It was as a schoolmaster, however, that Dr. Arnold was strikingly great. "Teaching was the business of his life, and in instruction his greatness was most conspicuous. His spirit was instinct with generous sympathy, which delights in contact with the freshness and ardor of youth." When he entered Rugby School, it was at a very low ebb, but it soon rose rapidly in public estimation, and the success of its pupils at the universities was marked and striking. He was not only an admirable scholar and skilful instructor, but he had that enthusiastic love for literature, and of every thing that tends to exalt and purify our nature, which seldom fails to inspire with the same ardor all minds that are susceptible of it. Yet his pupils were indebted to him for something far more valuable than learning, or the love of learning; for his constant, and, for the most part, successful endeavors to implant in their minds the noblest principles, the most just sentiments, not by precept only, but by that without which precepts are generally unavailing,-example.

As a theologian, Dr. Arnold was truly catholic in his views. He had little regard for systems of theology: he went to the fountain-head, and in his interpretation and application of the Scriptures, he so signalized himself that. in the judgment of his friends, this was the sphere for which he was most highly fitted to shine with eminent usefulness. In theological controversy he showed great ability and exerted great influence. He was a reformer in church and state, and to REFORM he consecrated his most earnest zeal.

As a man, he was remarkable for the uniform sweetness, the patience, and the forbearing meekness of his disposition. It was his constant aim to bring his religious principles into the daily practice of life, not by the continued introduction of religious phraseology, but by a single-hearted study to realize the Christian character. He was an ardent lover of truth, and when he found it, he uttered it with the utmost fearlessness. "He was an innate Christian; the bad passions might almost be said to have been omitted in his constitution. But his truth and honesty were unflinchingly regardless of his own interest, or of temporary consequences." Such is an imperfect outline of the character of this great and good man.2

“Our readers must pass a day with Arnold. They will see of how homely and plain a thread, to all appearance, it was composed. Only, to make it more impressive, the day we will choose shall be his last. It differs in itself in no respect from other days, except as it is more of a holiday, since it happens to be also the concluding day of the half year. On the morrow he was to shake his wings for Westmoreland. The morning is taken up with an examination in 'Ranke's History of the Popes.' Then come the distribution of prizes, the taking leave of the boys who are going, and all the mechanical details of

1 Read an excellent article on Dr. Arnold in the 5th volume of the New Englander; also Edinburgh Review, lxxvi. 357, and North British Review, ii. 403.

"He will strike those who study him more closely as a complete character,-complete in its union of moral and intellectual gifts, and in the steady growth and development of both: for his greatness did not consist in the preeminence of any single quality, but in several remarkable powers, thoroughly leavened and pervaded by an ever-increasing moral nobleness."-Quarterly Review, Ixxiv. 507.

"The basis of Arnold's morale reminds us of

all we know of that of another celebrated schoolmaster (not very popular in his day, and no great favorite with high churchmen); we mean John Milton. There is the same purity and directness about them both; the same predominance of the graver, not to say sterner, elements; the same confidence, vehemence, and elevation. They both so lived in their great Taskmaster's eye' as to verify Bacon's obser vation in his Essay on Atheism,-made themselves of kin to God in spirit, and raised their nature by means of a higher nature than their own."-Edinburgh Review, lxxxi. 202.

finishing for the holidays; his usual walk and bath follow; dinner next, where he talked with great pleasure to several guests of his early geological studies under Buckland, and of a recent visit to Naseby with Thomas Carlyle. An interval in the evening leaves room for an earnest conversation with an old pupil on some differences in their views of the Tractarian theology; after which the day rounds off with an annual supper to some of the sixth-form boys. Arnold retired to bed, apparently in perfect health. But before laying down his head upon the pillow, from which he was never more to raise it, he put his seal upon this busy and cheerful day by an entry in his diary, which (reading it as we now read it) seems of prophetic import. Yet, in truth, these transitions had become so familiar to him that, in passing from what was most spiritual, he was hardly conscious of the change. He kept the communication between this world and the next so freely open-angels ascending and descending that he blended the influences of both, of things temporal and things eternal, into one consistent whole.

FROM HIS JOURNAL.

Saturday Evening, June 11.-The day after to-morrow is my birthday, if I am permitted to live to see it,-my forty-seventh birthday since my birth. How large a portion of my life on earth is already passed! And then,-what is to follow this life? How visibly my outward work seems contracting and softening away into the gentler employments of old age! In one sense, how nearly can I now say "Vixi"! and I thank God that, as far as ambition is concerned, it is, I trust, fully mortified. I have no desire other than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to a higher. Still, there are works which, with God's permission, I would do before the night cometh, especially that great work, if I might be permitted to take part in it. But, above all, let me mind my own personal work, to keep myself pure, and zealous, and believing,-laboring to do God's will, yet not anxious that it should be done by me rather than by others, if God disapproves of my doing it.

"What a midnight epitaph! How ominous and how unconscious! How tender and sublime! He woke next morning, between five and six, in pain. It was angina pectoris. At eight o'clock he was dead!"'

DOMINION OF NAPOLEON.

Ten years afterwards there broke out by far the most alarming danger of universal dominion which had ever threatened Europe. The most military people in Europe became engaged in a war for their very existence. Invasion on the frontiers, civil war and all imaginable horrors raging within, the ordinary relations of life went to wrack, and every Frenchman became a soldier. It was

1 Edinburgh Review, lxxxi. 198.

a multitude numerous as the hosts of Persia, but animated by the courage and skill and energy of the old Romans. One thing alone was wanting,-that which Pyrrhus said the Romans wanted to enable them to conquer the world,-a general and a ruler like himself. There was wanted a master-hand to restore and maintain peace at home, and to concentrate and direct the immense military resources of France against her foreign enemies. And such an one appeared in Napoleon. Pacifying La Vendée, receiving back the emigrants, restoring the church, remodelling the law, personally absolute, yet carefully preserving and maintaining all the great points which the nation had won at the revolution, Napoleon united in himself not only the power but the whole will of France, and that power and will were guided by a genius for war such as Europe had never seen since Cæsar. The effect was absolutely magical. In November, 1799, he was made First Consul; he found France humbled by defeats, his Italian conquests lost, his allies invaded, his own frontier threatened. He took the field in May, 1800, and in June the whole fortune of the war was changed, and Austria driven out of Lombardy by the victory of Marengo. Still the flood of the tide rose higher and higher, and every successive wave of its advance swept away a kingdom. Earthly state has never reached a prouder pinnacle than when Napoleon in June, 1812, gathered his army at Dresden, that mighty host, unequalled in all time, of four hundred and fifty thousand, not men merely, but effective soldiers,—and there received the homage of subject kings. And, now, what was the principal adversary of this tremendous power? by whom was it checked, and resisted, and put down? By none, and by nothing, but the direct and manifest interposition of God. I know of no language so well fitted to describe that victorious advance to Moscow, and the utter humiliation of the retreat, as the language of the prophet with respect to the advance and subsequent destruction of the host of Sennacherib. "When they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses, applies almost literally to that memorable night of frost in which twenty thousand horses perished, and the strength of the French army was utterly broken. Human instruments, no doubt, were employed in the remainder of the work; nor would I deny to Germany and to Prussia the glories of that great year 1813, nor to England the honor of her victories in Spain, or of the crowning victory of Waterloo. But, at the distance of thirty years, those who lived in the time of danger, and remember its magnitude, and now calmly review what there was in human strength to avert it, must acknowledge, I think, beyond all controversy, that the deliverance of Europe from the dominion of Napoleon was effected neither by Russia, nor by Germany, nor by England, but by the hand of God alone.

SUFFERINGS DURING THE SIEGE OF GENOA.

In the autumn of 1799 the Austrians had driven the French out of Lombardy and Piedmont; their last victory of Fossano or Genola had won the fortress of Coni or Cuneo, close under the Alps and at the very extremity of the plain of the Po; the French clung to Italy only by their hold of the Riviera of Genoa, the narrow strip of coast between the Apennines and the sea, which extends from the frontiers of France almost to the mouth of the Arno. Hither the remains of the French force were collected, commanded by General Massena; and the point of chief importance to his defence was the city of Genoa. Napoleon had just returned from Egypt, and was become First Consul; but he could not be expected to take the field till the following spring, and till then Massena was hopeless of relief from without; every thing was to depend on his own pertinacity. The strength of his army made it impossible to force it in such a position as Genoa; but its very numbers, added to the population of a great city, held out to the enemy a hope of reducing it by famine; and as Genoa derives most of its supplies by sea, Lord Keith, the British naval commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, lent the assistance of his naval force to the Austrians, and, by the vigilance of his cruisers, the whole coasting trade right and left along the Riviera was effectually cut off. It is not at once that the inhabitants of a great city, accustomed to the daily sight of well-stored shops and an abundant market, begin to realize the idea of scarcity, or that the wealthy classes of society, who have never known any other state than one of abundance and luxury, begin seriously to conceive of famine. But the shops were emptied, and the storehouses began to be drawn upon, and no fresh supply or hope of supply appeared. Winter passed away, and spring returned, so early and so beautiful on that garden-like coast, sheltered as it is from the north winds by its belt of mountains, and open to the full rays of the southern sun. Spring returned, and clothed the hill-sides within the lines with its fresh verdure. But that verdure was no longer the mere delight of the careless eye of luxury, refreshing the citizens by its liveliness and softness when they rode or walked up thither from the city to enjoy the surpassing beauty of the prospect. The green hill-sides were now visited for a very different object: ladies of the highest rank might be seen cutting up every plant which it was possible to turn to food, and bearing home the common weeds of our road-sides as a most precious treasure. The French general pitied the distress of the people; but the lives and strength of his garrison seemed to him more important than the lives of the Genoese; and such provisions as remained were reserved in the first place for the French army. Scarcity became utter want, and want became famine. In the

most gorgeous palaces of that gorgeous city, no less than in the humblest tenements of its humblest poor, death was busy; not the momentary death of battle or massacre, nor the speedy death of pestilence, but the lingering and most miserable death of famine. Infants died before their parents' eyes; husbands and wives lay down to expire together. A man whom I saw at Genoa in 1825 told me that his father and two of his brothers had been starved to death in this fatal siege. So it went on, till in the month of June, when Napoleon had already descended from the Alps into the plain of Lombardy, the misery became unendurable, and Massena surrendered. But, before he did so, twenty thousand innocent persons, old and young, women and children, had died by the most horrible of deaths which humanity can endure. Other horrors which occurred besides during this blockade I pass over; the agonizing death of twenty thousand innocent and helpless persons requires nothing to be added to it.

It is astonishing how, amid all his public duties, Dr. Arnold found time to maintain such an extensive epistolary correspondence; and I think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find so many wise and practical remarks upon men and things, in religion, literature, politics, &c., in the letters of any other English author, as are to be found in his letters. From them I select the following-detached, indeed, but most suggestive and instructive-senti ments:

THE ENCOURAGEMENTS AND DISCOURAGEMENTS OF THE

SCHOOLMASTERS

To Sir J. Pusley-18.28.

Since I began this letter I have had some of the troubles of school-keeping, and one of those specimens of the evils of boynature which make me always unwilling to undergo the responsi bility of advising any man to send his son to a public school There has been a system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good; and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very account; and, likewise, instances of boys joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they would have rather shunned it; and the exceedingly small number of boys who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordi

1 Read Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., by Arthur P. Stanley, M.A., two volumes, a very interesting and instructive work.

The diligent and pious teacher, who properly instructeth and traineth the young, can never be fully rewarded with money. If I were to leave my office as preacher, I would

next choose that of schoolmaster or teacher; for I know that, next to preaching, this is the greatest, best, and most useful vocation; and I am not quite sure which of the two is the better; for it is hard to reform old sinners, with whom the preacher has to do, while the young tree can be made to bend without breaking."-MARTIN LUTHER,