THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D.

ARNOLD, THOMAS, D.D., an English educator and historian; born at West Cowes, Isle of Wight, June 13, 1795; died at Rugby, June 12, 1842. He was educated at various schools, and in 1811 was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; and subsequently a fellow of Oriel College, where he gained in 1815 and 1817 the Chancellor's prize for two University essays, the one in Latin, the other in English. He received deacon's orders in 1818; married soon after, and took up his residence at Laleham, where he devoted himself for nine years to the preparation of students for the great schools and the universities. In 1828 he took priest's orders, and was chosen to the head-mastership of Rugby School. Probably no English educator ever exercised so powerful a personal influence over his pupils as did Thomas Arnold. His cardinal principle was that no "black sheep" should find place at Rugby. "It is not necessary," he said, "that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen." In 1841, still retaining the head-mastership of Rugby, he was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and delivered an inaugural lecture which awakened the highest anticipations of the future which lay before him in this department. He had hardly passed middle age, and his apparently robust frame gave every indication that he would attain the extremest limit of human life. But on the evening of June 11, 1842, he was seized with a sudden spasm of the heart, and died early the next morning. His "Life and Correspondence," edited by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, is justly esteemed as among the best of English biographies.

TAKING LIFE IN EARNEST.

I MEET with a great many persons in the course of a year, and with many whom I admire and like; but what I feel daily more and more to need, as life every year rises more and more before me in its true reality, is to have intercourse with those who take life in earnest. It is very painful to me to be always

on the surface of things; and I feel that literature, science, politics, many topics of far greater interest than mere gossip or talking about the weather, are yet, as they are, generally talked about, still upon the surface; they do not touch the real depths of life. It is not that I want much of what is called religious conversation; that, I believe, is often on the surface, like other conversation. But I want a sign, which one catches by a sort of masonry, that a man knows what he is about in life; whither tending, in what cause engaged; and when I find this, it seems to open my heart as thoroughly, and with as fresh a sympathy, as when I was twenty years younger.

THE SIEGE OF GENOA IN 1800.

(From "Lectures on Modern History.")

In the Autumn of 1799 the Austrians had driven the French out of Lombardy and Piedmont. Their last victory of Fossano, or Genola, had won the fortress of Coni or Cuneo, close under the Alps, and at the very extremity of the plain of the Po. The French clung to Italy only by their hold of the Riviera of Genoa -the narrow strip of coast, between the Apennines and the sea; which extends from the frontiers of France almost to the mouth of the Arno. Hither the remains of the French force were collected, commanded by General Massena, and the point of chief importance to his defence was the city of Genoa.

Napoleon had just returned from Egypt, and was become First Consul; but he could not be expected to take the field. until the following Spring, and till then Massena was hopeless of relief from without; everything was to depend upon his own. pertinacity. The strength of his army made it impossible to force it in such a position as Genoa; but its very numbers, added to the population of a great city, held out to the enemy the hope of reducing it by famine; and as Genoa derives most of its supplies by sea, Lord Keith, the British naval Commander-inChief, in the Mediterranean, lent the assistance of his naval force to the Austrians; and by the vigilance of his cruisers the whole coasting trade right and left along the Riviera was effectually cut off. It was not at once that the inhabitants of a great city, accustomed to the sight of well-stored shops and an abundant market, began to realize the idea of scarcity; or that the wealthy classes of society, who have never known any other state than one of abundance and luxury, began seriously to

conceive of famine. But the shops were emptied, and the storehouses began to be drawn upon, and no fresh supply, or hope of supply, appeared.

Winter passed away, and Spring returned, so early and so beautiful on that garden-like coast, sheltered as it is from the north winds by its belt of mountains, and opened to the full range of the southern sun. Spring returned, and clothed the hillsides with its fresh verdure. But that verdure was no longer the mere delight of the careless eye of luxury, refreshing the citizens with its liveliness and softness when they rode or walked up thither from the city, to enjoy the surpassing beauty of the prospect. The green hillsides were now visited for a very different object. Ladies of the highest rank might be seen cutting up every plant which it was possible to turn to food, and bearing home the common weeds of our roadsides as a most precious treasure.

The French General pitied the distress of the people; but the lives and strength of his garrison seemed to him more important than the lives of the Genoese; and such provisions as remained were reserved in the first place for the French army. Scarcity became utter want, and want became famine. In the most gorgeous palaces of that gorgeous city, no less than in the humblest tenements of its humblest poor, death was busy. Not the momentary death of battle or massacre, nor the speedy death of pestilence, but the lingering death of famine. Infants died before their parents' eyes; husbands and wives lay down to expire together. A man whom I saw at Genoa in 1825 told me that his father and two of his brothers had been starved to death in this fatal siege. So it went on till, in the month of June - when Napoleon had already descended from the Alps into the plains of Lombardy - the misery became unendurable, and Massena surrendered. But before he did so, twenty thousand innocent persons, old and young, women and children, had died by the most horrible of deaths which humanity can endure.

HANNIBAL THE CARTHAGINIAN.

(From "History of Rome.")

HANNIBAL'S genius may be likened to the Homeric god, who, in his hatred of the Trojans, rises from the deep to rally the fainting Greeks, and to lead them against the enemy; so the

calm courage with which Hector met his more than human adversary in his country's cause, is no unworthy image of the unyielding magnanimity displayed by the aristocracy of Rome. As Hannibal utterly eclipses Carthage, so, on the contrary, Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius, Nero, and even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit and wisdom and power of Rome. The Senate, which voted its thanks to the political enemy, Varro, after his disastrous defeat, because he had not despaired of the Commonwealth, and which forbore either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honored than the conqueror of Zama.

This we should the more carefully bear in mind, because our tendency is to admire individual greatness far more than national; and as no single Roman will bear comparison with Hannibal, we are apt to murmur at the event of the contest, and to think that the victory was awarded to the least worthy of the combatants. On the contrary, never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the god of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered. His triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations; an no one man even though it were Hannibal himself can is one generation effect such a work. But where a nation has been merely enkindled for awhile by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life; when the charm has ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before.

He who grieves over the battle of Zama should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead, and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the Commonwealth of Christian Europe.

CHRISTIAN POLITICS.

(From "Life and Correspondence.")

I HAVE long had in my mind a work on Christian Politics, or the application of the Gospel to the state of man as a citizen, in which the whole question of a Religious Establishment, and the education proper for Christian members of a Christian Commonwealth would naturally find a place. It would embrace also an historical sketch of the pretended conversion of the Kingdoms of this World to the Kingdom of Christ, in the fourth and fifth centuries, which I look upon as one of the greatest tours d'adresse that Satan ever played. . . . I mean that by inducing Kings and nations to get into their hands the direction of Christian Societies he has in a great measure succeeded in keeping out the peculiar principles of that society from any extended sphere of operation, and insuring the ascendency of his own.

ITALY SEVENTY YEARS AGO.

(From Dr. Arnold's Journal.)

CHIAVASSO, July 3, 1825.

I CAN now understand what Signor A- said of the nakedness of the country between Hounslow and Laleham, as all the plains here are covered with fruit-trees, and the villages, however filthy within, are generally picturesque either from situation, or from the character of their buildings, and their lively white. The architecture of the churches, however, is quite bad; and certainly their villages bear no more comparison with those of Northamptonshire, than St. Giles's does with Waterloo Place. There are more ruins here than I expected, -ruined towers, I mean, of modern date, which are frequent in the towns and vil lages. The countenances of the people are fine, but we see no gentlemen anywhere, or else the distinction of ranks is lost. altogether, except with the court and the high nobility. In the valley of Aosta, through which we were travelling all yesterday, the whole land, I hear, is possessed by the peasants, and there are no great proprietors at all. I am quite satisfied that there is a good in this, as well as an evil, and that our state of society is not so immensely superior as we flatter ourselves. I know that our higher classes are immensely superior to any one here; but I doubt whether our system produces a greater amount of happiness, or saves more misery than theirs; and I cannot help