has taught me to value more and more.  Yet that restraint is salutary, and that self-reliance is as easily learnt as it is laudable, the propriety of my conduct and the readiness of my services shall ere long aptly illustrate.  It is with confidence I promise that the close of every year shall find me advancing in your regard by constantly observing the precepts of my excellent tutors and the example of my excellent parents.

     “We break up on Thursday, the 11th of December instant, and my
     impatience of the short delay will assure my dear parents of the
     filial sentiments of

     “Theirs very sincerely,

     “N.

     “P.S.  We shall reassemble on the 19th of January.  Mr. and Mrs. P.
     present their respectful compliments.”

The present writer lately asked a close observer of educational matters if Arnold had produced any practical effect on Secondary Education, and the answer was—­“He pulled down the strongholds of such as Mr. Creakle.”  If he did that, he did much; and it is a eulogy which he would have greatly appreciated.  Let us see how far it was deserved.  Let us admit at the outset that Mr. Squeers is dead; but then he was dead before Arnold took in hand to reform our system of Education.  Mr. Creakle, it is to be feared, still exists, though his former assistant, the more benign Mr. Mell, has to some extent supplanted him.  Dr. Blimber is, perhaps, a little superannuated, but still holds his own.  Dr. Grimstone is going strong and well.  In a word, the Private School for bigger boys—­(we are not thinking of Preparatory Schools for little boys)—­still exists and even flourishes.  Now, if Arnold could have had his way, the Private School for bigger boys would long since have disappeared.  “Mr. Creakle’s stronghold” would have been pulled down, and Salem House and Crichton House and Lycurgus House Academy would have crumbled into ruins.

And what would he have raised in their place?  He wrote so often and so variously about Education—­now in official reports, now in popular essays, now again in private letters, that it is not difficult to detect some inconsistencies, some contradictions, some changes of view.  Indeed, it needs but the alteration of a single word to justify, at least to some extent, the “damning sentence,” which, according to Arnold, Mr. Frederic Harrison “launched” against him in 1867.  “We seek vainly in Mr. A. a system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative.”  For “Philosophy” read “Education,” and the reproach holds good.  For in Education, as in everything else that he touched, he proceeded rather by criticism than by dogma—­by showing faults in existing things rather than by theoretically constructing perfection.  Yet, after all said and done, his general view of the subject is quite plain.  He had in his mind an idea or scheme of what National Education ought to be; and, though from time to time he changed his view about details and methods, the general outline of his scheme is clear enough.