[Footnote 6:  Dr. Williams, President of Jesus College.]

[Footnote 7:  Nicholas Nickleby.]

[Footnote 8:  “A shocking child-murder has just been committed at Nottingham.  A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child.  The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.”]

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION

“Though I am a schoolmaster’s son, I confess that school-teaching or school-inspecting is not the line of life I should naturally have chosen.  I adopted it in order to marry a lady who is here to-night, and who feels your kindness as warmly and gratefully as I do.  My wife and I had a wandering life of it at first.  There were but three lay-inspectors for all England.  My district went right across from Pembroke Dock to Great Yarmouth.  We had no home.  One of our children was born in a lodging at Derby, with a workhouse, if I recollect aright, behind and a penitentiary in front.  But the irksomeness of my new duties was what I felt most, and during the first year or so it was sometimes insupportable.”

[Illustration:  Laleham Church

As it was in Matthew Arnold’s boyhood

Photo H.W.  Taunt]

The name of Arnold is so inseparably connected with Education[9] that many of Matthew Arnold’s friends were astonished by this frank confession, which he made in his address to the Westminster Teachers’ Association on the occasion of his retirement from the office of Inspector.  There is reason to believe that the profession on which he had set his early affections was Diplomacy.  It is easy to see how perfectly, in many respects, diplomatic life would have suited him.  The proceeds of his Fellowship, then considerable and unhampered by any conditions of residence, would have supplied the lack of private fortune.  He had some of the diplomatist’s most necessary gifts—­love of travel, familiarity with European literature, keen interest in foreign politics and institutions, taste for cultivated society, rich enjoyment of life, and fascinating manners conspicuously free from English stiffness and shyness.  As to his interest in foreign politics, it is only necessary to cite England and the Italian Question, which he wrote in 1859, and which deals with the unity and independence of Italy.  It is the first essay which he ever published, but it abounds in clearness and force, and is entirely free from the whimsicality which in later years sometimes marred his prose.  Above all it shows a sympathetic insight into foreign aspirations which is rare indeed even among cultivated Englishmen.  In reference to this pamphlet he truly observed:  “The worst of the English is that on foreign politics they search so very much more for what they like and wish to be true, than for what is true.  In Paris there is certainly a larger body of people than in London who treat foreign politics as a science, as a matter to know upon before feeling upon.”