he passed in 1829 to Rugby,
then under the sway of Dr Thomas Arnold, whose strenuous views on life
and education he accepted to the full. Cut off to a large degree from
home relations, he passed a somewhat reserved and solitary boyhood,
devoted to the well-being of the school and to early literary efforts in
the _Rugby Magazine_. In 1836 his parents returned to Liverpool, and in
1837 he went with a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Here his
contemporaries included Benjamin Jowett, A. P. Stanley, J. C. Shairp, W.
G. Ward, Frederick Temple and Matthew Arnold.

Oxford, in 1837, was in the full swirl of the High Church movement led
by J. H. Newman. Clough was for a time carried away by the flood, and,
although he recovered his equilibrium, it was not without an amount of
mental disturbance and an expenditure of academic time, which perhaps
accounted for his failure to obtain more than a second class in his
final examination. He missed a Balliol fellowship, but obtained one at
Oriel, with a tutorship, and lived the Oxford life of study,
speculation, lectures and reading-parties for some years longer.
Gradually, however, certain sceptical tendencies with regard to the
current religious and social order grew upon him to such an extent as to
render his position as an orthodox teacher of youth irksome, and in 1848
he resigned it. The immediate feeling of relief showed itself in
buoyant, if thoughtful, literature, and he published poems both new and
old. Then he travelled, seeing Paris in revolution and Rome in siege,
and in the autumn of 1849 took up new duties as principal of University
Hall, a hostel for students at University College, London. He soon found
that he disliked London, in spite of the friendship of the Carlyles, nor
did the atmosphere of Unitarianism prove any more congenial than that of
Anglicanism to his critical and at bottom conservative temper. A
prospect of a post in Sydney led him to engage himself to Miss Blanche
Mary Shore Smith, and when it disappeared he left England in 1852, and
went, encouraged by Emerson, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he
remained some months, lecturing and translating Plutarch for the
book-sellers, until in 1853 the offer of an examinership in the
Education Office brought him to London once more. He married, and
pursued a steady official career, diversified only by an appointment in
1856 as secretary to a commission sent to study certain aspects of
foreign military educati