nd 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."

Arnold's method of teaching was founded on the principle of awakening
the intellect of every individual boy. Hence it was his practice to
teach by questioning. As a general rule, he never gave information,
except as a kind of reward for an answer, and often withheld it
altogether, or checked himself in the very act of uttering it, from a
sense that those whom he was addressing had not sufficient interest or
sympathy to receive it. His explanations were at short as
possible--enough to dispose of the difficulty and no more; and his
questions were of a kind to call the attention of the boys to the real
point of every subject and to disclose to them the exact boundaries of
what they knew or did not know. With regard to the younger boys, he
said: "It is a great mistake to think that they should _understand_ all
they learn; for God has ordered that in youth the memory should act
vigorously, independent of the understanding--whereas a man cannot
usually recollect a thing unless he understands it."

At Rugby he made it an essential part of the headmaster's office to
preach a sermon every Sunday in the school chapel. "The veriest
stranger," he said, "who ever attends service in this chapel does well
to feel something more than common interest in the sight of the
congregation here assembled. But if the sight so interests a mere
stranger, what should it be to ourselves, both to you and to me?" More
than either matter or manner of his preaching was the impression of
himself. Even the mere readers of his sermons will derive from them the
history of his whole mind, and of his whole management of the school.
But to his hearers it was more than this. It was the man himself, there
more than in any other place, concentrating all his various faculties
and feelings on one sole object, combating face to face the evil which,
directly or indirectly, he was elsewhere perpetually struggling.

His personal interest in the boys was always strong. "Do you see," he on
one occasion said to an assistant-master who had recently come, "those
two boys walking together? I never saw them together before; you should
make an especial point of obs