teachers it was not a taste of bitter and loathsome grammatical facts, which had no connexion with each other or anything else; dreadful rules which had to be learnt, in order to play the dreary game of education. There was something harmonious and seductive about what he was telling us, a sense of living men and living ideas-where language for a moment became, not the ashes of the human rubbish-heap, but coals glowing with the fire of the heart. I do not mean that I then and thus elaborated my thought; but it was a revelation of beautiful things within reach of one's hand-living ideas, glowing images.

I felt a sense of princely condescension and of active kindness about Mr. Arnold, that he should be willing to instruct us. His utterance did not seem like persuasion, but a priestly sort of ministering of undoubted grace. The effect soon faded away; but it induced me, I remember, to read his poems, with an odd mixture of pleasure at the beauty of many of them, together with a sort of revulsion at the hard, plain, and knotty lines that lay among the richness, like the pointed kernel in the honeyed plum. One of my schoolfellows was his nephew, and I secured an autograph, not indeed of the poet himself, but of his wife, which seemed to me a precious leaf from very near the rose.

Then, at Cambridge, I fell wholly under the spell of Matthew Arnold's writings, prose and poetry alike. He seemed to be the one faultless writer; and there came a day when he delivered the Rede Lecture, in the early 'eighties, and received an LL.D. degree. I was asked as an undergraduate to the great gardenparty at King's, where the Doctors all appeared robed in glory; and while I was talking to the kindly Mrs. Westcott, wife of the Bishop, I suddenly descried two figures standing together and surveying the scene-Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Arnold. One little thing struck me. Most of the Doctors were wearing their scarlet gowns and their odd flat gold-corded velvet hats with an air of obvious and fearful joy. They had become, most of them, mere lay-figures, with a foolish smiling figure-head at the top, instinct with complacent vanity. But Maine and Arnold alone appeared to wear their gowns like customary coats, each as one

That tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

There was no parade about it; they shone because it was their fate to shine. I murmured a heartfelt wish to Mrs. Westcott,

who, with motherly kindness, went straight up to Mr. Arnold, I trailing in her wake, aghast at my boldness, and said, 'Mr. Arnold, here is a young man who wishes to be presented to you. You know his father-the Bishop of Truro.'

The moment was come. The great man held out his hand, said a few pleasant words about my father, and then, when I was about to retire, nodded to Sir Henry Maine, and said to me, 'Come and walk about with me a little, and point out to me some of the celebrities.' He even put his hand within my arm, and I had a few minutes of awestruck rapture, parading before the guests in a kind of gorgeous intimacy with one of the first spirits of the age. I did my best to obey his instructions, and was at last dismissed with a delightful smile, and a wish that we should meet again.

We did meet again. My father became Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Arnold used to dine with us at Lambeth; I have little doubt I bored him horribly, for I contrived more than once, when the ladies left the room, to slip into a chair beside him. But his graciousness was perfect. He treated me as he might have treated the most honoured of our guests, and gave me of his best. My father had a real affection for him, not unmingled with terror. He considered him a dangerously subversive writer, but I think also thought of him as not likely to do serious harm to the cause of orthodoxy; while he loved his poetry so much and respected his sense of things ancient and beautiful so deeply that the admiration was wholly sincere. One interesting and characteristic story my father was fond of telling. He had sate next him, on the first occasion of their meeting, at the house of Mr. Charles Arnold at Rugby. Matthew Arnold had uttered some humorous semi-cynical statement, to the effect that it was useless to try to enlighten the general public, or to give them a sense of due proportion. My father was somewhat nettled, and quoted a few lines from the celebrated sermon of Dr. Arnold's on Christian Education. Matthew Arnold smiled affectionately at him, drooping his head sideways in his direction, while he patted his shoulder, and said, 'Very graceful and appropriate, my dear Benson, but we must not take for Gospel everything that dear Dr. Arnold said.'

It was incidents and sayings such as these-half-genial, half-ironical, and not really quite tactful-that gave Matthew Arnold the reputation for conscious superiority which the reality

so instantly belied. It was only necessary to be once in his presence to know, with a certainty that could never be shaken, that he was the kindest, most amiable, and most delightful of men. He was simple, humorous, sweet-tempered, and natural. Yet the tradition persistently lingers that there was something supercilious and disdainful about him. Perhaps the tone of his writings, which have been described as 'painfully kind,' like a sage pleading graciously with a stubborn and stupid child, his magnificent manner, his dramatic eyeglass, may have created this impression. He was thought to be affected and academic. Probably, too, this view of him was augmented by Mr. Mallock's delightful satire, the 'New Republic,' where Mr. Luke, who stands for Arnold, is depicted as languid, affected, and patronising. Yet his letters alone, which are really almost too homely for publication, might have disposed of this strange perversion. Even his liberal use of irony-that large, courteous, Socratic irony, which plays lambently over the type, and seldom scorches the individual-never made him unpopular; and in private life he was simply irresistible.

He was born in 1822 at Laleham, near Staines, in the great alluvial plain of the Thames. His father, Dr. Arnold, was then an unknown man, making an income by taking pupils. Two more diverse temperaments than those of father and son could hardly be selected. Dr. Arnold was earnest and strenuous, with the kind of passionate idealism that, while it inspires the enthusiastic with the same intense quality of emotion, is apt to take the heart out of more leisurely and easy-going natures. A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion. Dr. Arnold was a hero of men: he had a Herculean task to perform, and he performed it with marvellous courage and industry. But such a spirit flies abroad like flame, and withers where it does not ignite. It is impossible not to feel that Dr. Arnold would have regarded his son's religious writings with shame and dislike. And yet, strange to say, both father and son were attacking very much the same things and championing the same cause. Dr. Arnold hated tyranny, and had the true Protestant spirit. The son loved grace and light, and hated stupidity and conventional ineptitude. But the difficulty with such natures

as Dr. Arnold's, with their intense capacity of translating theory into practical life, with their sharply defined principles, their ardour of hope, is that they cannot concede to others more liberty than they are themselves determined to possess. Dr. Arnold's liberalism was part of a very clear theory of government and practice. He did not wish others to be free on their own lines, but upon his own. He gave his boys liberty with a generous hand, but woe betide them if they extended that liberty; they had then, in Dr. Arnold's mind, abused it. Neither had Dr. Arnold a sense of humour. The ironical attitude, the half-pathetic, half-amused contemplation of perversities and stupidities, which you can perceive, but cannot terminate, was abhorrent to him. It was a kind of cynical trifling with the urgent issues of life. There is evidence that father and son did not wholly harmonise in the schooldays of the latter. But, if Dr. Arnold had lived to be an old man, it is difficult to say what would have ensued. Matthew Arnold's filial piety was so strong, he was so

decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness,

that he would have very possibly suppressed opinions the avowal of which would have caused his father unmitigated pain. But Dr. Arnold died in 1842, when his son was an undergraduate at Balliol, and the collision never came in sight.

Matthew Arnold's Oxford career was not an entire success. He only obtained a Second Class in the final Classical Schools. But this, as in the case of Newman and Clough, was more than atoned for by an Oriel Fellowship, which was still considered the highest intellectual honour that Oxford could bestow upon a young man of promise.

He went for a time to Rugby as a master, and then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who was one of those quiet imponderable personal forces in mid-Victorian politics to which history inevitably does scanty justice. Lord Lansdowne led the House of Lords, and was consulted on every matter of political importance. He was a strong Whig, at a time when Whig opinions were still on the side of progress. Whiggery now seems a disagreeable blend of privilege and democracy, combining a convenient belief in popular liberty with a still stronger belief in personal prestige. Matthew Arnold's politics, nominally

Liberal, were to the end influenced by the bias communicated to them by the serene dignity of his old chief. Yet the period of indoctrination was short enough. A political secretaryship is a fleeting thing; and within four years Matthew Arnold was appointed to an Inspectorship of Schools, a post which he held for thirty-two years.

It is natural, I think, to over-estimate the services which Matthew Arnold rendered to the cause of national education. He had, of course, a perception of the fact that if the democracy is to rule the State, the only hope is to educate the democracy up to its vote, and to give it an inkling of what political progress is. But his real concern lay with secondary education, and, though he was a kindly and sympathetic inspector, it is clear that his ideal of education was built upon the old humanistic basis. He overrated the force of classical culture, and he did not perceive that what, under earlier conditions, had been a real tincture of mental habit, was becoming, under modern conditions, a merely sentimental veneer. The modern function of education, in its civic aspect, is to initiate the youth of the country into clear conceptions of the possible reconstruction of political stability under democratic conditions. Matthew Arnold had a theoretical sympathy with the possibilities of scientific education, but his real sympathies lay with the attainment of literary culture. Hence he suffered from the inevitable backwardness of mind which befalls all those who can only meet actual difficulties, arising out of changed conditions, with a vaguely lyrical proffer of ancient complacencies. He was in favour of State supervision and publicity in education, but the result of his own and like-minded efforts was to establish a system of primary education which corresponds very little with the needs of the class educated; while secondary education, which was, and is, in urgent need of simplification and co-ordination, has been left in the hands of monopolists and traditional exponents of outworn theories. The secondary schools of England are still as much in need as ever of the qualities which Matthew Arnold endeavoured to enforce, while the effect of the type of primary education adopted has been to upset and subvert traditional class-feeling, without providing any social outlet for the type thus educated. It is useless to organise education without knowing very clearly what end is in sight. Matthew Arnold had little grasp of social eventualities. He knew clearly enough what attitude of mind he desired to