It was a life of single-minded devotion to truth and friendship, a life serene and gentle, free alike from vanity and from ambition, bearing without complaint the ill-health which sometimes checked his labours, viewing with calm fortitude those problems of man's life on which his mind was always fixed, untroubled in the presence of death.
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas Quique metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari.
When his friends heard of his departure there rose to mind the words in which the closing scene of the life of Socrates is described by the greatest of his disciples, and we thought that among all those we had known there was none of whom we could more truly say that in him the spirit of philosophy had its perfect work in justice, in goodness, and in wisdom.
[51] It is hoped that a life of Sidgwick, together with a selection from his letters, may before long be published.
[52] It was his aim to avoid as much as possible technical terms or phrases whose meaning was not plain to the average reader. An anecdote was current that once when, in conducting a university examination, he was perusing the papers of a candidate who had darkened the subject by the use of extreme Hegelian phraseology, he turned to his co-examiner and said, "I can see that this is nonsense, but is it the right kind of nonsense?"
Ever since the publication of Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold that eminent headmaster has been taken as the model of a great teacher and ruler of boys, the man who, while stimulating the intelligence of his pupils, was even more concerned to discipline and mould their moral natures. Arnold has become the type of what Carlyle might have called "The Hero as Schoolmaster." Though there have been many able men at the head of large schools since his time, including three who afterwards rose to be Archbishops of Canterbury, as well as a good many who have become bishops, his fame remains unrivalled, and the type created by his career, or rather perhaps by his biographer's account of it, still holds the field. Moreover, during the sixty years that have passed since Arnold's death scarcely a word has been said regarding any other masters than the head. During those years the English universities have sent into the great schools a large proportion of their most capable graduates as assistant teachers; and some of the strongest men among these graduates have never, from various causes, and often because they preferred to remain laymen, been raised to the headships of the schools. Every one knows that a school depends for its wellbeing and success more largely on the assistants taken together than it does on the headmaster. Most people also know that individual assistant masters are not unfrequently better scholars, better teachers, and more influential with the boys than is their official superior. Yet the assistant masters have remained unhonoured and unsung in the general chorus of praise of the great schools which has been resounding over England for nearly two generations.