great energy in
the practical affairs of life and active untiring benevolence, is a sketch of

"ARNOLD AND HIS SCHOOL."

In the year 1827, the head mastership became vacant of the Grammar School at
Rugby, and the trustees, a body of twelve country gentlemen and noblemen,
selected, to the dismay of all the orthodox, the Rev. Thomas Arnold, late
fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and then taking private pupils at Laleham,
Middlesex. Transplanted from Oriel, the hotbed of strange and unsound
opinions, out of which the conflicting views of Whateley, Hampden, Keble, and
Newman, were struggling into day; himself a disciple of the suspected school
of German criticism; known to entertain views at variance with the majority
of his church brethren on all the semipolitical questions of the day; an
advocate for the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament, for the reform
of the Liturgy and enlargement of the Church, so as to embrace dissenters;
the distrust with which he was regarded by all who did not know him may be
imagined.

It was a critical time, the year 1827; the mind of the country was then
undergoing that process of change which shortly afterwards showed itself in
the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, the passing of the Reform Bill, the
foundation of the London University, and the publications of the Useful
Knowledge Society. Old opinions were on all sides the objects of attack. At
such a period, public schools, with their exclusively classical teaching and
their "fagging" systems, were naturally regarded as institutions of the past
not adapted to the present. It seemed probable that a remodelling, or,
according to the phrase of the day, a "reform" of them, would be attempted by
the new intellectual school of which Lord Brougham was regarded as the type.
It was the views of this party which, it was anticipated, Dr. Arnold would
hasten to introduce into Rugby.

We now know that he did not do this, although he did reform not only the
school of Rugby, but gave a bias to the education of the sons of what is
still the most influential class in this country, which has lasted to the
present day, and that in a direction and in a manner which surprised his
opponents, and at one time provoked even his friends.

It may not be uninteresting to such of our readers as love to trace the
origin of those changes of opinion, which are at times seen to diffuse
themselves over portions of society from an unseen source, to l