Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/128

  Duty of conceding the Roman Catholic Claims,' in the course of which he ruthlessly, exposed the incompetence of the clergy as a body to deal with such questions. In 1831 he started a newspaper, chiefly to plead for more generous treatment of the lower classes; and though this paper failed, he continued to write on similar subjects in the same outspoken style, almost to the end of his life. In 1833, when the very existence of the national church seemed to be in peril, he issued, in the 'Principles of Church Reform,' a powerful appeal for comprehension, as at once right in itself, and the only escape from the 'calamity' of disestablishment. And when, in 1836, the dominant party in Oxford attempted to keep Dr. Hampden out of a professorship on the ground of alleged heresy, he assailed them with unmeasured vehemence in the 'Edinburgh Review.'

The first of these publications so irritated the clergy that some years afterwards the Archbishop of Canterbury objected to Arnold's preaching Bishop Stanley's consecration sermon, on the ground of the offence that it would give them. For years his principles, tenets, and proceedings at Rugby were the subject, in certain tory papers, of abuse little short of libellous. The article in the 'Edinburgh Review' nearly led to the abrupt termination of his mastership. Disturbed by the stir which it created, the trustees wrote formally to ask whether he was the author; and when he declined to give any answer to the question a motion of censure, which would have led to his resignation, was all but carried. To these annoyances was often added the worse pain of feeling that as to many of the objects nearest to his heart he stood practically alone. With the exception perhaps of Chevalier Bunsen, the eminent Prussian minister, whose friendship, made at Rome in 1827, he counted as one of the chief blessings of his life, he knew no man altogether like-minded. Many who admired his freedom of thought could not understand his firm adherence to the old faith; many who shared his reverent spirit were shocked by his liberal opinions. Thus in labouring to liberalise the national church he displeased alike his liberal friends who wished to destroy it, and his church friends who wished to keep it narrow. Thus, having joined the new university of London, chiefly in the hope of making it an engine of education at once religious and unsectarian, he found that he could get no support in this design, and withdrew in bitter disappointment.

But for all this he found ample solace in his school duties and his literary labours in connection with them, in frank and friendly intercourse with old pupils, in his own happy family circle, and especially in the seclusion of the home which he had made for himself at Fox How, in a beautiful nook among the Westmoreland hills.

At length, about the year 1840, the tide turned. The merits of the schoolmaster, the high character of the man, came to be generally recognised, even where his opinions could find no acceptance. The numbers of the school rose beyond the limit within which he had wished to keep. Nowhere was the change of feeling towards him more marked than at Oxford; and when, in 18-41, he was appointed regius professor of history at that university, the delight with which he returned to his old haunts to deliver his inaugural lecture was greatly enhanced by his finding himself treated with cordial respect by those whose alienation he had most deeply regretted. At the same time a change came over his own spirit. Not that he bated one jot of his devotion to 'that great work,' the extension of Christ's church, or of his hostility to everything which seemed to retard it, whether toryism or jacobinism, sectarianism or indifferentism, superstition or unbelief; while to the last he continued to denounce tractarianism as a revival of the very judaizing spirit against which St. Paul fought. But the impatient fervour passed away. It was not only that some of his views on particular subjects underwent modification, but there came a general relaxation of tension, a disposition to trust more to time, and to bring his own immediate efforts and aspirations more within the bounds of what was practicable.

On this more tranquil phase of life he had hardly entered when, in the fulness of life and activity, on 12 June 1842, the last day of his forty-seventh year, he was suddenly cut off by an attack of angina pectoris. A slight previous illness had passed away without causing any alarm; but those nearest and dearest to him remembered afterwards to have observed a 'visible ripening for heaven;' and a touching entry in his private diary, written late on the night of the 11th, seems to indicate something of a foreboding that his work on earth was drawing to a close. He left a widow, who survived him for thirty-one years, and nine children, of whom the eldest son, Matthew, is the distinguished poet and critic, and the eldest daughter is the wife of Mr. W. E. Forster.

Dr. Arnold's chief published works are as follows:—
 * 1) An edition of Thucydides, especially valuable for its geographical notes, and for the light thrown on the constitutional history of the period of the Peloponnesian war. The first volume of the first edition