or he was a success: more scholars
came to him than he could really take care of. But he did not like the
work, since all the pupil desired, and all the parents desired, was that
he should help the backward one get his marks, and glide through the eye
of a needle into pedagogic paradise.

At twenty-six he was preaching, teaching and writing learned essays
about things he did not understand.

From this brief sketch it will be seen that the early education of
Thomas Arnold was of the kind and type that any fond parent of the
well-to-do Middle Class would most desire. He had been shielded from all
temptations of the world; he could do no useful thing with his hands;
his knowledge of economics--ways and means--was that of a child; of the
living present he knew little, but of the dead past he assumed and
believed he knew much.

It was purely priestly, institutional education. It was the kind of
education that every well-to-do Briton would like to have his sons
receive. It was, in short, England's Ideal.

* * * * *

Rugby Grammar School was endowed in Sixteen Hundred Fifty-three by one
Laurence Sherif, a worthy grocer. The original gift was comparatively
small, but the investment being in London real estate, has increased in
value until it yields now an income of about thirty-five thousand
dollars a year.

In the time of Arnold there were about three hundred pupils. It is not a
large school now; there are high schools in a hundred cities of America
that surpass it in many ways.

Rugby's claim to special notice lies in its traditions--the great men
who were once Rugby boys, and the great men who were Rugby teachers.
Also, in the fact that Thomas Hughes wrote a famous story called, "Tom
Brown at Rugby."

Rugby Grammar School was one hundred twenty-five years old when Sir
Joshua Reynolds commissioned Lord Cornwallis to go to America and fetch
George Washington to England, that Sir Joshua might paint his portrait.

For a hundred years prior to the time of Arnold, there had not been a
perceptible change in the methods of teaching. The boys were herded
together. They fought, quarreled, divided into cliques; the big boys
bullied the little ones. Fagging was the law; so the upper forms
enslaved the lower ones. There was no home life, and the studies were
made irksome and severe, purposely, as it was thought that pleasant
things were sinful.

If any better plan could have been devised to mak