He was convinced that the founders of our constitution in Church and State did truly consider them to be identical; the Christian nation of England to be the Church of England; the head of that nation to be, for that very reason, the head of the Church.  This view placed him in antagonism to the High Church party; but, as a matter of fact, he neither belonged, nor felt himself to belong, to any section of the English clergy.  Politically, he held himself to be a strong Whig; but that he was not, in the common sense of the word, a member of any party is shown by the readiness with which all parties alike, according to the fashion of the time, claimed or renounced him as an associate.

Arnold did not like the flat scenery of Warwickshire He described himself as “in it like a plant sunk in the ground in a pot.”  His holidays were always spent away from Rugby, either on the Continent, or, in later years, at his Westmoreland home, Fox How, a small estate between Rydal and Ambleside, which he purchased in 1832.  He was just about to leave Rugby for Fox How when his life was mournfully and suddenly ended by an attack of angina pectoris, on June 12, 1842.  Only the year before he had been appointed by Lord Melbourne Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.

Arnold’s principal works are six volumes of sermons, a three-volume edition of Thucydides, the Oxford “Lectures on Modern History,” and the three-volume “History of Rome,” which, by his unfortunate death, was broken off at the Second Punic War.  To the last-named he looked as the chief monument of his historical fame.

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AGNES STRICKLAND

Life of Queen Elizabeth

Agnes Strickland, born in London on August 19, 1796, with her sister Elizabeth began in 1840 the publication of the immense series of historical biographies of which the “Lives of the Queens of England” formed the first and most important group.  In that group the “Elizabeth” is recognised as holding the highest rank.  It is an essentially feminine study of one of the most remarkable of women; not a history, for historical events are treated as of infinitely less importance than picturesque personal details and miscellaneous gossip, but presenting altogether an admirable picture of the outward seeming of those spacious days, and a discriminating and judicious portrait of the maiden queen herself.  The author’s views, however, would not always be endorsed by a masculine critic.  Agnes Strickland died on July 13, 1874.  The literature relating to the life and times of Queen Elizabeth would form a library of contemporary records.  Many volumes of state papers have been published:  Camden’s “Annals of Elizabeth” is the classical account of her.  Creighton’s “Queen Elizabeth” and volumes VII. to XII. of Froude’s “History of England” are the leading modern works; and no one who wishes to know anything of the great queen can afford to neglect Hume’s “Courtships of Queen Elizabeth,” which will also be found in these pages (see Hume).

I.—­The Lady Elizabeth