350 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 



He was the eldest son, and the second child of his parents, and was 

 born on the 24th of December, 1822, at Lalehara, near Staines, in Mid- 

 dlesex, where his father, then a man of twenty-seven years old, after- 

 ward to become so widely known and honored as the Head Master of 

 Rugby School, was at the time residing. Dr. Arnold was appointed to 

 Rugby in 1827, and removed thither with his family during the next 

 year. For some years, while he was still a young boy, Matthew Arnold 

 was sent to a private school at Laleham ; but in August, 1836, he en- 

 tered Winchester, where he remained for a year before being transferred 

 to Rugby and brought immediately under his father's powerful influ- 

 ence. His poem of *' Rugby Chapel," written in 1857, fifteen years 

 after his father's death, commemorates justly those strong and high 

 qualities of character, that fervent and heroic nature, which made Dr. 

 Arnold not only a master of schoolboys, but a leader of men. In 1841 

 he went up to Oxford, having won the open scholarship at Balliol Col- 

 lege. At Oxford he was both popular and successful. The University 

 was full of a fervent life, in which Arnold had a large share. In the 

 opening of his Lecture on Emerson, written late in life, he has repro- 

 duced, in a passage of incomparable beauty, the impression of these Ox- 

 ford days, and of the contemporary voices which appealed most strongly 

 to his youth. In his first academic year he won the Hertford Scholar- 

 ship, given for proficiency in Latin ; he won the Newdigate prize for 

 English poetry with a poem on Cromwell ; but in his final examina- 

 tions he was disappointed, and obtained only a second class. This dis- 

 appointment was made up for, however, by his election in 1845, just 

 thirty years after the election of his father, to a Fellowship in Oriel, at 

 that time a College specially distinguished by the brilliant character of 

 its Fellows. Newman, who in this very year left Oxford for Rome, 

 was one of them. Among the others, to mention only those who have 

 attained more than a University reputation, were Dr. Church, the 

 present Dean of St. Paul's ; James Fraser, the late admirable Bishop 

 of Manchester ; and Clough, who stood nearer to Arnold in friendship 

 than any of the rest. Long afterwards Arnold commemorated this 

 friendship and its associations with Oxford in his poem of " Thyrsis," 

 — an elegy that ranks with the best that Greek or English poetry has 

 to show. 



Arnold was not disposed to enter the Church, and in 1847 he ac- 

 cepted the place of private secretary to Lord Lansdowne. This gave 

 him access to the world of affairs, but his ruling taste for letters was 

 manifested by the publication in the next year of his first volume, " The 

 Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A." It had no great success, and 



