Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) was a multitalented man, a great classics scholar, a distinguished poet and literary critic, and a commentator on education, religion, and culture. The son of the headmaster of Rugby school, he attended Rugby and Oxford. While at Oxford, he received the Newdigate prize for a poem about Oliver Cromwell, leader of England during the Puritan Interregnum. After graduating, Arnold took a government post as inspector of schools, a position that he held for the rest of his working life. In 1853, he published a book entitled Poems, which established his reputation as a writer of verse. In 1857, he was appointed to the poetry chair at Oxford, a position that he held for ten years. In 1859, he was appointed foreign assistant commissioner on education and traveled to the continent to observe school systems there. His New Poems, containing "Dover Beach," appeared in 1867, but by that time he was devoting his writing primarily to critical essays. He admired the calmness, clarity, and restraint of the great writers of classical Greece and Rome and believed that culture—"the best that has been thought and said in the world"—was the proper antidote for the worries, materialism, and decay of his times. In 1883 he made a lecture tour in the United States, published as Discourses in America.