The beginning of some of his later interests may be traced in his earlier amusements and occupations.  He never lost the recollection of the impression produced upon him by the excitement of naval and military affairs, of which he naturally saw and heard much by living at Cowes in the time of the Napoleonic war; and with his playmates he would sail rival toy fleets or act the battles of the Homeric heroes with improvised spears and shields.  He was extremely fond of ballad poetry, and his earliest compositions all ran in that direction.  At Winchester he was noted for his forwardness in history and geography; and there also he gave indications of that mnemonic faculty which in later years showed itself in minute details, extending to the exact state of the weather on particular days, or the exact words or passages he had not seen for twenty years.  The period of his home and school education was too short to exercise much influence on his after life, but he always looked back upon it with tenderness.

In 1811 he was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; in 1814 he took a first class in classics; in 1815 he was made a Fellow of Oriel; and he gained the Chancellor’s prizes for the Latin and English essays in 1815 and 1817.  During his later time at Oxford he took private pupils and read extensively in the libraries.  Meanwhile, he had been led gradually to fix on his future life course.  In December, 1818, he was ordained deacon and next year settled at Laleham, where, in August, 1820, he married Mary Penrose, daughter of the rector of Fledborough, Notts.

At Laleham he remained for nine years, coaching private pupils for the universities.  Here were born six of his nine children; the youngest three, besides one who died in infancy, were born at Rugby.  During this period an essential change and growth of Arnold’s character became manifest.  The warm feelings of his youth gave place to the fixed earnestness and devotion which henceforth took possession of him.  His former indolent habits, his morbid restlessness and occasional weariness of duty, indulgence of vague schemes without definite purpose, intellectual doubts as to accepted religious beliefs—­all seem to have vanished for ever.

It was now that the religious aspect of his character came to be emphasised.  In common acts of life, public and private, the depths of his religious convictions very visibly appeared.  And while it is impossible to understand his religious belief except through the knowledge of his life and writings on ordinary subjects, it is impossible on the other hand, to understand his life and writings without bearing in mind how vivid was his realisation of those truths of religion on which he most habitually dwelt.  It was this which enabled him to undertake labours which, without such a power, must have crushed or enfeebled the spiritual growth which in him they seemed only to foster.  His letters at this time show better than anything else how he was, though unconsciously to himself, maturing for the arduous duties he afterwards undertook.  It was now, too, that he first became acquainted with Niebuhr’s “History of Rome,” which revolutionised his views of history, and, later, served as a model for his own “History of Rome.”