CH. II.] TAKES HIS DEGREE. 11 CHAPTER II. DEGREE AT CAMBRIDGE-MASTERSHIP AT RUGBY-DR. ARNOLD-COURSE OWN HOUSE-SELECT MASTERSHIP OF MARL OF LIFE AT RUGBY-INFLUENCE ON BOYS IN HIS COLLEGE-REMINISCENCES BY JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP AND BY JOHN CONINGTON-CORRESPONDENCE. IN 1836 he took his degree, and was a senior optime and eighth in the first class of the classical tripos. In the same year he was appointed by Dr. Arnold to an assistant mastership and a boarding-house at Rugby. The influences of this appointment on his after life were incalculable. First amongst these must be counted the impression produced upon him by the character and teaching of his great chief. It is not too much to say that there was none of all the direct pupils of Dr. Arnold on whom so deep and exclusive a mark of their master's mind was produced as on Cotton. They received this mark on minds more or less incapable of fully appreciating the force of his character; and in later years, in many instances, its particular effects were more or less rudely effaced, either by the impulses of their own growing thoughts, or by the disturbing attractions of other men and other schools of thought. But Cotton came into contact with him after his mind had been already formed, and yet before he had been swayed by any other commanding influence. He had received from his intercourse with his Rugby friends at Cambridge a strong predisposition to admire and to love the man whose fame they were proud to spread amongst their new acquaintances. Indeed there grew up at Cambridge a circle of disciples, to which no exact parallel could be found at Oxford-not that the Oxford-Rugbeians were less enthusiastic than those on the banks of the Cam-but that the receptive elements at Oxford were fewer or less analytical. All who remember those days will recall the delight with which they found in such men as Conybeare, Howson, Freeman, and others, willing listeners to all they could pour forth of their beloved master, and men who seemed to gather like a new undergrowth beneath the parent tree which had sheltered them. But amongst all those Cotton was chief. From the moment that he first made Arnold's acquaintance, he never wavered in his loyalty. He may, after his manner, have criticised and deprecated parts of his character or career. But no other hero ever took the place of the image which had thus been enshrined in his heart; there was never either in his own mind, or in the circle of his later acquaintances, any force sufficiently powerful to disturb its pre-eminence. His long continuance within the direct sphere of its influence, first at Rugby, then at Marlborough, tended to keep it intact: and when he entered on the wider field of India, the inspiring force of Arnold's genius and goodness only found a new channel in which to work, and all that was most elevating and peculiar in those bright recollections of his early youth stamped itself on every part of the task which he there undertook. There is no proof of Arnold's practical influence so undivided, so unquestionable, so little alloyed with any baser matter, as the blameless and fruitful career which will be described in the following pages. In the book which beyond any other will keep fresh in the minds of future generations the picture of the school-life at Rugby, it will be remembered that the crisis of the story is brought about by the wise sugges 'Tom Brown's School Days,' part i. chap. ix. CH. II.] FRIENDSHIP WITH DR. ARNOLD. 6 13 tion of a young master, the model young master,' lately come, on which Arnold acts, and which produces the desired results. That 'young master' was Cotton, and it will be seen how fitting a tribute to him has been the notice, however slight, of his intimate relation to the school and its illustrious head.* There are those who can still recall the picture of the two men, as they have seen them side by side in the school-close, or met them in the hedge-grown lanes of Warwickshire, the one in the very prime of vigorous middle age, tall, stalwart, dark-visaged, with keen eye that flashes still through the mist of years, and swinging stride and prompt utterance, and under lip and lower jaw that spoke of suppressed energy and will, the king of men as he seemed to his loving or trembling pupils; the other tall also, and younger, and with a face interesting even to boys, but of hesitating and awkward gait, slow in speech, dry in manner, somewhat slouching in figure, short-sighted, and playing perpetually with an eyeglass, as unlike his companion in physical gifts as in force of character and fire of genius. Yet, for all this, there was a strong and instructive sympathy and likeness that drew them to each other; and, on a calmer view of men and things, it may be questioned whether there was one of Arnold's friends or pupils who so thoroughly absorbed and reproduced in his own life and work the most distinctive features of Arnold's character and principles, or whether, after Arnold's death, there 'Young is the most remarkable boy I have ever yet had dealings with, and the lessons I learnt from him last Sunday were as numerous as they were profitable. I never saw, in man or boy, such a real conviction of sin, and, though he showed great ignorance, he was most deeply impressed with the notion of eternity, and spoke with an earnestness altogether different from anything that I ever heard before. His voice quite trembled as he spoke. All this taught me the great error and sin of neglecting boys who seem thoughtless and troublesome, which I have always done in his case.' was any one man who might claim to have carried out so earnestly, and in time so successfully, the ideas and the system of which his friend was the founder and the apostle. Yet his success as a schoolmaster was by no means rapid or unchequered. His Rugby life extended over fifteen years: a time of slow and gradual growth, in which the foundations for some present and much future success were laid with daily toil and patience. His keen and boyish sense of life's mirthful side never left him. He was often the most amusing and laughter-moving of companions. There was a natural and quiet flow of genial humour that overran and freshened, like a mountain spring, the dry places and arid relations, the numbing cares and anxieties, of scholastic life. The visitors at that hospitable house will remember the quaint reminiscences of books and travel that reproduced Vitellius in the denizen of his pigsty, the Semiramis of Prague in the Libussa who drew his carriage, the Norman invaders' dog in the whelp Hardigras, and which transformed two faithful household servants from a Ramsay and a Packwood to a Criologus and Xylosagus. But with all this he was never frivolous or self-indulgent: the vein of ceaseless humour which played beneath an exterior somewhat grim and saturnine was combined with an intensity and earnestness of religious life which formed the chief feature in his character. The pastoral relation in which a clergyman should stand to his pupils was never out of his sight. To deepen and quicken the Christian side of public school life was the deliberate purpose of his life. It was now that he drew up and published manuals of devotion for school-boys, which have stood the tests of many schools and many generations of boys. It was now that he laid the foundation for his future excellence as a preacher by his carefully prepared addresses to his house on Sunday evenings. CH. II.] DIFFICULTIES OF HIS LIFE AT RUGBY. 15 It was now that, in occasional sermons at Rugby and elsewhere, and as a select preacher before the University of Cambridge in the year 1843, he gave evidence alike of his powers, and of his promise as a preacher. It was now that, in his preparation of his pupils for Confirmation, he learnt to find his way to the often closed casket of an English boy's thoughts and feelings. It was now that by his minute and careful study of all the details of education, he laid the foundation of the powers of organisation which afterwards developed themselves elsewhere. It was now, finally, that by systematic reading and laborious self-cultivation, he trained himself to become what he was in India, the teacher not of boys, but of men. Yet he had many difficulties to contend with, and his self-development was slow and lingering. It was not at once that he acquired the art of enforcing discipline, or controlling unruly and turbulent boyhood. He was in some respects before his age, and his very efforts to become acquainted with his juniors were for a time resented by the stolid conservatism of boys, if not of men, as a revolutionary encroachment. His dry humour was branded as sarcasm: his interest in his pupils was denounced as favouritism. He had little of the charm of manner which in some men is itself a passport to the hearts of others, none of the ready address and superficial tact which come unsought to less earnest spirits. But he won his way, and the circle of his friends widened yearly, and the devotion of his pupils yearly gathered strength. There was about the man a simplicity and earnestness which went straight to the hearts of those who had once come under his spell. After the death of Arnold he became the attached friend and trusted counseller of his successor. His pupils, among whom might be mentioned Professor Conington at the one university, Lord Stanley at the other, carried with them to other scenes their warm and affectionate homage. |