MEMOIR

OF

THOMAS ARNOLD

OF RUGBY, ENGLAND,

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO HIS LIFE AND WORK AS A TEACHER.

SELECTED FROM

LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE,

BY

ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LONDON IN 1845.)

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

JAMES H. CARLISLE,

PRESIDENT OF WOFFORD COLLEGE, SPARTANBURG, S.C.

THOMAS ARNOLD.

"One of the noblest minds and highest characters of these days-prematurely taken from us, in the middle of a career of usefulness which we believe we are guilty of no extravagance in terming unparalleled in the line of life which Dr. Arnold adopted." - GLADSTONE, January, 1843.

"We never recollect a religious life which so much affected us; which, while reading, we wished so much to make our own; revolving which, we can so little justify ourselves that it shall not be so." - EDINBURGH REVIEWER, January, 1845.

INTRODUCTION.

ASCHAM, in a letter dated in 1550, laments the ruin of grammar schools in England, and predicts, "from their decline, the speedy extinction of the universities." This sentence may give us a slight connection between the names of Ascham and Arnold. In 1567, the year before Ascham's death, Laurence Sheriff, a London grocer, dying, left a small amount of property to found a grammar school in Rugby, his native town, about eighty miles north-west of London. This was a small place (now containing eight thousand inhabitants) in Warwickshire, an agricultural county. The property was chiefly in real estate in London, yielding at first only the value of a few hundred dollars yearly. With the growth of the city the property improved, until, in the first part of this century, it annually yielded more than twenty thousand dollars. The school, of course, also improved in some respects; but it did not rank with the leading high schools, as Eton and Westminster. A writer in "The Edinburgh Review" (January, 1845) says that twenty years before that date Rugby "was the lowest and most Boeotian of the

English schools."

To-day its name is a household word all over the English world. In East Tennessee we have an English town bearing the familiar name. All this sudden importance is due to the life, labors, and biography of the man who was the head master there from 1828 to 1842. He followed Dr. Wool; and he was followed by Dr. A. C. Tait, who rose to be archbishop of Canterbury. But the name of Thomas Arnold is better known to general readers than that of either of these distinguished men. The present head master is Dr. T. W. Jex-Blake, who has twentyone assistants.

He is a bold man who will undertake to improve Stanley's "Life of Arnold," or even to condense it in just proportion. Neither of these tasks is attempted here. Such portions of the work have been taken as serve to show Arnold's work and life as a teacher. This could be done only by leaving out much valuable matter. The first chapter, giving his life up to the close of his university course, is given entire. From the second chapter, containing his life as a private tutor preparing pupils for the university, a page or two of Stanley's text and some of Arnold's letters have been omitted. The famous third chapter, with its full record of his Rugby life, is given at length, the footnotes only being omitted. This chapter is long, and out of proportion to the size of the memoir; but no careful reader will wish that a page had been left out. Of the fourth chapter, that portion which describes Arnold's domestic life is retained, with specimens of

his letters. The five following chapters, with letters appended to each, are omitted entirely. Our fifth chapter gives a portion of the last (tenth) chapter in the original work. It contains a short reference to the historical lectures at Oxford, while the touching account of Arnold's death is given at length. This should never be mutilated or abridged. The late Francis Lieber, speaking to a pupil about that portion of the biography, said, literally with tears in his eyes, "His death was beautiful." Nothing has been added to the work as Stanley wrote it; and (except in a. single instance, where it seemed necessary to keep the connection by joining two sentences, omitting a few words in one) not a sentence or a word has been changed. Throughout this memoir, the reader may know that he has the literal words of the original work, of which scarcely one-fourth is here given.

Arnold died in 1842; and his biography first appeared in 1845, when the first edition was published in London. Happy alike in its subject and in its author, the work at once attracted attention in the reading-world. It was translated into several foreign languages. Perhaps it may be said to mark an era in the art of writing biographies. In America, several editions appeared in Boston and New York. It was noticed in the leading reviews of that day. The different religious magazines all agreed in praising the skill of the biographer, while each found something to approve and admire in Arnold's character and life.. From the nature of the case, many of the readers of