rattle of wheels, the clatter of hammers, street-brawls, and the jingling of pianofortes!" In the biography of Dr. Arnold, his longing for natural beauty recurs as one of the peculiarities of his constitution. He did not need very grand scenery, though he enjoyed it deeply, but some wild natural loveliness was such a necessity for him that he pined for it unhappily in its absence. Rugby could offer him scarcely anything of this, "We have no hills," he lamented, "no plains--not a single wood, and but one single copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream--scarcely any flowers, for the lias is particularly poor in them--nothing but one endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedgerow trees. This is to me a daily privation; it robs me of what is naturally my anti-attrition; and as I grow older I begin to feel it.... The positive dulness of the country about Rugby makes it to me a mere working-place: I cannot expatiate there even in my walks." "The monotonous character of the midland scenery of Warwickshire," says Dr. Arnold's biographer, "was to him, with his strong love of natural beauty and variety, absolutely repulsive; there was something almost touching in the eagerness with which, amidst that 'endless succession of fields and hedgerows,' he would make the most of any features of a higher order; in the pleasure with which he would cherish the few places where the current of the Avon was perceptible, or where a glimpse of the horizon could be discerned; in the humorous despair with which he would gaze on the dull expanse of fields eastward from Rugby. It is no wonder we do not like looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between us and the Ural mountains. Conceive what you look over; for you just miss Sweden, and look over Holland, the north of Germany, and the centre of Russia."[14] This dreadful midland monotony impelled Dr. Arnold to seek refreshment and compensation in a holiday home in the Lake district, and there he found all that his eyes longed for, streams, hills, woods, and wild-flowers. Nor had his belief in the value of these sweet natural surroundings been illusory; such instincts are not given for our betrayal, and the soul of a wise man knows its own needs, both before they are supplied, and after. Westmorland gave him all he had hoped from it, and more. "Body and mind," he wrote, "alike seem to repose greedily in delicious quiet, without dulness, which we enjoy in Westmorland." And again: "At Allan Bank, in the summer, I worked on the Roman history, and hope to do so again in the winter. It is very inspiring to write with such a view before one's eyes as that from our drawing-room at Allan Bank, where the trees of the shrubbery gradually run up into the trees of the cliff, and the mountain-side, with its infinite variety of rocky peaks and points upon which the cattle expatiate, rises over the tops of the trees."