THIS is a most genuine, hearty, real, and vivid book-most striking, most glowing, and most pictorial. It gives Dr. Arnold to the life, and portrays the man completely. We may say this without professing to have had more than an exoteric knowledge of Dr. Arnold's character, before we read it, to test the likeness by. There is a kind of intuitive power, however, by which we recognise a good portrait even when we did not know the original. Truth and nature tell their own tale we see when the features are harmonious, when the face is a characteristic one, when the composition is a whole. This book is a clear, full, and rich representation of a particular species of religious mind; what species we mean we shall have occasion to explain farther on. We will take Dr. Arnold, for the present, simply as Mr. Stanley lays him before us, without any comments of our own. And we cannot forbear thus early thanking Mr. Stanley most sincerely for the taste and feeling with which he has managed his own editorial part of the business, and for the tact which has enabled him to carry out the representation of Dr. Arnold's character, opinions, and system, in their very strongest light and most ticklish collision with existing parties, and yet to distinguish throughout between loving the warrior and identifying himself with the combat; which has made him combine the most intense feeling for Arnold in the conflict, and
The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., late Head Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. By ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford. London. 2 vols. 8vo. 1844.