In 1828 the family returned for a visit to England, and Arthur was put to school at Chester, whence in the next year he was transferred to Rugby. Dr. Arnold had then very lately become the headmaster at Rugby, and was already giving to the school a tone and quality unknown previously to the public schools of England. He strove to impress upon the boys the sense of personal responsibility, and to rouse their conscience to the doing of duty, not so much as a matter essential to the discipline of the school as to the formation of manly and religious character. The influence of his high, vigorous, and ardent nature was of immense force. But its virtue was impaired by the artificiality of the ecclesiastical system of the Church of England, and the irrationality of the dogmatic creed which, even to a nature as liberal as Dr. Arnold's, seemed to belong to the essentials of religion, and to be indissoluble from the foundation of morality. Clough became Arnold's devoted disciple, but he had intellectual independence and sincerity enough to save him from yielding his own individuality to any stream of external influence, however powerful. What he called "the busy argufying spirit of the prize schoolboy" stood him in good stead. But the moral stress was great, and it left him early with a sense of strain and of perplexity, as his mind opened to the wider and deeper problems of life, for the solution of which the traditional creed seemed insufficient. His career at school was of the highest distinction; and when he was leaving Rugby for Oxford in 1836, Dr. Arnold broke the rule of silence to which he almost invariably adhered in the delivery of prizes, and congratulated Clough on having gained every honor which Rugby could bestow, and on having done the highest credit to the school at the University,--for he had won the Balliol Scholarship, "then and now the highest honor which a schoolboy could obtain."