LALEHAM FERRY.
Such charm as may be found in a flat landscape—and it is not small when there are trees and water, red roofs and quaint chimneys, sheep, cows, and an old church—we find at Laleham Ferry, one of the quietest and prettiest spots on the Thames. The nearest railway stations, neither of which is too near, are Staines and Shepperton. This little village was for nine years of work, study, and wedded happiness, the residence of Dr. Arnold, the mild but firm Erastian in most of his ecclesiastical views, the parental educator, the Liberal in politics but not in party, the Church reformer who clung to the Church not as a priesthood but as a body of believers, the man of thought and man of action. To Laleham, Thomas Arnold went at twenty-four years of age; took pupils, as, since he was twenty, and elected a Fellow of Oriel College, he had done at Oxford; married, and worked on, with the grand idea before him of bringing new life and spirit into our public-school system. It was at the end of his nine years’ sojourn at Laleham that he took priest’s orders, and turned a corner in his life whence his useful fame began. He was appointed to the headmastership of Rugby School. In those nine years at Laleham, peaceful and happy as they were, sorrows were not “too strictly kept” from Arnold’s home. Four of his family are buried here; his infant child, his mother, his aunt, and his sister. It is no matter of mere opinion or dispute that Dr. Arnold and Rugby are associated as no person and place, no school and master, ever were before or since. Illustrious men have indeed raised the high standard of tuition higher than they found it, at other public schools. Their names add lustre to a shining roll. But Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, whose constant longing from his youth had been to “try whether our public school system has not in it some noble elements which may produce fruit even to life eternal,” justified his belief and his mission so well, that he not only raised Rugby School to its highest fame, but introduced a great change and improvement into all school-life in England. He trusted much to his Sixth form, his elder boys, whom he inspired with love, veneration, and confidence, so that their recognised authority over the junior pupils was exercised as with a reflected light. He would have no “unpromising subjects,” no pupils likely to taint others. “It is not necessary,” he said, “that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.” All good hearts in time were bound to the firm, manly, sympathetic master, whose devotion to duty was contagious, and whose unceasing interest in his scholars was repaid by their reverence for him. Dr. Arnold’s writings are earnest, clear, and independent. The six volumes of sermons, chiefly delivered to the Rugby boys, should be read by all boys, all parents, and all masters. Dean Stanley, his pupil and biographer, collected and republished his tracts on social and political subjects; and in the striking picturesqueness of his “Roman History,” in which he adopts the “ballad-theory” of the Prussian historian, Niebuhr, he forestalled a mode of animated illustration, and contrast of ancient and modern events, which is so popular in the hands of Macaulay and Grote.
Nine years of such a life as Arnold’s would be enough to confer perpetual dignity on a more important place than Laleham, which contains a population of not more than six or seven hundred souls, and is not honoured and spoilt by a “surrounding neighbourhood” of new wealth, refinement, and education. Not that the village is more rustic—in the depreciative sense—than a village inhabited by people who “have known some nurture” ought to be. There are a few good old-fashioned houses about it, Arnold’s being one of them; a solid red-brick house with a large garden. The occupant came to regard the country as “very beautiful.” He had always a resource at hand, he tells us, in the bank of the river up to Staines; “which, though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness, there being not a house anywhere near it; and the river here has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it, which makes it in many places as public as the high road.” Laleham House, the seat of the Earl of Lucan, is a plain square modern mansion with a Tuscan portico. The grounds of forty acres are noted for the noble elms, shrubs, lawns, and flower-gardens.
“One spot for flowers, the rest all turf and trees,”
as Leigh Hunt sang, though not of so large and fine a domain.
LALEHAM CHURCH.