Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/52

 He was also a fluent writer of English verse. Already an indefatigable sightseer, he showed signs of those powers of picturesque description in which he was, in later life, unsurpassed. His diary of a visit paid to the Pyrenees in 1828 contains passages which are not only precocious in their promise, but striking in themselves.

On 31 Jan. 1829 he entered Rugby school, where Dr. Arnold had been installed as headmaster in the previous summer. His progress up the school was rapid. In August 1831 his promotion into the sixth form brought him into close contact with Dr. Arnold, whose influence was the ‘lodestar of his life.’ His respect for his headmaster quickly ripened into affection, and rose to veneration. ‘Most sincerely,’ he writes in May 1834, ‘must I thank God for His goodness in placing me here to live with Arnold. Yet I always feel that the happiness is a dangerous one, and that loving him and admiring him as I do to the very verge of all love and admiration that can be paid to man, I fear I have passed the limit and made him my idol, and that in all I may be but serving God for man's sake’ (, Life of Dean Stanley, i. 102). At Rugby, where Stanley won all the five school distinctions, he held a position which was almost unique at a public school. In spite of his incapacity for games, he so impressed the roughest of his contemporaries that they recognised in him a being of a higher order than themselves, not to be judged by their conventional standards (see the character of ‘Arthur’ in Tom Brown's Schooldays).

In November 1833 Stanley gained a scholarship at Balliol, and in the following October went into residence at Oxford. There he was plunged into the midst of influences hostile—on religious, political, and social questions—to those of his ‘oracle and idol,’ Dr. Arnold. Even at this stage of his career his chivalry in defending friends, detachment from party ties, and power of criticising those whom he most reverenced were conspicuous. Though the names of Faber, W. G. Ward, Marriott, and Keble often occur in his letters, and though for a time he felt ‘the strong attraction of Newmanism,’ he remained staunch to the views which he brought with him from Rugby. At Oxford he won the Ireland scholarship in 1837, and in the same year the Newdegate prize for English verse (‘The Gypsies:’ see Letters and Verses of Dean Stanley, pp. 29–38), and a first class in the final classical schools. In July 1838 he was elected a fellow of University College, finding that his views on church and state would probably prevent his election at Balliol. He also gained in 1839 the chancellor's Latin essay, and in 1840 the chancellor's English essay and the Ellerton theological essay.

In December 1839 he was, after prolonged hesitation, ordained by the bishop of Oxford. His reluctance to take orders proceeded not from any doubts respecting the central doctrines of Christianity, but from the stringent subscription to the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian creed which was then exacted from candidates for ordination. So great was his difficulty in this respect that he did not expect to take priest's orders. In the hope of procuring some relaxation in the stringency of the terms of subscription, he helped to promote a petition for the relief of the clergy, which was presented to the House of Lords in 1840. The petition was rejected, but Stanley adhered to his point with his usual tenacity. In 1863, when Lord Ebury's bill was before the House of Lords, his brilliant ‘Letter to the Bishop of London’ (published in 1863) effectively supported the proposal. The bill was lost. But a royal commission reported in favour of relaxation, and in 1865 effect was given to their recommendations by an act of parliament (28 & 29 Victoria, c. 122), and by the corresponding alterations which convocation made in the canons.

In July 1840 Stanley left England for a prolonged tour through Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Sicily. The tour was memorable. It confirmed his love of foreign travel; it also revealed to himself and his friends his descriptive powers. Henceforward scarcely a year passed without his making some more or less lengthy tour in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America. External nature scarcely attracted him, except as the background of history or human interest. But no one ever experienced a keener delight in seeing places which were connected with famous people, striking events, impressive legends, or scenes in the works of poets and novelists. Few persons have rivalled him in his powers of communicating his own enthusiasms to his readers, of peopling every spot with living actors, of seizing the natural features which coloured local occurrences and modified events, of noting analogies in apparent opposites, or detecting resemblances beneath superficial differences. It is from the exercise of these gifts that his letters derive their charm and his historical writings their value.

After his return to England in May 1841, Stanley found Oxford divided into two hostile camps, with neither of which could he ally himself. So uncongenial was the atmosphere of religious animosity that he con-