Note 5 — A LETTER, &c. &c. &c.

“In many points he (Dr. Arnold) took the institution (the authority of the Sixth Form) as he found it, and as he remembered it at Winchester. The responsibility of checking bad practices without the intervention of the Master, the occasional settlement of difficult cases of school-government, the triumph of order over brute force involved in the maintenance of such an authority, had been more or less produced under the old system both at Rugby and elsewhere. But his zeal in its defence, and his confident reliance upon it as the keystone of his whole government, were eminently characteristic of himself, and were brought out the more forcibly from the fact that it was a point on which the spirit of the age set strongly and increasingly against him, on which there was a general tendency to yield to the popular outcry, and on which the clamour, that at one time assailed him, was ready to fasten as a subject where all parties could concur in their condemnation. But he was immoveable: and though, on his first coming, he had felt himself called upon rather to restrain the authority of the Sixth Form from abuses, than to guard it from encroachments, yet now that the whole system was denounced as cruel and absurd, he delighted to stand forth as its champion; the power, which was most strongly condemned, of personal chastisement vested in the Præpostors over those who resisted their authority, he firmly maintained as essential to the general support of the good order of the place; and there was no obloquy, which he would not undergo in the protection of a boy, who had by due exercise of this discipline made himself obnoxious to the school, the parents, or the public.”—Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold, Vol. I. page 105. See also Arnold’s Miscellaneous Works—On the Discipline of Public Schools: page 371, &c.