the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father's school.
Here he only remained a year, and entered Rugby in August 1837. He
remained there for four years, obtaining an open Balliol scholarship
in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841. In 1840 he had
also gained the prize for poetry at Rugby itself with _Alaric at
Rome_, a piece which was immediately printed, but never reprinted
by its author, though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition
of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at the seven years
after his death.

It is an observation seldom falsified, that such exercises, by poets
of the higher class, display neither their special characteristics,
nor any special characteristics at all. Matthew Arnold's was not one
of the exceptions. It is very much better than most school prize
poems: it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer
with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry
in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a
boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for
rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "palaces" and "days"). It manages a
rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed _ababcc_ and ending
with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its
special danger. And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught
are interesting and abode with him, such as the _anadiplosis_--

"Yes, there are stories registered on high,
Yes, there are stains Time's fingers cannot blot";

in which kind he was to produce some years later the matchless

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,