necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case
have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent
was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but
much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests'
offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted--though he felt
and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for
public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his
life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other
place of the kind inspires--whether he would have been long at home
there as a resident. For the place has at once a certain republicanism
and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the
aspiring and restless spirit of the author of _Switzerland_. None
of her sons is important to Oxford--the meanest of them has in his
sonship the same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much at Mr
Arnold's heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or
share his qualities.

However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the
fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went
circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would
have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the
Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany.
Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined
system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd,
there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and
would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all
reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly
all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his
lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short
apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private