‘I rejoice,’ wrote an anonymous correspondent in the British Magazine for June 1845, ‘that he had no power to act mischieviously but died, happily for his fame, ruling over boys.’ Such a judgement on Arnold’s career, although delivered two years after his death was equally current during his lifetime, not merely among his enemies—or at least those of them who did not denounce his influence in every sphere—but also among his own friends and disciples. From 1833 and in certain cases earlier, the older and more influential members of this circle—Bunsen, Whately, Keble, J. K. Coleridge, Hawkins, and the Hares—faced with Arnold’s powerful, and for him often undistinguishable, compound of political and theological radicalism, embarrassed by the polemical extremism of the Oxford Malignants, and increasingly aware of his growing public unpopularity, while largely maintaining some contact with him, found themselves not only opposing or ignoring his opinions but also reflecting that it was neither possible nor desirable that he should occupy a more conspicuous position beyond his headmastership. ‘I love Dr Arnold,’ Crabb Robinson quoted Wordsworth as telling Mrs Arnold, ‘he was a good man and an admirable school master, but he would make a desperate bad Bishop’. Wordsworth, although a firm Tory, also spoke for the many liberals whose confident predictions that Arnold’s elevation to the bench was purely a matter of time had gradually evaporated.