The life and correspondence of Thomas Arnold, Volume 1 |
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Page 91 - ... 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...
Page 111 - will never be what it might be, and what it ought to be." The remonstrances which he encountered both on public and private grounds were vehement and numerous.
Page 101 - And few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than on one of these occasions, when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when, in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school, and said, " It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys ; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.
Page 122 - Latin fixed themselves in the boys' memories, when learned in English were forgotten. The changes in his views resulted, on the whole, from his increasing conviction, that " it was not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge, which he had to teach ; " as well as by his increasing...
Page 180 - ... mischief of the reaction against them. There was besides a peculiar importance attaching, in his view, to political questions, with which every reader of his works must be familiar. The life of the Commonwealth is to him the main subject of history— the laws of political science the main lesson of history — " the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government, the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind.
Page 33 - I have always thought," he writes in 1823, " with regard to ambition, that I should like to be aut Caesar aut nullus, and as it is pretty well settled for me that I shall not be Caesar, I am quite content to live in peace as nullus.
Page 256 - There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress...
Page 121 - The study of language," he said, " seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth ; and the Greek and Latin languages, in themselves so perfect, and at the same time freed from the insuperable difficulty which must attend any attempt to teach boys philology through the medium of their own spoken language, • seem the very instruments, by which this is to be effected.
Page 109 - ... that you have an anxious duty — a duty which some might suppose was too heavy for your years. But it seems to me, the nobler as well as the truer way of stating the case to say, that it is the great privilege of this and other such institutions, to anticipate the common time of manhood ; that by their whole training they fit the character for manly duties at an age when, under another system, such duties would be impracticable...
Page 34 - ... philosophical speculations, impressed themselves upon his intellectual nature. There is naturally but little to interrupt the retirement of his life at Laleham, which was only broken by the short tours in England or on the Continent, in which then, as afterwards, he employed his vacations. Still it is not without interest to dwell on these years the profound peace of which is contrasted so strongly with the almost incessant agitations of his subsequent life, and " to remain awhile" (thus applying...