distinction it may owe to the loyalty of such a group of pupils as his
son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was,
if not positively great, a notable and influential person in many
ways. As a historian he was alert and intelligent, though perhaps too
much under the influence of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of
"popular breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows that they are
sailing not with but away from the vulgar. As a scholar he was
ingenious, if not very erudite or deep. He was really a master, and
has been thought by some good judges a great master, of that admirable
late Georgian academic style of English prose, which is almost the
equal of the greatest. But he was, if not exactly _cupidus novarum
rerum_ in Church and State, very ready to entertain them; he was
curiously deficient in logic; and though the religious sense was
strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his son, the heresy--the
foundation of all heresies--that religion is something that you can
"bespeak," that you can select and arrange to your own taste; that it
is not "to take or to leave" at your peril and as it offers itself.

On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had
devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to
school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at
Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son
was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822. He was always enthusiastic
about the Thames valley, though not more so than it deserves, and in
his very earliest letter (January 2, 1848) we find record of a visit,
when he found "the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid
fulness, 'kempshott,'[1] and swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was
only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership
of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where
an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at