the Sheldonian Theatre, a very unusual move in those days. And there, we are told, he held his hearers spellbound by his earnest manner and interesting matter. The younger men heard him with delight—their attendance was not compulsory—and the elder men submitted readily to learn history anew under the teaching of this talented master. Unhappily his talks were few; for he died the next year.
That was Thomas Arnold as a College Undergraduate and as a College Don. What was Thomas Arnold as the Head of a great English Public School, Mr. Thomas Hughes has told us in an almost immortal book.
During the Long Vacation "Tom Brown," then an undergraduate at Oxford, went a' fishing in pleasant waters, with certain college friends, when an old newspaper brought to the party the news of Arnold's death. "Tom" was in the stream, it will be remembered, when the item was shouted out at him:— "His hand stopped half way in his cast, and his lines and flies went all tangling round and round his rod. You might have knocked him over with a feather. . . . He felt completely carried off his mental and intellectual legs; as if he had lost his standing-point in the invisible world. Besides which, the deep, loving loyalty which he felt for his old leader
