“Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
  Still clutching the inviolable shade,”

of the Scholar-Gipsy.  On the whole, the thing is correct but colourless; even its melancholy is probably mere Byronism, and has nothing directly to do with the later quality of Dover Beach and Poor Matthias.

Of Mr Arnold’s undergraduate years we have unluckily but little authentic record, and, as has been said, not one letter.  The most interesting evidence comes from Principal Shairp’s well-known lines in Balliol Scholars, 1840-1843, written, or at least published, many years later, in 1873:—­

  “The one wide-welcomed for a father’s fame,
  Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim
    Fame for himself, nor on another lean.

  So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
    Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
  Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
    Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger,
  We see the banter sparkle in his prose,
  But knew not then the undertone that flows
    So calmly sad, through all his stately lay."[2]

Like some other persons of much distinction, and a great many of little or none, he “missed his first,” in December 1844; and though he obtained, three months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship (at Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any length at the university.  The then very general, though even then not universal, necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests’ offices for a morsel of bread.  It may well be doubted—­though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other place of the kind inspires—­whether he would have been long at home there as a resident.  For the place has at once a certain republicanism and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the aspiring and restless spirit of the author of Switzerland.  None of her sons is important to Oxford—­the meanest of them has in his sonship the same quality as the greatest.  Now it was very much at Mr Arnold’s heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or share his qualities.

However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the fold.  The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany.  Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined system of public support for men of letters are, as