His effect was of a different kind.  It was written on the fleshly tables of the heart.  To Oxford men he seemed like an elder brother, brilliant, playful, lovable, yet profoundly wise; teaching us what to think, to admire, to avoid.  His influence fell upon a thirsty and receptive soil.  We drank it with delight; and it co-operated with all the best traditions of the place in making us lifelong lovers of romance, and truth, and beauty.  One of the keenest minds produced by Oxford between 1870 and 1880 thus summarized his effect on us:  “I think he was almost the only man who did not disappoint one.”

[Illustration:  Fox How, Ambleside

Dr. Thomas Arnold’s holiday home.

Mrs. Arnold continued to reside at Fox How until her death, in 1873

Photo Herbert Bell]

As in dealing with the Universities, so also in dealing with the Public Schools, Arnold found it difficult to liberate himself from his early environment and prepossessions.  He was the son of a Wykehamist, who had become the greatest of Head Masters; he himself was both a Wykehamist and a Rugbeian; he was the brother of three Rugbeians, and the father of three Harrovians.  Thus it was impossible for him to regard the Public Schools of England with the dispassionate eye of the complete outsider.  It is true that, when he gave rein to his critical instinct, he could not help observing that Public Schools are “precious institutions where, for L250 a year, our boys learn gentlemanlike deportment and cricket”; that with us “the playing-fields are the school”; and that a Prussian Minister of Education would not permit “the keepers of those absurd cock-pits” to examine the boys as they choose, “and send them jogging comfortably off to the University on their lame longs and shorts about the Calydonian Boar.”  But, when it came to practical dealing, he had a tenderness for the “cock-pit”—­even for the playing-fields—­almost for the Calydonian Boar—­which hindered him from being a very formidable or effective critic.  Rugby, with which he was so closely connected, and to which he was so much attached, owes nothing, as far as one knows, to his suggestions or reproaches.  At Harrow he lived for five years, on terms of affectionate intimacy with the Head Master and the staff; and, though he was keenly alive to the absurdities of the “catch-scholarship,” as he called it, which was cultivated there, and to the inefficiency of the Principia and Notabilia, on which the Harrovian mind was nourished, his adverse judgment never made itself felt.  Marlborough he praised and admired as “a decided offspring of Rugby.”  At Eton his fascinating essay on “Eutrapelia” was given;[11] and he in turn was fascinated by the Memorials of “An Eton Boy,” which he reviewed in the Fortnightly for June, 1882.[12] That boy, Arthur Baskerville-Mynors, was certainly a most lovable and attractive character, and he was thus commemorated in the Eton College Chronicle: