Keble's feelings, though on different grounds; and I did not write to you, though with many a wish to do so, because one feels instinctively repelled, I think, from communicating with an old friend, except on a footing of equal confidence and respect; and I doubted your feeling these towards me, though I did not doubt your kindness and affection. But one or two men have behaved towards me in the course of my life just as they might have done, being kind hearted and affectionate men, if I had committed some great crime, which rendered respect or friendship impossible, though old kindness might still survive it. And this is hard to bear, when, far from being conscious of such great fault in myself in the points which are objected to, I hold my faith in those points to be the most certain truth in Christ, and the opposite opinions to be a most grievous and mischievous error, which I only will not, in the individual cases of those holding it, regard as they regard my supposed error, because I know that along with it there exist a truth and a goodness which I am clearly warranted in loving and in believing to be Christ's Spirit's work. But your last visit was so friendly :-I perceived, too, that you could bear things with which you might not agree, and saw and felt with satisfaction how much there was with which you did agree, that I was altogether revived, and, if I may use St. Paul's language, my heart was enlarged," and I ventured to tell Fellowes to send you my new volume of Sermons, as to a man who might not and would not agree with all that he found there, but yet would not be shocked at it, but would believe that it was intended to serve the same cause to which he was himself devoted. And I have had the full intention of writing to you as in times past, if you again sailed to India, or if you remained in England; of which intention be this present letter the first fruits and pledge.

CCLXXIX. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, August 12, 1841.

I thank you very much for your letter, although, to say the truth, there were some expressions in it which a little disappointed me. I do not know, in point of fact, what our differences of opinion are, and with regard to Newmanism, I had supposed that we were mostly in agreement. I should have expected, therefore, that generally you would have agreed with the Introduction to my last volume; and that your differences would have been rather with some parts of the appendices. But I do not mean by disappointment the finding more or less of disagreement in opinion, but much more the finding that you still look upon the disagreement, be it what it may, as a serious matter, by which I understand you to mean a thing deserving of moral censure; as if, for example, one had a friend whom one respected and loved for many good qualities, but whose temper was so irritable, that it made a considerable abatement in one's estimate of him. Of course, he who believes his own views to be true, must believe the oppo site views to be error; but the great point in our judgment and feelings towards men seems to be not to confound error with fault. I scarcely know one amongst my dearest friends, except Bunsen, whom I do not believe to be in some point or other in grave error; I differ very widely from Whately on many points, as I differ from you and from Keble on others; but the sense of errors is with me something quite distinct from the sense of fault, and if I were required to name Keble's faults or yours, it would never enter into my head to think of his Newmanism or your opinions, whatever they may be, which differ from my own. The fault would be in my judgment, and, you will forgive me for saying so, the feeling as Keble does, and as Í hoped that you now did not, towards an error as if it were a fault, and judging it morally. We are speaking, you will observe, of such errors as are consistent with membership, not only in Christianity, but in the same particular

Church; and I cannot think that we have a right to regard such as faults, though we have.quite a right, a right which I would largely exercise, to protest against them as mischievous,-mischievous, it may be, in a very high degree, as I think Newmanism is.

CCLXXX. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, September 22, 1841.

I must write a few lines to you before we leave Fox How, because my first arrival at Rugby is likely to be beset with business, and I fear that your time of sailing is drawing near. Most heartily do I thank you for your last letter, and you may be sure that I will not trouble you on the subject any farther. Nor do I feel it necessary, for although it may be that there is something which I could wish otherwise still, yet I feel now that it need not and will not disturb our intercourse, and therefore I can write to you with perfect content.

You are going again to your work, which I feel sure is and will be blessed both to others and yourself. I should be well pleased if one of my sons went out hereafter to labour in the same field, but what line they will take seems very hard to determine. They do not seem inclined to follow Medicine, and I have the deepest abhorrence of the Law, so that two professions seem set aside, and for trade, I have neither capital nor connexion. Meanwhile I wish them to do well at the University, which will be an arming them in a manner for whatever may open to them. We shall leave this place, I think, on Friday. This long stay has doubly endeared it to us all, and though I am thankful to be able to get back to Rugby, yet there will be a sad wrench in leaving Fox How. It is not the mere outward beauty, but the friendliness and agreeableness of the neighbourhood in which we mix, simply as inhabitants of the country, and not as at Rugby, in an official relation.

The School is summoned for the 9th of October, but many of the boys will return, I think, on Saturday, so that the work will begin probably on Monday, but as I have some of the Sixth Form down here, I have not the leisure for my History I could have desired. I trust that you will go on with your Journal, and that you will hereafter allow large portions of it to be printed. I am persuaded that it will do more towards enabling us to realize India to ourselves, than any thing which has yet appeared.

CHAPTER X.

LAST YEAR.-PROFESSORSHIP OF MODERN HISTORY AT OXFORD.LAST DAYS AT RUGBY.-DEATH.-CONCLUSION.

It was now the fourteenth year of Dr. Arnold's stay at Rugby. The popular prejudice against him, which for the last few years had been rapidly subsiding, now began actually to turn in his favour; his principles of education, which at one time had provoked so much outcry, met with general acquiescence;-the school, with each successive half-year, rose in numbers beyond the limit within which he endeavoured to confine it, and seemed likely to take a higher rank than it had ever assumed before;-the alarm which had once existed against him in the theological world was now directed to an opposite quarter; his fourth volume of Sermons, with its Introduction, had been hailed by a numerous party with enthusiastic approbation; and many who had long hung back from him with suspicion and dislike, now seemed inclined to gather round him as their champion and leader.

His own views and objects meanwhile remained the same. But the feeling of despondency, with which for some time past he had regarded public affairs, now assumed a new phase, which, though it might possibly have passed away with the natural course of events, coloured his mind too strongly during this period to be passed over without notice.

His interest, indeed, in political and ecclesiastical matters still continued; and his sermon on Easter Day, 1842, stands almost if not absolutely alone in the whole course of his school sermons, for the severity and vehemence of its denunciations against what he conceived to be the evil tendencies of the Oxford School. But he entertained also a growing sense of his isolation from all parties, whether from those with whom he had vainly tried to co-operate in former years, or those who, from fear of a common enemy, were now anxious to claim him as an ally; and it was not without something of a sympathetic feeling that, in his Lectures of this year, he dwelt so earnestly on the fate of his favourite Falkland, "who protests so strongly against the evil of his party, that he had rather die by their hands than in their company-but die he must;

for there is no place left on earth where his sympathies can breathe freely; he is obliged to leave the country of his affections, and life elsewhere would be intolerable." And it is impossible not to observe how, in the course of sermons preached during this year, he turned from the active "course" of the Christian life, with its outward "helps and hindrances," to its inward "hopes and fears," and its final "close;" or how, in his habitual views at this time, he seemed disposed, for the first time in his life, to regard the divisions of the Church as irreparable, the restoration of the Church as all but impracticable, and "to cling," as he expresses himself in one of his letters, "not from choice, but from necessity, to the Protestant tendency of laying the whole stress on Christian Religion, and adjourning his idea of the Church sine die." It was in this spirit, also, that he began to attach a new importance to the truths relating to a man's own individual convictions, which, though always occupying a prominent place in his thoughts, had naturally less hold upon his sympathies than those which affect man in relation to society. The controversy on Justification acquired greater interest in his eyes than it had assumed before; and he felt himself called, for the first time, to unfold his own views on the subject. The more abstract and metaphysical grounds of truth, divine and human, which he had formerly been accustomed to regard in its purely practical aspect, were now becoming invested in his mind with a new value. And, whilst in his latest studies of early Christian history, in the Epistles of Cyprian, he dwelt with an increasing sympathy and admiration, which penetrated even into his private devotions, on the endurance and self-devotion of the early martyrs, and on the instruction to be derived from contemplating an age "when martyrdom was a real thing to which every Christian might, without any remarkable accident, be exposed," he was also much struck with the indications which these Epistles seemed to him to contain, that the Church had been corrupted not only by the Judaic spirit of priesthood, but even more by the Gentile spirit of government, stifling the sense of individual responsibility. "The treatment of the Lapsi, by Cyprian," he said, "is precisely in the spirit of the treatment of the Capuans by the Roman Senate, of which I was reading at the same time for my Roman History. I am myself so much inclined to the idea of a strong social bond, that I ought not to be suspected of any tendency to anarchy; yet I am beginning to think that the idea may be overstrained, and that this attempt to merge the soul and will of the individual man in the general body is, when fully developed, contrary to the very essence of Christianity."

Such were the general feelings with which he entered on this year-a year, on every account, of peculiar interest to himself and his scholars. It had opened with an unusual mortality in the

1 Sermons XIII.-XXXIV. in the posthumous volume, entitled," Christian Life; its Hopes, its Fears, and its Close."

2 See Sermons, vol. v. p. 316.

school. One of his colleagues, and seven of his pupils, mostly from causes unconnected with each other, had been carried off within its first quarter; and the return of the boys had been delayed beyond the accustomed time in consequence of a fever lingering in Rugby, during which period he had a detachment of the higher Forms residing near or with him at Fox How. It was during his stay here that he received from Lord Melbourne the offer of the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford, vacant by the death of Dr. Nares. How joyfully he caught at this unexpected realization of his fondest hopes for his latest years, and how bright a gleam it imparted to the sunset of his life, will best be expressed by his own letters and by the account of his Lectures.

CCLXXXI. TO THE REV. DR. HAWKINS.

Fox How, August 21, 1841.

You may perhaps have heard my news already, but I must tell you myself, because you are so much connected with my pleasure in it. I have accepted the Regius Professorship of Modern History, chiefly to gratify my earnest longing to have some direct connexion with Oxford; and I have thought with no small delight that I should now see something of you in the natural course of things every year, for my wife and myself hope to take lodgings for ten days or a fortnight every Lent Term, at the end of our Christmas holidays, for me to give my Lectures. I could not resist the temptation of accepting the office, though it will involve some additional work, and if I live to leave Rugby, the income, though not great, will be something to us when we are poor people at Fox How. But to get a regular situation in Oxford would have tempted me, I believe, had it been accompanied by no salary at all.

CCLXXXII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Fox How, September 1, 1841.

In the midst of my perplexities, practical and historical, I am going to indulge myself by writing to you. My practical perplexity is about the meeting of the school, which in either way involves a great responsibility, and the chance of much inconvenience and loss. I believe that we might meet next week without any real imprudence, and that the amount of fever in Rugby is but trifling; but if a single boy were to catch it, after the two fatal cases of last half-year, the panic would be so great that we should not be able to keep the school together, or to reassemble it till after Christ

mas.

My historical perplexity has caused me many hours of work, and I cannot yet see land. It shows to me how the most notorious facts may be corrupted, even very soon after the occurrence, when they are subjected to no careful and judicious inquiry. Hannibal's march from Capua upon Rome, to effect a diversion for the besieged town, is of course one of the most striking parts of the whole war. I want to give it in detail, and with all the painting possible. But it is wholly uncertain by what road he advanced upon Rome, whether by the Latin road direct from Capua, or by an enormous circuit through Samnium,—just the road which we took last summer from Capua to Reate, and so from Reate on Rome. Cælius Antipater, Polybius, and Appian, all either assert or imply the latter. Livy says the former, and gives an account of the march, from Fabius, I think, or Cincius, which is circumstantial and highly probable; but he is such a simpleton,