer activity of mind and an interest in his work to high scholarship: for the one may be acquired far more easily than the other. I should wish it also to be understood, that the new master may be called upon to take boarders in his house, it being my intention for the future to require this of all masters as I see occasion, that so in time the boarding-houses may die a natural death.... With this to offer, I think I have a right to look rather high for the man whom I fix upon, and it is my great object to get here a society of intelligent, gentlemanly, and active men, who may permanently keep up the character of the school, and make it "vile damnum," if I were to break my neck

LETTER TO A MASTER ON HIS APPOINTMENT.

The qualifications which I deem essential to the due performance of a master's duties here, may in brief be expressed as the spirit of a Christian and a gentleman,—that a man should enter upon his business not ex Tagέgyou, but as a substantive and most important duty; that he should devote himself to it as the especial branch of the ministerial calling which he has chosen to followthat belonging to a great public institution, and standing in a public and conspicuous situation, he should study things lovely and of good report ;" that is, that he should be public spirited, liberal, and entering heartily into the interest, honour, and general respectability and distinction of the society which he has joined; and that he should have sufficient vigour of mind and thirst for knowledge, to persist in adding to his own stores without neglecting the full improvement of those whom he is teaching. I think our masterships here offer a noble field of duty, and I would not bestow them on any one whom I thought would undertake them without entering into the spirit of our system heart and hand.

But the chief interest of his Rugby life lies of course in his own personal government of the boys. The natural effect of his concentration of interest on what he used to call "our great self," the school, was that the separate existence of the school was in return almost merged in him. This was not indeed his own intention, but it was precisely because he thought so much of the institution and so little of himself, that, in spite of his own efforts to make it work independently of any personal influence of his own, it became so thoroughly dependent upon him, and so thoroughly penetrated with his own spirit. From one end of it to the other, whatever defects it had were his defects; whatever excellences it had were his excellences. It was not the master who was beloved or disliked for the sake of the school, but the school which was beloved or disliked for the sake of the master. Whatever peculiarity of character was impressed on the scholars whom it sent forth, was derived not from the genius of the place, but from the genius of the man. Throughout the whole, whether in the school itself, or in its after effects, the one image that we have before us is not Rugby, but ARNOLD.

What was his great object has already appeared from his letters; namely, the hope of making the school a place of really Christian education; words which in his mouth meant something very different from the general professions which every good teacher must be supposed to make, and which no teacher even in the worst times of English education could have openly ventured to disdain; but which it is exceed