The Oxford and Rugby Line, which was one of the subjects of the celebrated Battles of the Gauges, has not been constructed; and it may be doubted whether it ever will.

The town lies about a mile from the station on the banks of the Avon, and owes all its importance to Laurence Sheriff, a London shopkeeper in the time of Queen Elizabeth, who, in 1567, endowed a school in his native village with eight acres of land, situated where Lamb’s Conduit-street, in London, now stands, whence at present upwards of 5000 pounds a year is derived.

Rugby was long considered the most snobbish of English public schools, a sad character in a country where style and name go so far.  Some twenty years ago, when the Rugbaeans had the “presumption” to challenge the Wykehamists to play at football, the latter proudly answered, that the Rugbaeans might put on worsted stockings and clouted soles, and the Wykehamists in silk stockings and pumps would meet them in any lane in England.  But, since that time, the Harrow gentlemen, the Eton fops, the Winchester scholars, and the Westminster blackguards, have had reason to admit that Arnold, a Wykehamist, long considered by the fellows of that venerable institution an unworthy son, succeeded in making Rugby the great nursery of sound scholars and Christian gentlemen, and in revolutionizing and reforming the educational system of all our public schools.

The following, by one of Arnold’s pupils, himself an eminent example of cultivated intellect and varied information, combined with great energy in the practical affairs of life and active untiring benevolence, is a sketch of

“Arnold and his school.”

In the year 1827, the head mastership became vacant of the Grammar School at Rugby, and the trustees, a body of twelve country gentlemen and noblemen, selected, to the dismay of all the orthodox, the Rev. Thomas Arnold, late fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and then taking private pupils at Laleham, Middlesex.  Transplanted from Oriel, the hotbed of strange and unsound opinions, out of which the conflicting views of Whateley, Hampden, Keble, and Newman, were struggling into day; himself a disciple of the suspected school of German criticism; known to entertain views at variance with the majority of his church brethren on all the semipolitical questions of the day; an advocate for the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament, for the reform of the Liturgy and enlargement of the Church, so as to embrace dissenters; the distrust with which he was regarded by all who did not know him may be imagined.