ate
"sentiment against hideousness and rawness," and so he was a classicist
by temperament. Then his training was essentially classical. He used to
protest, with amusing earnestness, against the notion that his father
had been a bad scholar. "People talk the greatest nonsense about my
father's scholarship. The Wykehamists of his day were excellent
scholars. Dr. Gabell made them so. My father's Latin verses were not
good; but that was because he was not poetical--not because he was a bad
scholar. But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his
Greek prose, you couldn't tell it from Thucydides." In this kind of
scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect
his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous
study. His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps
wider in Greek than in Latin, though the soundness of his Latin
scholarship is proved by the fact that he was _proxime_ for the Hertford
Scholarship at Oxford. He had read Plato in the Sixth Form at Rugby, and
Oxford taught him Aristotle. From first to last his "unapproachable
favourites" were Homer and Sophocles, and Hesiod was "a Greek friend to
whom he turned with excellent effect." But though he was thus
essentially a classicist, a mere classicist he was not. No one had a
wider, a more familiar, a more discriminating knowledge of English
literature; no one--and this is worthy of remark--had the text of the
Bible more perfectly at his fingers' ends. He had read all that was best
in French, German, and Italian;[16] and in French at any rate he was an
exact and judicious critic, as is sufficiently shown by his essay on
_The French Play in London_.[17] Hebrew he mastered sufficiently to
"follow and weigh the reasons offered by others" for a retranslation of
the Old Testament; and into Celtic literature he made at any rate one
memorable incursion.[18]

A man so equipped was essentially a man of letters: a great deal more
than a classicist, but a classicist first and foremost. And so it was
natural that he should think a classical education the best education
that could be offered to boys, and should desire to see classics, taught
in a literary and not a pedantic spirit, the staple of instruction in
all those Public Schools, whether of ancient or of modern foundation,
to which the Upper and Middle Classes should resort. He was perfectly
ready to make composition in Greek and Latin the luxury of th