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206 boys positively seemed to enjoy themselves most. There were moments when he almost lost faith in his whole system of education, when he began to doubt whether some far more radical reforms than any he had attempted might not be necessary, before the multitude of children under his charge—shouting and gamboling, and yet plunged all the while deep in moral evil—could ever be transformed into a set of Christian gentlemen. But then he remembered his general principles, the conduct of Jehovah with the Chosen People, and the childhood of the human race. No, it was for him to make himself, as one of his pupils afterwards described him, in the words of Bacon, "kin to God in spirit"; he would rule the school majestically from on high. He would deliver a series of sermons analysing "the six vices" by which "great schools were corrupted, and changed from the likeness of God's temple to that of a den of thieves." He would exhort, he would denounce, he would sweep through the corridors, he would turn the pages of Facciolati's lexicon more imposingly than ever; and the rest he would leave to the Præpostors in the Sixth Form.

Upon the boys in the Sixth Form, indeed, a strange burden would seem to have fallen. Dr. Arnold himself was very well aware of this. "I cannot deny," he told them in a sermon, "that you have an anxious duty—a duty which some might suppose was too heavy for your years"; and every term he pointed out to them, in a short address, the responsibilities of their position, and impressed upon them "the enormous influence" they possessed "for good or for evil." Nevertheless most youths of seventeen, in spite of the warnings of their elders, have a singular trick of carrying moral burdens lightly. The Doctor might preach and look grave; but young Brooke was ready enough to preside at a fight behind the Chapel, though he was in the Sixth, and knew that fighting was against the rules. At their best, it may be supposed that the Præpostors administered a kind of barbaric justice;