Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/66

44 Arnold at Rugby, a favorite fellow-student of Matthew Arnold, of Jowett, of Arthur Stanley, and of men of that stamp at Oxford, and, throughout his life, a favorite friend of most of the men of his own profession, who were fortunate enough to know him well. His nature, like much of his work, seems to have been peculiarly lovable and sweet; and he even won the good will of Thomas Carlyle, who declared that Clough was "a diamond sifted out of the general rubbish-heap."

This was the general rubbish-heap of London, in the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century. There are supposed to be no rubbish-heaps, general or individual, in Oxford! Clough gained the Rugby Balliol Scholarship, and went to Oxford in 1837, a few years before Arnold. In 1842 he won a Fellowship at Oriel, then considered a great distinction.

While Charles Calverley was at Harrow, he wrote certain clever Latin verses (it is said without effort), on the strength of which he was admitted to Balliol in the autumn of 1850. The next year he won the Chancellor's Prize for another Latin poem. But he was, although in a comparatively harmless way, too wild and too reckless to suit the dons of the institution, and his name was taken off the books in 1852. He went later to Christ's College at Cambridge, where he was better behaved, and