MEMORIALS OF SAMUEL CLARK.*

Tiroz Memorials will be interesting to that large circle of friends to whom the subject of them was personally known, and endeared by his deep as well as his lighter social sympathies ; and not less so to those who care for the records of the formation of a fine character, and of the work which a self-made man can do

in the world,—and especially to such as need the encourage- ment which a life of successful battle with difficulties, within and without, offers to those who have themselves to contend with like circumstances. Samuel Clark was born at South- ampton in May, 1810. Those who delight—with Darwin and Galton—to find evidences of the hereditary descent of moral and intellectual character, may be pleased to read that Clark's paternal ancestor was believed to be Henry, second son of Oliver Cromwell,—a tradition curiously confirmed by the story that on Clark being introduced to Mr. Samuel Lawrence while engaged on a picture of Oliver Cromwell, he looked hard at him, and then asked for a sitting, that he might copy his eyelids, the only ones he had ever seen in a living person which resembled those in the existing portraits of the Protector.

On his father's side, too, there was a traditional pedigree reaching back to Henry VIL'e time, and including several

generations of parish clerks. Actually, he was the youngest of ten children of a middle-class family, settled at Southampton, strict members of the Society of Friends. We gather from allusions in his journal and letters that his father was some- what stern and narrow, though conscientious and religious, while his mother was both more loving and more catholic in her sympathies ; and that while the family was highly respected alike by those who were and wore not Quakers, young Clark

had early to learn what it was " to knock about the world, and earn his own bread," though he was able, in his twenty-fifth year, to write, " It is desirable for you and me to seek some other business. It ought to make us brimful of gratitude that we can leave our parents and sisters in comfortable circum-

stances, and therefore that we need have no pressing anxiety on any account."

After four years of school, broken into by a year of bad health,—

"When, at the early ago of thirteen and a half, his father decided on employing him in his business, Samuel wont down on hie knees to bog to be permitted to remain longer at school. His mother added her en- treaties to his, and collected his school-bills, to show that only £30 had been spent on his education. The request was refused, with the words, Thou knowest enough for what I want of thee.' His ardour for knowledge was not, however, abated by this chock, and he set himself diligently to carry on his studies alone. At this period of his life, and for the next few years, his hours of business were from six a.m. to eight p.m, so that his only times for read- ing were before and after these hours, and during the intervals allotted for meals. He appears rarely to have had a day's holiday, and to ha''e taken hardly sufficient out-of-door exercise to keep him

in health The extent of his reading in English was mar- vellous, considering the oircumstances; and he also acquired an accurate knowledge of French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to which the study of various sciences was added."

It was not without important and permanent influence on the future career of young Clark, that Mr. Michael Maurice, father of Professor Maurice, now came with his family to live at Southampton. The spirit of the old Unitarian minister and schoolmaster was stirred by the want of intellectual energy'in the town; he found out the young Quaker, and called him to help to infuse life into the torpid existence of the local mechanics' institute and literary and philosophical society, while assisting him in return in a systematic course of study, after his business of the day was finished. In Elizabeth Maurice, the eldest daughter of the family, the youth found a friend who could sympathise with him not only in his love of litera- ture, and especially of poetry, but also in the religious difficulties which he now felt to be involved in his position as a Quaker. Still more important was the help which he got from Frederick Maurice, who was approaching the like questions for himself from another• side. After long and thoughtful examination of the subject, recorded in his journals, Clark decided on joining the Church of England, though it was not till 1837 that he formally avowed the change, from his conscientious reluctance

• ireeterrerA,from.igurnals and Laleere, of Samuel Clark, df.A., FR.G.S., late Rector or Eaton Bishop, Herefordshire, and formerly Principal of the National Society's Training College, Battersea. Edited, with an Introduction, by his Wife. London : Macmillan and 00. 1878.

to put himself in opposition to his father and mother, and to wound their own religious convictions. In 1836 he went to London, and became a partner in the publishing firm of the Messrs. Dalton, the younger of whom had married his sister. Here he was able not only to enjoy the society and the sympathy of Mr. Maurice, lately become Chaplain of Guy's Hospital, but to do his friend some important service.

The great Evangelical revival of the preceding generation was, if not dying out, yet fading into the light of common day, and the High-Church revival, under the guidance of Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman, was begun. Wide-spread and lasting as have been the effects of this latter revival upon the mind and life, political and religious, of the country, they would have been still greater—greater for evil, and less for good—but for the counteracting force of which Frederick Maurice was the repre- sentative. Mr. Maurice was entering upon what became the work of his life,—the assertion that truth and reason, and not authority and tradition, were the sustaining pillars of the

Church, and that if the Church did employ truth and reason, so, and so only, could she solve for us all the otherwise insoluble problems of human and national life. A man of genius, one of the master-spirits who make the course of their generation to be other than it would have been without them, would no doubt have found means of utterance in any case ; but it was not un- important to him at that moment to have in Clark an enthu- siastic publisher, who, not without pecuniary and other sacri- fices, brought out in monthly pamphlets the Letters to a Member of the Society of Friends, in which Maurice maintained his ideal of the Church against that of the Tracts for the Times. And at the same time, by putting the Educational Magazine under Maurice's editorship, Clark assisted him in taking a leading place in the great controversy of the day about National Education. The interest in National Education, and the enthusiastic eagerness and earnestness with which the young men of forty years ago, together with some of their elders, not only argued, but worked, might be fitly described iu language taken from Milton's " Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." Something of this may be seen in Clark's corre- spondence at this time ; and as the matter passed from con- troversy to action, he began to take au active part in the latter, too. His journals show that he had long desired to become a Christian minister ; circumstances made the business he was in distasteful to him, and after—amidst the greatest hindrances and delays—completing his residence at Oxford and taking his degree, he was ordained in 1846, and a few weeks later ap- pointed Vice-Principal and Chaplain of St. Mark's Training- College for• National Schoolmasters, which had been established by the National Society, under the Rev. Dorwent Coleridge. In 1848 he became and for some years after continued to be a lecturer at Queen's College, which lie had assisted Mr, Maurice in estab- lishing, for the higher education of women. Letters from Dr. Coleridge, from Miss Wedgwood, and from a pupil at St. Mark's, describe his great success as a teacher in both Colleges, in language which is enthusiastic in its admiration, but which those who knew him will not think exaggerated. In 1849 he married Miss Ellen Heath, by whom he had four children, of whom three died in infancy, and the remaining one only sur- vived him a few months. The failure of his health from overwork compelled him to resign the Vice-Principalship of St. Mark's in 1850 ; but after some months' rest he was able next year to take the office of Principal of Battersea Training College. During the outburst of interest in education of which we have spoken, Sir James Kay Shuttleworth and Mr. Edward Tufnell, men of no less noble an enthusiasm than was inspiring Mr. Maurice and his friends, though they were for the time rather opponents than follow-workers, had established a College for training schoolmasters in a fine old country-house —once, if we do not mistake, the abode of Lord Chester- field—on the banks of the Thames, at 13attersea. After carry- ing it on for some time, chiefly at their own expense, they made over to the National Society, with only the stipulation—if we remember rightly—that a fair trial should be allowed to some arrangements they had made for the education not being exclusively that of the Church of England. The Society appointed Mr. Clark to the office of Principal ; large additions were made to the buildings ; and under his admirable management, during the seventeen years that he continued to direct the College, it became a model of what a training-college for national schoolmasters should be. He had already proved himself an able lecturer and teacher; ho

now showed himself to be a no less able organiser and ad- ministrator. His journals and letters in earlier years tell how much there was in his former circumstances; and his consci- entious self-culture, to have prepared him for this work; and for a detailed account of what that work was, and how ex- cellently it was done, we must refer our readers to the account given in a letter from Mr. Evan Daniel, the present Principal of the College, and a former pupil of Mr. Clark, or to Mr. Clark's own evidence before the Education Commission in 1860.

He used to say that such an office as his should only be held for a limited time, as it was one which required a special in- fusion of new energies, as well as now thoughts and methods, at short intervals, and his health was again giving way when he decided to retire from Battersea. To the discredit--strange,

if it were not so usual—of the Heads of the Church for which he had trained nearly a thousand schoolmasters, he was only able to retire by an accident of private patronage. The remaining thirteen years of his life were spent in two country parishes in Herefordshire, where he was actively occupied, in addition to his parish work, in the diocesan inspection of schools, in conducting the education of his only son together with other pupils, in the duties of an examiner for the Society of Arts and for the Oxford Local Examination, as well as in various literary engagements. When a publisher, he wrote and edited many school-books, as well as Peter Parley's Wonders of Earth,

Sea, and Sky, and Peter Parley's Ancient and Modern Atlas. He wrote articles in the Educational Magazine, published many valuable geographical, historical, and physical maps and atlases, contributed several articles to Dr. Smith's Bible Dictionary, and to the Speaker's Commentary the portions on Leviticus, part of Exodus, and Micah. He was also one of the judges in the Educational Department of the Great Exhibition of 1862.

Of his domestic life, its happiness and its sorrows, of the death of his first wife, of his second marriage with Miss Holldsworth, to whom we owe these Memorials, and of the pious submission and cheerfulness of his last painful illness, we will not here speak, but will conclude with the summary of his character given by one of his oldest friends; in a letter to Mrs.

Clark :-

"Clark was a man of deep personal piety ; an orthodox, though a liberal clergyman of the Church of England ; and not less active and• useful in his parishes, and in the diocese in which those parishes lay, than he had been in the Colleges of St. Mark and Battersea. Besides his Biblical and ecclesiastical learning, which was considerable, there were few subjects of literature or of natural science with which he had not more or less acquaintance. His ready powers of conversa- tion, and his genial and sympathetic temperament in all social rela- tions, made him a general favourite with ordinary acquaintances; while those who knew him well prized his friendship—ever gentle, affectionate, and unselfish as it was—in proportion to their intimacy with him."