late Georgian academic style of English prose, which is almost the equal of the greatest.  But he was, if not exactly cupidus novarum rerum in Church and State, very ready to entertain them; he was curiously deficient in logic; and though the religious sense was strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his son, the heresy—­the foundation of all heresies—­that religion is something that you can “bespeak,” that you can select and arrange to your own taste; that it is not “to take or to leave” at your peril and as it offers itself.

On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822.  He was always enthusiastic about the Thames valley, though not more so than it deserves, and in his very earliest letter (January 2, 1848) we find record of a visit, when he found “the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid fulness, ’kempshott,’[1] and swans, unchanged and unequalled.”  He was only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father’s school.  Here he only remained a year, and entered Rugby in August 1837.  He remained there for four years, obtaining an open Balliol scholarship in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841.  In 1840 he had also gained the prize for poetry at Rugby itself with Alaric at Rome, a piece which was immediately printed, but never reprinted by its author, though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at the seven years after his death.

It is an observation seldom falsified, that such exercises, by poets of the higher class, display neither their special characteristics, nor any special characteristics at all.  Matthew Arnold’s was not one of the exceptions.  It is very much better than most school prize poems:  it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry in the very least.  It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a boy’s verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme ("full” and “beautiful,” “palaces” and “days").  It manages a rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed ababcc and ending with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its special danger.  And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught are interesting and abode with him, such as the anadiplosis—­

  “Yes, there are stories registered on high,
  Yes, there are stains Time’s fingers cannot blot”;

in which kind he was to produce some years later the matchless