A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

Dr. Arnold’s Knowledge as a Child.––On the whole, the children who grow up amongst their elders and are not provided with what are called children’s books at all, fare the better on what they are able to glean for themselves from the literature of grown-up people. Thus it is told of Dr. Arnold that when he was three years old he received as a present from his father of Smollett’s History of England as a reward for the accuracy with which he went through the stories connected with the portraits and pictures the successive reigns––an amusement which probably laid the foundation of the great love for history which distinguished him in after life. When occupying the professorial chair at Oxford, he made quotations, we are told, from Dr Priestley’s Lectures on History––verbally accurate quotations, we may believe, for such was the habit of his mind; besides, a child has little skill in recasting his matter––and that, though he had not had the book in his hands since he was a child of eight. No doubt he was an exceptional child; and all I maintain is, that had his reading been the sort of diluted twaddle which is commonly thrust upon children, it would have been impossible for him to cite passages a week, much less some two score years, after the reading.