crotchets, pedantries, humours, favouritism, and prejudices." The other
was that he had learnt to sympathize with the teachers. "I met daily in
the schools men and women discharging duties akin to mine, duties as
irksome as mine, duties less well paid than mine; and I asked myself:
Are they on roses? Gradually it grew into a habit with me to put myself
into their places, to try and enter into their feelings, to represent to
myself their life."

It belongs to the very nature of an Inspector's work that it escapes
public notice. Very few are the people who care to inform themselves
about the studies, the discipline, the intellectual and moral atmosphere
of Elementary Schools, except in so far as those schools can be made
battle-grounds for sectarian animosity. And, if they are few now, they
were still fewer during the thirty-five years of Arnold's Inspectorship.
A conspicuous service was rendered both to the cause of Education and to
Arnold's memory when the late Lord Sandford rescued from the entombing
blue-books his friend's nineteen General Reports to the Education
Department on Elementary Schools. In those Reports we read his
deliberate judgment on the merits, defects, needs, possibilities and
ideals of elementary schools; and this not merely as regards the choice
of subjects taught, but as regards cleanliness, healthiness, good order,
good manners, relations between teachers and pupils, selection of models
in prose and verse, and the literary as contrasted with the polemical
use of the Bible.

Such an enumeration may sound dull enough, but there is no dulness in
the Reports themselves. They are stamped from the first page to the last
with his lightness of touch and perfection of style. They belong as
essentially to literature as his Essays or his Lectures.

In reading these Reports on Elementary Schools we catch repeated
allusions to his three Missions of enquiry into Education on the
Continent. Those Missions produced separate Reports of their own, and
each Report developed into a volume. "The Popular Education of France"
gave the experience which he acquired in 1859, and its Introduction is
reproduced in _Mixed Essays_ under the title of "Democracy." _A French
Eton_ (not very happily named) was an unofficial product of the same
tour; for, extending his purview from Elementary Education, he there
dealt with the relation between "Middle Class Education and the State."

"Why," he asked, "cannot we have throughout E