SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS, AND SCHOOLMASTERS. SCHOOLS SCHOOL-BOOKS AND S CHOOLMASTERS (Contribution to tfje Distort) of bucational in reat Britain BY w. CAREW HAZLITT NEW YORK G. E. STECHERT & Co 1905 M ,\ PREFACE. ALTHOUGH the commencing section has been thrown into the introductory form, it has seemed to me necessary to annex a few lines by way of preface, in order to explain that the following pages do not pretend to deal ex- haustively with the subject of which they treat, but offer to public consideration a series of representative types and selected specimens. To have barely enumerated all the authors and works on British education would fill a volume much larger than that in the hands of the reader. My main object has been to trace the sources and rise of our educational system, and to pre- sent a general view of the principles on which the groundwork of this system was laid. So 255820 vi Preface far as I am capable of judging, the narrative will be found to embody a good deal that is new and a good deal that ought to be inter- esting. The bias of the volume is literary, not biblio- graphical; but its production has involved a very considerable amount of research, not only among books which proved serviceable, but among those which yielded me no contribution to my object. W. C. H. BARNES COMMON, SURREY, November 1887. A SELECT LIST OF Utorte 0r (Mitians BY WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT OF THE INNER TEMPLE CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 1. History of the Venetian Republic; Its Rise, its Greatness, and its Civilisation. 'With Maps and Illustrations. 4 vols. 8vo. Smitlt, Elder 2. Uniform with First Series. About 10,000 titles on the same principle as before. "Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's second series of Bibliographical Collections and Notes (Quaritch) is the result of many years' searches among rare books, tracts, ballads, and broadsides by a man whose specialty is bibliography, and who has thus produced a volume of high value. If any one ( 2 ) will read through the fiftyfour closely printed columns relating to Charles I., or the ten and a half columns given to 'London' from 1541 to 1794, and recollect that these are only a supplement to twelve columns in Hazlitt's Handbook and five and a half in his first Collections, he will get an idea of the work involved in this hook. Other like entries are 'James I.,' 'Ireland,' 'France,' 'England,' 'Elizabeth,' 'Scotland' (which has twenty-one and a half columns), and so on. As to the curiosity and rarity ot the works that Mr. Hazlitt has catalogued, any one who has been for even twenty or thirty years among old books will acknowledge that the strangers to him are far more numerous than the acquaintances and friends. This second series of Collections will add to Mr. Hazlitt's well-earned reputation as a biblio- grapher, and should be in every real library through the English-speaking world. The only thing we desiderate in it is more ot his welcome marks 'and names, B. M., Brit- well, Lambeth, &c., to show where all the books approa- ching rarity are. The service that these have done in Mr. Hazlitt's former books to editors for the Early-English Text, New Shakspere, Spenser, Hunterian, and other societies, has been so great that we hope he will always say where he has seen the rare books that he makes entries of." Academy, August 26, 1882. 7. Bibliographical Collections and Notes. A THIRD AND FINAL SERIES. 1886. 8vo. Uniform with the First and Second Series. This volume contains upwards of 3000 articles. All three are now on sale by Mr. Quaritch. 8. Memoirs of William Hazlitt. With Portions of his Correspon- dence. Portraits after Miniatures by John Hazlitt. 2 vols. 8vo. 1867. During the last twenty years the Author has been inde- fatigable in collecting additional information for the Life of Hazlitt, 1867, in correcting errors, and in securing all the unpublished letters which have come into the market, some of great interest, with a view to a new and improved edi- tion. !>. Inedited Tracts. Illustrating the Mariners, Opinions, and Occupations of Englismen during the 16th and 17th Centuries, 1586-1618. With an Introduction and Notes. Facsimiles. 4to 1868. 10. The Works of Charles Lamb. Now first collected, and entirely rearranged. With Notes. 4 vols. 8vo. E. Moxon & Co. 1868-69. < 3 ) 11. Letters of Charles Lamb. With some Account of the Writer, his Friends and Correspondents, and Explanatory Notes. By the late Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, D. C. L., one of his Executors. An entirely new edition, carefully revised and greatly enlarged by W. Carew Hazlitt. 2 vols. 1886. Post 8vo. Ha. Mary and Charles Lamb. New Facts and Inedited Remains. 8vo. Woodcuts and Facsimiles. 1871. The groundwork of this volume was an Essay by the writer in Macmillan's Magazine. 12. English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases. Arranged alpha- betically and annotated. Medium 8vo. 1869. Second Edition, corrected and greatly enlarged, crown 8vo . 1882. 13. Narrative of the Journey of an Irish Gentleman through En- gland in 1751. From a MS. With Notes. 8vo. 1869. 14. The English Drama and Stage, under the Tudor and Stuart Princes. 1547-1664. With an Introduction and Notes. 8vo. 1869. A series of reprinted Documents and Treatises. 15. Popular Antiquities of Great Britain. I. The Calendar. II. Customs and Ceremonies. III. Superstitions. 3 vols. Medium 8vo 1870. Brand's Popular Antiquities, by Ellis, 1813, taken to pieces, recast, and enormously augmented. 16. Inedited Poetical Miscellanies. 1584-1700. Thick 8vo. W 7 ith Notes and Facsimiles. 50 copies privately printed. 1870. 17. Warton's History of English Poetry. An entirely new edition, with Notes by Sir F. Madden, T. Wright, F. J. Furnivall, II. Morris, and others, and by the Editor. 4 vols. Medium 8vo. 1871. 18. The Feudal Period. Illustrated by a Series of Tales (from Le Grand\ 12mo. 1874. ID. Prefaces, Dedications, and Epistles. Prefixed to Early English Books. 1540-1701 8vo 1S74. 50 copies privately printed. 20. Blount's Jocular Tenures. Tenures of Land and Customs of Manors. Originally published by Thomas Blount of the Inner Temple in 1079. An entirely new and greatly enlar- ged edition by W. Carew Hazlill, of that Ilk. Medium 8vo 1874. 21. Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays. A new edition, great- ly enlarged, corrected throughout, and entirely rearran- ged. With a Glossary by Dr. Richard Morris. 15 vols. 8vo. 1874-76. ( * ) 22. Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances. Illustrating Shakespear and other Early English Writers. 12mo. 1875. 23. Shakespear's Library : A Collection of the Novels, Plays, and other Material supposed to have been used by Shakespear. An entirely new edition. 6 vols. 12mo. 1875. 24. Fugitive Tracts (written in verse) which illustrate the Condi- tion of Religious and Political Feeling in England, and the State of Society there, during two centuries. 1493-1700. 2 vols. 4to. 50 copies privately printed. 1875. 25. Poetical Recreations. By W. C. Hazlitt. 50 copies printed. 12mo. 1877. A new edition, revised and very greatly enlarged, is in preparation. 20. The Baron's Daughter. A Ballad. 75 copies printed. 4to 1877. 27. The Essays of Montaigne. Translated by C. Cotton. An enti- rely new edition, collated with the best French text. With a Memoir, and all the extant Letters. Portrait and Illus- trations. 3 vols. Svo. -JS77. The only library edition. 28. Catalogue of the Huth Library. [English portion.] 5 vols. Large Svo. lSh'0. 200 copies printed. 29. Offspring of Thought in Solitude. Modern Essays. 18S'i. Svo, pp. 384. Some of these Papers were originally contributed to All the Year Round, &c. 30. Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. 12mo. 1886. 31. An Address to the Electors of Mid- Surrey, among whom I Live. In Rejoinder to Mr. Gladstone's Manifesto. 1886. 8vo, pp. 32. "Who would not grieve, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?'' POPE. 32. Gleanings in Old Garden Literature. 12mo. 1SS7. 33. Schools, School-books, and Schoolmasters. A Contribution to the History of Educational Development. 12mo. 1J-T-S. 34. Studies in Jocular and Anecdotal Literature. 12mo. hi January next. 35. Present and Future : a Little Book about Life & Death; 12mo. 1891. 36. Tales and Legends of England from Early Tinu-s. Svo. 1892^ 37. Manual for the Collector of Old English Plays. 4to. 1892. ( 5 ) 38. Livery Companies of the City of London. 111. roy. 8vo. 1892. 39. Coinage of the European Continent, Mints. Illus. 8vo. 1893. 40. The Coin Collector. 8vo. pp. 298. Limited edit, on Japanese vellum. Roy. 8vo. pp. 298. 1896. 41. The Lambs : their Lives, Friends, Correspondence. New Particulars. Gr. 8vo. pp. 248. 1895. 42. Four Generations of a Literary Family : Hazlitts in England, Ireland, America : their Friends and Fortunes, 1725-1896. Portraits from Miniatures by John Hazlitt. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 528. 1897. 43. Confessions of a Collector. Cr. 8vo. pp. 384. 1897. 44. Supplement to Coinage of European Continent. 8vo. 1897. 45. Leisure Intervals. 8 x 4 314 pp. 254. 1898. 40. Lamb and Hazlitt : Further Letters and Records hitherto Unpublished. Cr. 8vo. 7 7/8 x 5. pp. 200. 1899. 47. Venetian Republic : Rise, Growth, Fall. 2 vols. roy. 8vo. 93/8x6 3/8. pp. 1670. 1900. 48. Shakespear. Roy, 8vo. 91/8x5 3/4. pp. 320, 1902. 49. Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. Pop. ed. 12mo. 63/4x4 1/8. pp. 274. 1902. 50. Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Lite- rature made during 1893-1903. 8vo. 1903. 51. Shakespeare Himself and his Work : Study. 2nd ed. 8vo. 1903. SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS, AND SCHOOLMASTERS. Introductory survey ol' the old system of teaching Salutary influence of the Church Education of Englishmen in their own homes and on the Continent Severity of early discipline Dr. Busby. I. A FAIR body of authentic evidence has been collected, and is here before us, exhibiting and illustrating the origin and progress of the edu- cational movement, and the opportunities which our ancestors acquired and improved for mental cultivation and literary development. An attentive consideration of the ensuing pages may bring us to the conclusion that the A 2 Schools, School-Books, English and Scots, at all events, of former days were not ill provided with facilities for mastering the rudiments of learning, and that the qualifications necessary and sufficient for ordinary persons and careers were within the reach of all men, and, as time went on, women, of moderate intelligence. and resources. Moreover, when the taste for a more elabo- rate and extended system of training, and for a circle of accomplishments, set in with the Stuarts, the appliances of every kind for grati- fying and promoting -it were superabundant ; and London and other cities swarmed with experts, who either attached themselves to academies or worked on their own account, waiting on their clients or receiving them at their own places of business. The youth of family who had passed from the grammar- school or the tutor to the University, enjoyed, from the moment when professors began to flock hither from France, Italy, and Germany as to the b?st market, greatly increased faci- lities for completing themselves in special departments of science, as well as in such exercises as were thought to belong to gentle- and Schoolmasters. 3 men. As our intercourse with the Continent became more regular and general, its fashions and sentiments were gradually communicated to us, and we began to overcome our old insular prejudices. A familiarity with other languages and literatures than our own, and with the pursuits and amusements of countries which a narrow strip of sea separated, was the beneficial consequence of the French and Ital- ian sympathies which the union of the crowns, after the death of the last of the Tudors, intro- duced into England. We are scarcely entitled to plume ourselves on the elevation from which it is our privilege to look back on obsolete educational theories and principles. The change which we witness is of recent date and of political origin. It is within an easily measurable number of years that the democratic wave has loosened and shaken the direct clerical jurisdiction over our schools and our studies. What more signifi- cant fact can there be, in proof of the conser- vative bigotry of those who so long exercised control in schoolroom and college, that a primer compiled in the first quarter of the 4 Schools, School-Books, sixteenth century was still substantially the standard authority less than a hundred years since ? When we regard a History of English Litera- ture, and the works which either constitute its principal strength and glory, or even such as, rather from the circumstances connected with them than their own intrinsic importance, lend to it a certain incidental or special value, it becomes natural to inquire by what process or course of training the men and women whose names compose the roll of fame became, or were aided at least in becoming, what they were and remain ? As for the women, they followed their studies at home under governesses and professors; and Ballard's volume on Learned Ladies will shew what was capable of accomplishment in a few isolated and conspicuous cases, before any scheme for the higher education of the sex had been broached. But it is with the men that I have more particularly to deal. Every eminent Englishman who has done more or less to augment and enrich our literary stores, and an infinitely greater number who and Schoolmasters. 5 have adopted other vocations, passed of course through the scholastic ordeal. They were sent to school, and perhaps to college ; and they had books put into their hands, as our boys have books put into theirs books written by the scholars of the time up to the knowledge and opinion of the time. With the fewest exceptions, the boys was the father of the man, and what he had himself acquired he was content to see his children acquire. There were centuries during which the lines of instruction and the scope of culture varied little. The greater part of our early English teachers came across the sea, or had been educated there ; our best books were modelled on those of French or Roman grammarians, and the im- provement in our system was due, when it came, to the gymnasia and academies of the Continent. II. We all know that the Church in early times, before it became a conflicting and mis- chievous influence, did much valuable work toward the developmentand progress of litera- Schools, School-Books, ture and art, and was instrumental in preserv- ing many monuments of ancient learning and genius, which might otherwise have perished. But the strong clerical element in the old social system operated beneficially on our English civilisation in another equally impor- tant way. For a vast length of time the schools attached to the monasteries were not only the best, but almost the sole seminaries where an education of the higher class could be obtained. They were, in point of fact, the precursors of the similar establishments subsequently attached to some of the colleges; and it is further to be remarked, that, besides the ordinary features of a mediaeval scholastic curriculum, they taught music for the sake of keeping a constant suc- cession of candidates for the choir of the chapel. It was through the monks and through an ecclesiastical channel that we derived both our most ancient schools of music and our primitive educational machinery, the two alike destined to become sensible, in course of time, of a potent secular influence, scarcely imaginable by their monastic institutors. and Schoolmasters. 1 Bishop Percy says that the system of instruc- tion appears to have consisted of learning the Psalms, probably by heart, and acquiring the principles of music, singing, arithmetic, and grammar. Some of the boys, he adds, who had made the art of music their profession, assisted in later life at the religious services on special occasions, while others relinquished their origi- nal callings, and sought their fortune as min- strels and instrumental players. Altogether, it is evident that music and other branches of a liberal training were primarily indebted at the outset, and long subsequently, for their encouragement and diffusion to Hie only class which was at the period capable of undertaking tuition. We have to seek in the Church of the Middle Ages the source of aU our scholastic erudition and refinement, and of all the humanising influence which music, in all its forms, has exerted over society. III. Carlisle, in his well-known work on the Endowed Schools, supplies us with some very desirable facts touching the cathedral institu- tions which preceded the lay seminaries, and 8 Schools, School-Books, over which the bishop of the diocese presided ex officio. The pupils in these institutions were termed the scholastics of the diocese; and one of the latest survivals of the system was, per- haps, the old St. Paul's, which Colet's endow- ment eventually superseded. The preponderant element here was, of course, clerical; the boys were, as a rule, educated with a view to ecclesi- astical preferment; and those studies which lay outside the requirements of the early Church were naturally omitted. It was a narrow and warpingcourse of discipline, which lasted, never- theless, from the days of 'Alfred to the age of the Tudors. But these cathedral schools themselves had grown out of the antecedent conventual estab- lishments, of which hundreds must have at one time existed among us, and consequently the former represented o forward movement and a certain disposition to relax the severity and exclusiveness of purely religious education. As we see that subsequently it was the practice to attach to a college a preparatory school, as at Magdalen, Oxford, so in the mediaeval time almost every monastic house had its special and Schoolmasters. 9 educational machinery for training aspirants to the various orders. This point does not really come within my immediate scope ; but I thought it well to shew briefly how, as the lay schools evolved from the cathedral schools, so the latter were an outcome from the conven- tual. There seems, however, to have been one marked difference between the monastic or con- ventual and the cathedral programmes, that in the latter the sciences of law and medicine, having become independent professions, were abandoned in favour of the academies, where youths on quitting school were specially in- ducted into a knowledge of those Faculties. Prior to the institution of colleges and schools of a better class, the nobility and gentry often sent their children to the monasteries and con- vents to be initiated in the elements or first principles of learning. The sort of education obtained here must have been of the most meagre character; the course was restricted to grammar, philosophy of the cast then in vogue, and divinity; the classics were treated with com- parative neglect, and a study of the living lan- guages was still more remote from their design. 10 Schools, School-Books, Even so late as the Tudor time, those who could afford to send their children abroad found the education better, and probably cheaper ; some distinguished Englishmen, driven from their country by political or religious differences, brought up their families whitherever they fled as a matter of necessity. Sir Thomas Bodley, in the account of his life written by himself in 1609, acquaints us with the fact that when his father was living at Geneva, the great centre of the Protestant refugees, and he was a boy of twelve, he was sufficiently advanced in learning, through his father's care, to attend the lectures delivered at that University in Hebrew, Greek, and divinity, in which last his teachers were Calvin and Beza ; and besides these studies he had private tutors in the house of the gentleman with whom he boarded, including Robertus Gonstantinus, the lexicographer, who read Homer to him. On the return of the Bodleys to England upon the accession of Elizabeth, the member of the family who was destined to immortalise their name was sent to Oxford. Bishop Waynflete appears to have been and Schoolmasters. 11 among the earliest men who perceived the necessity, at all events, of grounding boys more thoroughly in grammar, and he was the prime mover in the establishment of schools at Wayn- flete, Brackley, and Oxford, where the Acci- dence and Syntax were taught on an improved plan. The last-named seminary was within the precincts of Magdalen College, and became by far the most important and most famous of the three, in consequence of its good fortune in having among its masters men like Anniquil and Stanbridge, who took a real interest in their profession, and bred scholars capable of diffusing and developing the love of acquir- ing knowledge and the art of communicat- ing it. A Knight observes, grammar was the main object ; but then the method was a great ad- vance on the old monastic plan. Even Jesus College, Cambridge, was merely erected and endowed for a master and six fellows, and a certain number of scholars to be instructed in grammar. At the time of the Civil War, John Allibone, 69 a repre- and Schoolmasters. '25 sentation on the subject was actually laid before Parliament in a document called " The Chil- dren's Petition : Or, A modest remonstrance of that intolerable grievance our youth lie under in the accustomed severities of the school-disci- pline of this nation." This protest was printed, and facing the title-page there meets the eye a notice to this effect : " It is humbly desired this book maybe delivered from one hand to another, and that gentleman who shall first propose the motion to the House, the book is his, together with the prayers of posterity," in which last phrase a double sense may or may not lurk. It required many attacks on such a strong- hold as the united influence and prejudice of the teaching profession to produce an effect, and probably no effect was produced at first ; for in 1698 another endeavour was made to obtain parliamentary relief, and in this instance the address humbly sought " an Act to remedy the foul abuse of children at schools, especially in the great schools of this nation." These preparatory movements indicated the direction in which sentiment and taste were beginning to stir, not so much at the outset, 26 Schools and Schoolmasters. perhaps, from any persuasion that greater cle- mency was conducive to progress, but from a natural disposition on the part of parents to revolt against the senseless ill-usage of their boys by capricious martinets. II. The Foundations -Vocabularies, Glossaries, and Noniinalia Their manifold utility Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric (tenth century) -Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Ni-ckam on utensils (twelfth century) Works of Johannes de Garlandia His Dictionary (thirteenth cen- tury (and its pleasant treatment The Pictorial Vocabu- laryAnglo-Gallic Dictionary of Walter de Biblesworth (late thirteenth century). I. THE origin and history of a class of docu- ments which may be viewed as the basis and starting-point of our educational literature have first to be considered. I refer to the vocabu- laries, glossaries, and nominalia, which afford examples of the method of instruction pursued tn this country from the Middle Ages to the invention of pinting. Such of these manuals as we fortunately still possess represent the surviving residue of a much larger number; and from the perishable 28 Schools, School-Books, material on which they were written and their constant employment in tuition, it becomes a source of agreeable surprise that so many specimens remain to throw light on the mode in which elementary learning was acquired in England in the infancy of a taste for letters and knowledge. In the small volumes on Cookery and Garden- ing by the present writer, he has, as a matter of course, called into requisition these early philological relics to illustrate both those sub- jects ; and this fact testifies to the multiplicity of purposes for which such relics can be ren- dered serviceable. There is hardly, indeed, any aspect or line of mediaeval life which these productions do not assist very powerfully in making more luminous and familiar. But their original design and destination were obviously educational. They were rude and imperfect vehicles, contrived by men of narrow culture and limited experience for the instruction of the young; and they w r ere advisedly thrown, as far as possible, into an interlocutory form the form most apt to impress circumstances and names on the memories of pupils. Some of and Schoolmasters. 29 these, which I shall presently describe a little more at large, were constructed on the inter- linear principle, not, as among ourselves, for the edification of the learner, but, as Mr. Wright points out, for the preceptor's guidance in days when the latter was often a person of very mediocre attainments, and was incapable of dispensing with occasional assistance to his recollection. In other words, the majority of schoolmasters and ushers were merely the me- chanical medium for conveying to the boys the lessons which they found set down in treatises prepared by persons of superior skill and erudition. These primitive schoolbooks are, as a rule, easily susceptible of classification under the heads of Vocabularies, Dictionaries, Colloquies, and Narrative or descriptive texts, of which the two latter divisions are usually interlinear, either in part or throughout. Some of these terms, again, were formerly understood in acceptations different from our own ; for a Vocabulary was what we should rather call a Dictionary, and a Dictionary was what we should rattier call a Phrase-Book. 30 Schools, School-Books, II. The most ancient item in the collection before me belongs to that century of which King Alfred just lived to witness the opening, the Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric, in Anglo- Saxon and Latin, and known only from an enlarged copy or transcript made by the writer's disciple and namesake. The original is sup- posed to have been compiled while Alfric was a monk at Winchester. He succeeded to the archbishopric in 995, and his pupil and editor died about the middle of the following century. The professed object of the undertaking was the acquisition of the Latin language by the Anglo-Saxon youth in the intervals of leisure from other pursuits or duties; and the process of instruction is conducted on the plan of a dialogue in Latin between a master and boys, with an interlinear Sayon gloss. It is significant of the harsh discipline which prevailed in those days that one of the foremost points or inquiry is in relation to flogging. The teacher asks if the boys choose to be flogged at their lessons, and the answer is that they would rather be flogged and taught than be ignorant, but that they rely on his clemency and unwillingness to und Schoolmasters. 31 punish them, unless he is obliged. The entire work deals with the matters which were most familiar to the student and came nearest home to their everyday life and sympathies ; and this feature constitutes for us its special value and beauty. The Latin itself is indifferent enough, and bespeaks the acquisition of the tongue by Alfric and his follower from the earlier monkish authors, rather than from classical models. Many curious points might be elicited from the present composition and others of an allied character printed with it, I mean such passages as those where the shepherd speaks of the danger from wolves, and the herdsman of the depredations of cattle-lifters. There w r as probably no occupation of the period which is not brought before us, and its particular speci- alities bilingually set out. The VOCABULARY, of approximately the same date, is in reality a Latin and Anglo-Saxon word- book. Like the Colloquy, it received subsequent additions perhaps by the same hand; but they are in the form of a separate Appendix. Each section has its independent alphabet, and the articles which fall under it do not observe any 32 Schools, School-Books, apparent order. The same is to be said of all the works of this class belonging to the mediaeval era. The Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Neckam De Utensilibus (twelfth century) is differently constructed from the Alfric Vocabu- lary, not as regards the text itself, which is also in Latin, but in having an interlinear gloss in Old French, and in following a descriptive form. It takes the various parts of a dwelling seriatim, the several occupations and callings of men, the mode of laying out a garden, and of building a castle. Perhaps the book by Neckam and the Dictionary of Johannes de Garlandia constitute together the most comprehensive and remark- able body of information in our literature re- specting the life and habits of the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans. Johannes de Garlandia, whose work is com- mon in MS. and who is also known as the author of other productions of a philological cast, commences his Dictionary by defining what a dictionary is. " Dictionarius, 3 ' says he, " dicitur libellus iste a dictionibus magis and Schoolmasters. 33 necessariis, quas tenetur quilibet scolaris, non tantam in scrinio de linguis facto, sed in cordis arrnariolo firmiter retinere, ut ad faciliorem oracionis constructionem perveniat. Primo igitur sciat vulgaria nominare. Placet igitur a membris humani corporis incoare. . . ." Tliis phrase or word book, which was pro- bably composed about 1220, enters into the most minute particulars under all the eads which it comprises, and is unquestionably of the highest value and interest as taking us back so far into the life of the past, and making us in a manner the contemporary of an Englishman who flourished six or seven centuries ago, and domi- ciled himself in France, chiefly at Paris, where he gives us an account of his house and gar- den, with all their appointments and incidence. There is a very curious passage in one of the glosses, where Johannes explains the derivation of Pes, which he traces from the Greek pos [sic] adding that thence the dwellers of the other world or hemisphere, if it be true that there are any, are termed Antipodes. As this was written nearly 300 years before Golombus, it might have supplied a note and a point to Mr. c ,34 Schools, School-Books, Beamish in his volume on the Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century, 1841. The old dictionary-maker brings us so near to him by his pleasant colloquial method and familiar way of putting everything, and expects us to become acquainted into the bargain with his friends and neighbours, who resided at Paris under Philip Augustuses if one might go there and find some of them still living. In other words, there was belonging to this man a natural simplicity of style and a communicati- veness which together have rendered his treatise a work of art and a cyclopaedia of information. He even leaves his house to go into the market with you and shew what his neighbour William has on sale there ! How unspeakably more luminous and understandable the gone ages might have been if we had had more such ! 111. Passing from him, his pleasant book, and its pleasant associations with cordial regret, I just notice the other and latter-day word-books, w r hich are really, in the main, of the same type as those of which a description has gone before. and Schoolmasters. 35 One only differs markedly from the rest in possessing graphic embellishments of a rude and quaint character ; among the rest the por- trait of a woe-begone gallant, and by his side an arrow-pierced heart. Some of the repre- sentations^are, of course, happier than others ; assuredly those of animals are pre-Landseerian. They are many degrees below the stamp of such artistic essays as one finds in the books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a rule, both in England and abroad. Cri- ticism lays down its arms. But I must dwell rather longer on one of the tracts in this series the Anglo-Gallic Dictionary or Phraseologia of Walter de Biblesworth. It is the most ancient monument of its particular kind of which I am aware, and is ascribed to the close of the thirteenth century, in other words, to the period embraced by the later years of the reign of Edward I. The orthography, which naturally strikes a modern French stu- dent as strange and uncouth, may be accepted as a key to the ancient pronunciation of the language, at all events in England, if not even among the French themselves ; but the Ian- 36 Schools, School-Books, guage, apart from the spelling, is remarkable for its plentiful use of expressions which have fallen into desuetude, and some of which, as 10 for ye, bespeak a Pyrenaaan origin. This production is intituled " Le treytyz ke moun sire Gauter de Bibelesworthe fist a ma dame Dyonisie de Mounchensy, pur aprise de langwage, c,o est a saver, du primer temps ke horn me nestra, ouweke trestut le langwage pur saver nurture en sa juvente, &c." The text is in short rhyming couplets, and takes the child from its birth through all the duties, occupations, and incidents of life. To select a passage which will give a fair idea of the whole is not altogether easy ; but here is an extract which is capable of puzzling an average French scholar of our day : " Homme et femme lint la pec!, De morte beste quyr jo apel. Le clerk soune le dreyne apel, Le prestre fat a Roume apel. Ore avet co ke pent a cors, Dedens ausy et deors. Vestet vos dras, me chers en fauns, Chaucez vos bras, soulers, e gauns ; Mettet le chaperoun, coverz le chef, Tachet vos botouns, e pus derechef De une coreye vus ceynet." and Schoolmasters. 37 This didactic treatise is additionally interest- ing to the English student from its relationship, in the way of likely literary ancestry, to the subsequent compilations of a cognate sort by Lydgate and others. The diction is obscure enough, and has the air of having been the work of a man of imperfect culture, from the presence of such forms as dreyne for derreniere or derniere and the abundance of false syntax, which ought not to have been so conspicuous, even at this remote date, in a composition pro- fessedly educational. Yet, after all deductioHs, the work is of singular curiosity and fascination, not only for its ow r n sake, but as the best phi- lological standard which we seem to have to put side by side with its successors in the same important direction. 111. Earliest printed works of instruction Publications of Bishop Perrotus His Grammatical Rules Johannes Sulpicius and his Opus G ram mat iciint Some account of the book Importance and influence of these foreign Manuals in England The Carmen Juvcmile or Stans Puf'r t (Sogntta : qnabo acui beBet, bel qii gratart 2lccentit triples ; fit acutit* fcel cjrat>i, inbe (Bt ctrcuf(eu : qui mine fit ratu in bu. cum tenbtt uryiim et accentu acutu accentu eb t)ltaba ^rea beorum ^tt ctrciif(eU gtat)i in pritua : eb in altum 5lttolltt ntcbtant, |)otxema gtat)t recibitque. " This metrical exposition, which will not be mistaken for the language of Horace, is follo- wed by a commentary in prose. The next three divisions do not call for any particular criticism. They treat of the Eight Parts of Speech, the Irregular Nouns, and the Laivs of Grammatical Construction, of which the last is the first cast of the Syntax. There remain the Vulgar ia and the Lucu- brations, which are far more important and interesting, and of which there were numerous editions. The subjoined samples will shew the principle on which the Vulgaria was com- piled : and Schoolmasters. 65 tb Befe and motion is so dere, that a peny worth of meet wyll scant sufTyse a boy at a meale. " Whan I was a scholler of Oxforthe I lyued competently with vii. pens commens wekely. " Be of good chere man for I sawe ryght nowe a rodde made of wythye for the, gar- nysshed with knottes. it wolde do a boy good to loke vpon it. "A busshell of whete washoldeat xii. pens. "A gallon of swete wyne is at viii. pens in London. " A gallon of ale is at a peny and ferdynge. " I warne the fro hens forthe medle not with my bokes. Thou blurrest and blottest them, as thou were a bletchy sowter." Such bits as these were decidedly worth ex- tracting, yet Dibdin, with the very copy of the book from which they are derived before him, let them pass. In this volume Whittinton takes occasion to speak in eulogistic terms of Sir Thomas More. Of the Lucubrations the most interesting portion to an English reader will be the Syno- nyms : E 66 Schools, School-Books, " To arraye or To backbyte. The goute. to (Ujcj)it. Detraho Ar the sis Omo Detracto Arthtica passio Vestio Ob t recto Morbus articular! Amu-io Maledico Chiragra Tnduo Carpo Podagra Como &c. &c. &c. Colo A K (('(/an or To plat/e the To be u'u(h>. outlandysshe. brothell. Seuio Alienag.-na Scortari Furio Peregrinus Prostitui Insanio Aduena Fornicari Excandeseor Alienus Merere Bacchor Kxterus Struprari Wodnesse or Extern us Adulterari madnesse. Tarbarus Cohire Insania Extraneus Concumbere Sevicia?. &c. &c. Furor. " The copious storehouse of equivalent phrases in Latin composition shews us in what wide vogue that language was in England at this period, as there is no corresponding facility offered for persons desirous of enlarging their English vocabulary. The influence of the scholars of France, Italy, Holland, and Ger- many ~ long kept our vernacular in the back- ground, and retarded the study of English by Englishmen ; but the uprise of a taste for the and Schoolmasters. 67 French and Italian probably gave the first serious blow to the supremacy of the dead tongues, as they are called, and it became by degrees as fashionable for gentlemen and ladies to read and speak the languages in which Moliere and Tasso wrote as the hybrid dialect in which erudite foreigners had been used to correspond and compose. Whittinton styles himself on the title-pages of several of his pieces laureatus and protovates Anglice. In one place he speaks of being " primus in Anglia lauri coronam gestans, " and elsew r here he professes to be magistergram- maticcs. As Warton and others have specu- lated a good deal on the real nature and import of the dignity which this early scholar claimed in regard to the laurel crown or wreath, it may be worth noting that Wood furnishes the annexed explanation of the point : u In the beginning of the year 1513, he supplicated the venerable congregation of re- gents under the name and title of Robert "Whittington, a secular chaplain and a scholar of the art of rhetoric ; that, whereas he had spent fourteen years in the study of the said 68 Schools and Schoolmasters. art, and twelve years in the informing of boys, it might be sufficient for him that he might be laureated. This supplication being granted, he was, after he had composed an hundred verses^ which were stuck up in public places, especially on the door or doors of St. Mary's Church [Oxford], very solemnly crowned, or his temples adorned with a wreath of laurel, that his, deco- rated in the arts of grammar and rhetoric, 4 July the same year. " The biographer of Colet is undoubtedly cor- rect in supposing that the ancient poet-laureat- ship was nothing more than an academical degree, and that in this sense, and in no other, Skelton bore that designation, as well as Ber- nardus Andreas, who was tutor to Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII. It also appears from the account of the decoration of Whittinton that he had com- menced his qualification for a schoolmaster as far back as 1499, which is reconcilable with the date assigned to his birth (1480). ( 69 ) V. Educational tracts produced by other writers Parv ula Holt's Milk for Children Horrnan's Vulgaria and its singular curiosity and value The author's literary quarrel with \Vhittinton-The contemporary foreign teachers Specimen of the Grammar of Guaiini of Verona (1470) Vestiges of the literature current at Oxford in the beginning of the sixteenth century The printed works ot Johanes de Garlandia. I. OF independent tracts intended for the use of our early schools, there were several either anonymous or written by persons whom we do not recognise as writers of more than a single production. In the former category is placeable the small piece published three or four times by Wynkyn de Worde about 1509, under the title of Par- vula or Longe Parvula. It is a series of rules for translation and other exercises in the form of question and answer, thus : 70 Schools, School-Book*, U Q. What shall them do whan them hast an englysshe to make in latyn ? " A. I shal reherse myne englysshe ones, twyes, or thryes, and loke out my pryncypal, & aske y questyon, who or what." A second publication is the Milk for Children of John Holt, of Magdalen College, Oxford, who had the honour of numbering among his pupils Sir Thomas More. One of the most interesting points about the little book to us nowadays is that it is accompanied by some Latin hexameters and pentameters and an epi- gram in the same language by More. The latter has the air of having been sent to Holt, and insei'ted by him with the heading which occurs before it, where the future Chancellor is termed "disertus adolescentulus. " A decided singulaiity of this volume is the quaint device of the author f >r impressing his precepts on those who read his pages or attended his academy by arranging the cases and declensions on woodcuts in the shape of outstretched hands. Besides his Milk for Children and the Par- vulorum Institiitio, to the latter of which I have and Schoolmasters. 71 already referred, Holt appears to me the most likely person to have compiled the tract called Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione, a small grammatical manual based on that of his pre- decessor or even colleague at Magdalen School; and this may be the work to which Knight points were he says that Holt put forth an Accidence and Grammar concurrently with his other tract, though the biographer of Dean Colet errs in placing Stanbridge after Holt in chronological sequence. Another of the miscellaneous unofficial pieces, answering very nearly to the mediaeval Nomi- nate, has no other title than Os, Fades, menttim, and is a Latin poem descriptive of the human form, first printed in 1508, with an interlinear English gloss. It begins thus : a mouthe a face a chyne a toth a throot a tonge Os facies rnentii dens gutlur lingua a 1 erde a browe abrye a forhede teples a lype Barba supercilium cilii'i frons tepora lubrii roffe of the mouth pal a turn There is nothing, of course, on the one hand, recondite, or, on the other, very edifying in this ; but it is a sample of. the method pursued in these little ephemerides nearly four centuries ago. 72 Schools, School-Books, II. The comparative study of Latin and English acquired increased prominence under the Tudors; and in addition to the regular text-books compiled by such men as Stanbridge and Whittinton, there is quite a small library of pieces designed for educational purposes, and framed on a similar model. Doubtless these were in many cases accepted in the schools on an equal footing with the productions of the masters themselves, or the latter may have had a hand, very possibly, in those which we have to treat as anonymous. Between the commencement and middle of the sixteenth century, during the reigns of the first and second Tudors, there were several of these unclaimed and unidentified compilations, such as the Grammatica Latino-Anglica, Trac- tatus tie octo oriatonis partibus, and Brief Rides of the Regiment or construction of the Eight Parts of Speech, in English and Latin, 1537. The Introductorium linguoe Latince by W. H. may perhaps be ascribed to William Herman, of whom we shall have more to say ; and there are also in the category of works which had no particular width or duration of currency the and Schoolmasters. 73 Gradus Comparationum of Johannes Bello- mayus, and the Reyulce Information-is of John Barchby. These, and others, again, of which all trace has at present disappeared, were employed in common with the regular series, constantly kept in print, of Whittinton and Stanbridge, prior to the rise of the great public seminaries, many of which, as it will be my business to shew, took into use certain compilations sup- posed to be specially adapted to their require- ments. William Herman, who is presumed to have been the author of the Introductorium above mentioned, was schoolmaster and Fellow of Eton College; in 1477 he became a perpetual Fellow of New College, Oxford, and he was eventually chosen Vice-Provost of Eton. He sur- vived till 1535. From an epigram appended to the volume it is to be gleaned that Horman was a pupil of Dr. Caius, poet-laureate to Edward the Fourth. , Of the Gradus Comparationum the subjoined may be received as a specimen : What now r nes make comparyson? All ad- 74 Schools, School-Books, iec yues welnere y betoken athynge that maye be made more or lesse : ns fayre: fayrer : fay- rest : black, blacker, blackest. How many deg-ess of comparacyon ben there? iij. the positiue y comparatiue & the superlatyue. How knowe ye the posituye gedre ? For he is the groude and the begynner of all other de- grees of co-par yson. How know ye the com- paratyue degre ? for he passeih his posityue with this englysshe more, or his englysshe end- eth in r, as more w r yse or wyser. How knowe ye the superlatyue degre? for he passeth his posityue with engysshe moost: or his englisshe endeth in est : as moost fayre or fayrest, moost whyte or whytest." TIL The Vulgar ia of William Horman, 1519, is perhaps one of the most intrinsically curious and valuable publications in the entire range of our early philological literature. It would be easy to till such a slender volume as that in the hands of the reader with samples of the con- tents without exhausting the store, but I must content myself with such extracts as seem most entertaining and instructive : and Schoolmasters. 75 "Physicians, that be all sette to wynne money, bye and sylle our lyues : and so ofte tymes we Lye deth with a great and a sore pryce. Aninias nostrils (cruscatori's medicineyociantiir, ci'c. "Papyre fyrstewas made of a certeyne stuffe like Ihe pythe of a bulrushe in ^Egypt : and svth it is made of lynnen clothe soked in water, stable or grade pressed and smothed. Charter, sen 2>ffj>y)'i, tlv. "The greattest and hyest of pryce : is papyre irnperyall. Auc/ustissimum papyrum, &c. ''The prynters haue fonnde a crafte to make bokis by brasen letters sette inordre by a frame. Cnlcoyraphi arte, &c. "Pryntynge hathe almooste vndone scry- uenei's crafte. Chalcoyraphia Ubrarioru qstu pene cxhavsit. cc Yf the prynters take more hede to the hast- ynge : than to the true settynge of theyr moldis : the warke is vtterly marred. SI qui libros, &;-7 The rest are given without the Latin equiva- lents, which have no particular interest. u Scryueners write with blacke, redde, purple, gren, blewe, or byce : and suche other. 76 Schools, School-Books, Parchement leues be wonte to be ruled : that there may be acomly marget: also streytelynes of equal distaunce be drawe withyn : that the \vryttyng may shewe fayre. Olde or doting chourles can not suflre yo^e children to be mery. I haue lefte my boke in the tennys playe. This ynke is no better than blatche. Frobeynes prynt is called better than Aldus : but yet Aldus is neuer the lesse thanke worthy : for he began the fynest waye : and left sauple by the whiche other were lyghtly provoked and taughte to deuyse better. There is come a scoolle of fysshe. The terns is frosne ouer with yse. The trompettours blowe a fytte or a motte. Vitelarsthryue: by getheryngeofgood felowes that haue swete mouth es. The mokis of charter-house : neuer ete fleshe mete. We shall drynke methe or metheglen. We shall haue a iuncket after dyner. Serue me with pochyd eggis. He kepeth rere suppers tyll mydnyght. Se that I lacke nat by my beddes syde a and Schoolmasters. 77 chayer of easement : with a vessel vnder : and an vriftall bye. Women couette to sytte on lowe or pote stolys : men upon twyse so hye. It is couenyent that a man haue one seueral place in his house to hymselfe fro cubrance of wome. Women muste haue one place to themselfe to tyffil themselfe and kepe theyr apparell. \ They whyte theyr face, necke and pappis with cerusse : and theyr Jyppis and ruddis with purpurisse. Tumblers, houndes, that can goo on huntynge by them selfe : brynge home theyr praye. Lytel popies, that serueth for ladies, were sutyme bellis : sutyme colers ful of prickkis for theyr defece. 1 haue layde many gynnys, pottis,and other : for to take fisshe. Some fisshe scatre at the nette. Ponies steple is a mighty great thyng/ and so hye that vneth a man may discerne the wether cocke. It is an olde duty / and an auncyent cus- tume ; that the Mavre of London with his 78 Schools, School-Books, bretherne shall offer at Ponies certayne dayes in the yere. In London be . lij. parysshe chyrches. Two or . iij. neses be holsome: one is a shrowed toke." These selected extracts will convey some notion of the unusual curiosity of the Vulgaria of Herman, of which a second edition came out in 1530 ; it is so far rather surprising that it did not prove more popular. But it had to enter into competition with books of a similar title anb! cast by Stanbridge and Whittinton, who had their established connection to assist the sale of their publications. The concluding item in this list of educa- tional performances is alsoacuriouspbilological relic, and a factor in the illustration of the im- perfect mastery of English by foreigners of all periods and almost all countries. I allude to an edition of the Declensions of the learned Parisian printer Ascensius with an English gloss. The tract was evidently printed abroad; and I am tempted to transcribe the paragraph on Punctuation, as it may afford an idea of the nature of the publication and of the English of and Schoolmasters. 79 that day as written by a foreigner. It will be observed that the author seems to confound the comma and the colon : u Of the craft of poyntiny. " Therbe fine maner poyntys / and diuisios most vside with cunnyng men : the whiche if they be wel vsid : make the sentens very light / and esy to vnderstod both to the reder & the herer. & they be these : virgil/come/paruthesis/ playne poynt / and interrogatif. A virgil is a scleder stryke : lenynge forward e thiswyse / be tokynynge a lytyl / short rest without any per- fetnes yet of sentens : asbetwene the fiuepoyntis a fore rehersid. A come is with tway titils this- wyse : betokynyng a lenger rest : and the setens yet ether is vnperfet : or els if it be perfet : ther cumith more after / logyng to it : the which more comynlycan not be perfect by itself with- out at the lest sumat of it : that gothe a fore. A parenthesis is with tway crokyd virgils : as an olde mone / & a neu bely to bely : the whiche be set theron afore the begynyng / and thetother after the latyr ende of a clause : comyng with- 80 Schools, School-Books^ in an other clause : that may be perfet : thof the clause / so comyng betwene : wer awey and therfore it is sowndyde comynly a note lower: than the vtter clause, yf the setens cannot be perfet without the ynner clause : then stede of the first crokyde virgil a streght virgil wol do very wel : and stede of the latyr must nedis be a come. A playne point is with won tittil this- wyse. & it cumith after the ende of al the whole setens betokinyng a loge rest. An 'iterrogatif is with tway titils : the vppir rysyng this wyse? & it cumith after the ende of a whole reason : wheryn ther is sum question ax side, the whiche ende of the reson / tariyng as it were for an answare ; risyth vpwarde . we haue made these rulis in englisshe : by cause they be as profit- able / and necessary to be kepte in euery moder tuge / as I latin. |j Sethyn we (as we wolde to god : euery precher [ ? techer] wolde do) haue kepte owre rulis bothe in owre englisshe / and latyn : what nede we / sethyn owre own be sufficient ynogh : to put any other exemplis." VI. It is perhaps fruitless to offer any vague conjecture as to the authorship of the Ascencian and Schoolmasters. 81 Declensions. Many Englishmen resident in Paris, Antwerp, and Germany might have edited such a hook. The ortography and punctua- tion are alike peculiar, and suspiciously redolent, it may be considered, of a foreign parentage ; but one of our countrymen who had long resided abroad, or who had even been educated out of England, might very well have been guilty of such slips as we find here. A Thomas Robertson of York, of whom I shall have more presently to say, was a few years later in com- munication with the printers and publishers of Switzerland, and became the editor of a text of Lily the grammarian. Robertson, as a Northern man, was apt, in writing English, to introduce certain provincialisms ; and I put it, though merely as a guess, that he might have executed this commission, as he did the other, for Bebelius of Basle. Two years subsequently to the appearance of his Vulgar ia^ Herman involved himself in a literary controversy with Whittinton inconse- quence of an attack which he had made on the laureate's grammatical productions in a printed Epistle to Lily ; it was the beginning of a move- F 82 Schools, School-Books, ment for reforming or remodelling the current educational literature, and llorman himself was a man of superior character and literary trai- ning, as we are able to judge from the way in which he acquitted himself of his own contri- bution to this class of work. A, curious and very interesting account of the dispute between Lily and Herman, in which Robert Whittinton and a fourth grammarian named Aldrich became involved, is given by Maitland in his Notices of the Lambeth Palace Library. I elsewhere refer to the warm alter- cation b?tween Sir John Gheke and Bishop Gardiner on the pronunciation of Greek. Both these matters have to be added to a new edi- tion of Disreali's Quarrels of Authors. The Salernitan gentleman (Andrea Guarna) who set the Noun and the Verb together by the ears in his Grammar War, acted, no doubt, more discreetly, since he reserved to himself the power to terminate the fray which he had commenced. VII. Generally speaking, it is the case that the men who compiled the curious and highly and Schoolmasters. 83 valuable Manuals of Instruction during the Middle Ages were superseded and effaced by others following in their track and profiting by their experience. The bulk of these more ancient treatises, such as I have described, still remained ?n MS. till of recent years, like the college text-books, which are yet some- times left imprinted from choice ; and after the introduction of typography the teaching and learning public accorded a preference to those scholars who constructed their system on more modern lines, and whose method was at once more intelligible and more efficient. Of all the names with which we have be- come familiar, the only one which seems to have survived is Johannes de Garlandia ; and it is remarkable, again, that the two works from his pen which passed the London press, the Verborum Explicatio and the Synonyma, are by no means comparable in merit or in interest to the Dictionary already noticed. Subsequently to the rise of the English Grammatical School the reputation and popularity of Garlandia evidently suffered a permanent decline, and we hear and feel no more of him. 84 Schools, School-Books, A new generation, trained in foreign schools or under foreign tutors, set themselves the task of forming educational centres, and of intro- ducing the people of England to a conversance with the foundations of learning and culture by more expeditious and efl'ectual methods ; and as from Scrooby in Lincolnshire a small knot of resolute men went forth in the May Flower to lay the first stone of that immense constitutional edifice, the United States of America, so from an humble school at Oxford sprang the pioneers of all English grammatical lore Anriiquil; his usher, Stanbridge ; Stan- bridge's pupil, Whittinton; and Whittinton's pupil, Lily. It is not too much to say that during three hundred years all our great men, all our nobility, all our princes, owed to this hereditary dynasty, as it were, the elementary portion of their scholastic and academical breeding, and that no section of our literature can boast of so long a celebrity and utility as the Grammatical Sum- mary which is best known as Lily's Short Introduction, and which in most of its essentials corresponds with the system employed by those and Schoolmasters. 85 who preceded him and those who followed him almost within the recollection of our grand- fathers. It was reserved for scholars of a very different temper and type to overthrow his ancient empire, and establish one of their own; and this is a revolution which dates from yes- terday. At the period when the school at Magdalen was established byBi shop Way nflete, the teachers in our own country and on the Continent were working on nearly parallel lines, just as the religious service-books printed at Paris and Rouen were made, by a few subsidiary altera- tions, to answer the Englih use; and indeed in the case of the grammatical system of Sulpicius a v n impression was executed at Paris in 1511 for Wynkyn de Worde, and imported hither for sale, without any differences or variations from the text employed in the Parisian gymnasium and elsewhere through the French dominions. It was not till the English element in these books gained the ascendancy, having been in- troduced by furtive degrees and by way of occa- sional or incidental illustration, that a marked native character was stamped on our school- 86 Schools, School-Books, books. Ultimately, as we know, the Latin proportion sensibly diminished, and even a preponderant share of space was accorded Jo the vernacular. ; I have spoken of ^Elius Donatus as an author whose Grammar enjoyed a long celebrity and an enormously wide acceptance, down from his own age to the date of the revival of learning. It was used throughout the Continent, in Eng- land, and in Scotland; But prior to our earliest race of native gram- marians and philologists, there were several labourers in this great and fruitful field, who began, towards the latter end of the fifteenth century, to cast off the trammels of the Roman professor, and to set up little systems of their own, of course more or less built upon Donatius. Such an one was Guarini of Verona, whose Bcyulce Grammaticales were originally published at Venice in 1470, and are regarded as one of the earliest specimens of her prolific press. These rules were frequently reissued, and I have before me an edition of 1494. The book, which consists only of twenty-two leaves or forty-four pages,begins with describi ng and Schoolmasters. 87 the parts of speech, then lakes the various sorts of verbs, and follows with the adverbs, participles, and so forth. There is a set of verses on the irregular nouns, and a second headed Versus differentiates or synonyms ; and some of the illustrations are given in Italian. The section on diphthongs forms an Appendix. I merely adduce a cursory notice of Guarini to keep the student in mind of the collateral progress of this class of learning abroad, while our own men were developing it among us with the occasional assistance of foreigners. Perhaps I may just copy out the following small speci- men, where the glosses are in the writer's ver nacular : " Largior ris per donare e p essere donate Experior ris per puare e per essere puato Ueneror ris per honorare e p essere honorato Moior ris per aspectare e p eere aspectato Os^ulor ris per basare e p essere basiato. " In connection with Magdalen School, we see in the account-book of John Dome, Oxford bookseller, for 1520, the class and range of literature which a dealer in those days found saleable. Among the strictly grammatical books 88 Schools, School-Books, occur the A. B.C. and the Boys' Primer; the productions with which \ve are already fami- liar, of Whittinton, Stanbridge, Erasmus, Cicero, Terence, ane Lucian, interspersed with some of the Fathers, service-books of the Church, classical authors of a less popular type, such as Lucan, Cornelius Nepos, and Pomponius Mela; and more or less abstruse treatises on logic, rhetoric, and theology. On the other hand, we have prognostications in English, almanacs, Robin Hood, the Nutbrown Maid, the Squire of Low Degree, Sir Isumbras, Robert the Devil, and ballads. There are, besides, the Sermon of the Boy-Bishop, the Book of Cookery, the Book of Carving, and an Anglo-French vocabulary. But I do not enter into these details. It was merely my intention to peep in at the shop, and see what a bookseller at one of the Universities nearly four centuries ago had in the way of school-literature. Perhaps next to the A.B.C' and the primers, the educational works of Erasmus were in greatest demand. This old ledger has a sort of living value, inasmuch as it carries us back with ,it to the and Schoolmasters. 89 very Oxford ot the first race of teachers and grammarians, about whom I write. All of them, except perchance Anniquil, must have known Dome and had transactions with him ; and here is his ledger, upon which the eyes of some of them may have rested, still preserved, with its record of stock in hand new copies damp from the printer, or remainders of former purchases, now scarcely extant, or, if so, shorn of their coeval glory by the schoolboy's thumb or the binder's knife. 00 ) VI. Auxiliary books Vulyaria of Terence His Comedies printed in 1497 Some of them popular in schools HORACE CICERO His Offices and Old Age translated by Whitlinton VIRGIL OVID Specimens of Whit- tinton's Cicero The school Cato Notices of other works designed or employed for educational purposes. 1. THERE is a class of books which, while they were not strictly intended for use in the preparation of the ordinary course of lessons, were most undoubtedly brought into constant requisition, at least by the higher forms or divisions, as aids to a familiarity with the dead languages, and eventually those of the Con- tinent. The earliest and one of the most influential of these was the Vulgar la of Terence. As far back as the reign of Edward IV., I find it annexed to the Compendium Grammatics o* Schools and Schoolmasters. 91 Johannes Anniquil, printed at Oxford about 1483; and at least three other editions of it exist. It is on the interlinear plan, as the fol- lowing extract will serve to indicate : " Here must I abyde nllone this ij dayes 33tbuu f)tc mcmenbu et tmfji olu Though I may not touch it yet I may see @t nott tangenbt copta e tnbenbi ta erit. The dede selfe scheweth or telleth 9te ta tnbtcaL If I had tarayed a lytill while I hadd not found hym at home ce3ae en bomt no off No one- will be astonished or displeased to hear that Terence soon acquired great popu- larity among school-boys and a permanent rank as- a text-book. In 1497 Pynson printed all the Comedies, and a few years later selections were given with marginal glosses. In 1533 the celebrated Nicholas Udall, many years before he gave to the world the admirable comedy of Ralph Roister Doister, edited por- tions of the Latin poet with an English trans- lation, doubtless for the benefit of the scholars 92 Schools, School-Books, at Eton; it was a volume which long continued a favourite, and passed through several impres- sions, both during the author's life and after his death. In 1598, a century subsequent to the appear- ance of the first, came a second complete ver- sion of the Comedies, from the pen of Richard Bernard of Axholme in Lincolnshire, and being more contemporary in its language and treat- ment, drove out of fashion the old Pynson. Bernard's remained in demand till the middle of the next century, and concurrently with it renderings of separate plays occasionally pre- sented themselves. In 1588 the Andria was brought out by Maurice Kyffin with marginal notes, his pro- fessed object being twofold, namely, to further the attainment of Latin by novices and the recovery of it by such as had forgotten the lan^ guage. In 1627, Thomas Newman, 'apparently one of the masters of St. Paul's, prepared for the special behoof of students generally the Eunuch and the Andria, dedicating his per- formance to the scholars of Paul's, to whom he wished increase in grace and learning. The and Schoolmasters. 93 treatment of these two favourite dramas was in- fluenced, as we are expressly informed, by the idea and ambition of adapting them for thea- trical exhibition at a school. But they were, at the same time, considered by our forefathers particularly well suited as vehicles for instruction, as well perhaps as for amusement. In the early days of Charles L ? Dr.Webbe brought out an edition of them, both on a novel principle of his own, which he had taken the precaution to patent. The safeguard proved superfluous, however, for the book never went into a second edition. For the sake of grouping conveniently to- gether the entire Anglo-Terentian literature, I shall conclude with a mention of the version, executed in 1667 by Charles Hoole of six of the plays. It is in English and Latin, " for the use of young scholars," and was most probably done with a special view to Hoole's own school, which at this time was " near Lothbury Garden, London. " He kept for a long series of years one of the leading proprietary establishments in the metropolis : but he was originally the 94 Schoofe, S principal of one at Rotlierham in Yorfesfeire* We last hear of him as carrying on the same business in Godsmith's Alley. This was in 1675. His career as a teacher must have ex- tended over some thirty years. II. Leaving Terence, we may pass to Vir- gil; whose Bucolics were published in 1512 with a dull Latin commentary, illustrating the construction of the verse and other critical points. No ancient English edition of Horace exists, either in the original language or a translation. But Whittinton admitted selections from him into his Syntax. In 1534 he translated Cicero's Offices for the use of schools, printing the Latin and English face to face; and the treatise of Old Age closely followed. In these attempts to draw the classics into use for educational purposes, the fine musical numbers of the ancient poet and the noble composition of the writer in prose offer a powerful contrast to the barbarous jargon and dissonant pedantry of the scholiast and editor, whose Latin exposition certainly tended in no and Schoolmasters. 95 way to assist the learner, either from the point of view of an interpreter or a model. Fort it must have been, in the absence of some one to expound the exposition, fully as puzzling to pupils as the most difficult passages of the J Ionian poets, while it was eminently mischie- vous in its influence on the formation of a Latin style. The teacher in all ages has been a prosaic and unimaginative being ; and if the one who directed the studies of Virgil himself had glossed the works of those authors who lived before the Augustan era, he would have problably trans- mitted to us a labour as dry and unfruitful as those which make part of the reference library of English boys in the olden time. Except in a prose translation, which bears no mark of having been intended for boys, the JEneid, was not introduced among us for a very long period subsequently to the revival of learning, nor were the Georgics. A selection from Ovid's Ar i of Love appeared in 1513; perhaps the whole was deemed too fescennine for the juvenile peruser. I shall add Ca3sar, whose Commentaries were 96 Schools, School-Books, printed in 1530, not because this invaluable book was intended as a medium for instruction in the seminaries and colleges, but. just by the way, as the only other classic rendered into our tongue so early, on account of its probable interest in relation to France and to military science, and, once more, on account of the person who translated it, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, an accomplished nobleman, who filled at one time a professorial chair in the University of Padua. The Ca3sar, in fact, occupies an analogous position to the English editions of Cicero and the prose paraphase of the Mneid published by Caxton, and was intended for the use of those few cultivated minds which had imbibed in Italy and France a taste for elegant and refined studies. III. I have before me a copy of Whittin- ton's versions of the Offices and Old Age of Cicero, and I may take the opportunity to pre- sent to the reader a specimen of his perform- ance. It is taken from the first book of the Office* : and Schoolmasters. 97 De Officiis Servandis in eos qui intulerunt nobis iniuriam. Svnt autern qucedam officia elirun aduersus eos seruadaa quibus iniuriam acceperis, Kst eriiin ulciscendi & \>n- niendi modus. Atq; baud srio ;ui sitis sit eum, qui laees- sierit, iniurise siue premiere. ut & ipse ne quid tale posthac committal, & c.'eteri si tit at iniuriam tardiores. Of oflyces to be ol)serued agnvne suche as haue done vs \v rouge, There be also certayne ofl'yces to be kepte agayne suche / of whom a ma hath taken wrong. Fore there is a mane i' of reuengynge and punysshyng, and I can not tell whether it be sufl'yri-nt for hym that hath done w rouge to be sory of his wrong* 1 ;mra-- clarum munus a^tatis, siqui- dem id aufert nobis, quod est in adolescentiavitiosissimum. Accipite suim optirni adoles- centes, ueterem orationem Archyt;o Tarentini, magni in prim is, et praeclari viri. M U;!I milii tradila est cum rsscm adolescens Tarenti cum Q. Maximo. Xulla cai)ilalioi'e peste fjuam eorporisuoluptate hoiniiiibus dicebat a natura data. . . . The thyrde accusacion of okle age foloweth. By cause it must forg(j pleasures. that i xcellent benefyle of oldeage : yf it take away from vs lhat thynge/ whiche in youlh is moost vicious. Thei-fore ye gentyll yonge men hearc the o!d( j sentence ot Archytas a Tai'i-ntyne / a great and a fa- mous man amonges all other / which was taught vnto me whan I was a yonge man in Hit- citye of Tarenlu with Quintrs Maximus. llesayd that then- was not a moi'e deedly poyson gyuen to man by nature / than sensuall pleasure ot body. . . 98 Schools, School-Books, These two passages afford a fair idea of the capability of Whittinton for his task, and of the means which the English student of those days enjoyed for profiting by the lessons of antiquity and holding intercourse with the greatest minds of former ages, at the same time that it led the way to the purification of the current Latinity from mediaeval barbarism and the heresies of the Dutch school. To be hypercritical in the judgment of these experimental, and of course imperfect, attempts to impart to the educational system in th's island a better tone and to place it on an improved footing, would be ungracious and improper. The introduction of the R.oman writers in pose and verse into our schools and universities was an important step in the right direction, and tendedto counteract the monastic temper and element in our method of training. V. Outside the pale of the schoolroom, but still clearly designed for learners, one finds such literary fossils as the Book ofCato, the Cato for Boys, the Eclogues of Mantuan, of which Bale speaks as popular in his day, and which Holo- and Schoolmasters. 99 f ernes mentions in Love's Labours Lost; various abridgments of the Colloquia of Erasmus and Jus Little Book of Good Manners for Children (another monument of the industry anp scholar- ship of Whittinton) ; and, lastly, such elementary guides to mythology and history as Lydgate's Interpretation of the Natures of Gods and God- desses, and the Chronicle of all Ute Kings' Names that have reigned in England, 1530. With these I should perhaps couple the Latin *Esop of 1502, with a commentary in the same lan- guage, and the later edition of which, in 1535, includes the Fables of Poggius. Considering the state of our population and the restrictions on learning, it cannot be said that the market for works of reference and instruction was poorly supplied, and the remains which have descended to us of books pub- lished in England, many wholly or partly in that language, for the use of the young, certainly bespeak and establish an eager and wide de- mand on the part of our public and private seminaries in the fifteenth and following cen- turies. I take occasion to shew the beneficial share 100 Schools and Schoolmasters. which Erasmus had in the promotion of culture in England in various ways, and the interest which he evinced in the establishment and success of St. Paul's School. Not only were his own works translated into English, and received with favour among the book-lovers cf that age, but he ventured so far as to turn several of the Dialogues of Lucian into Latin, encouraged by the proficiency which he had acquired during his fir&t visit to England, in the original language, added perhaps to the satis- factory result of his later experiments as a teacher of Greek at Cambridge. ( 101 ) VII. Influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More Visits ot the former to this countryHis friendship with Dean Colet Establishment of various schools in England- Foundation of St. Paul's by Colet Statutes Books used in the school Narrow lines Notice of the old Cathedral School. I. WE must not attempt, in fact, to consider the educational question in early England wit- hout studying very sedulously the Lives of Eras- mus and Colet by Samuel Knight. The influence of Erasmus on our scholastic literature I believe to have been very great indeed. He came over to this country, it appears, in 1497, and spent a good deal of time at Oxford, where he acquired a knowledge of Greek. " While Erasmus re- mained at Oxford, " says his biographer, u he became very intimate with all those who were of any Note for Learning ; accounting them 102 Schools, School-Books, always his best friends, by whom he was most profited in his studies. And as he owns M. Colet did first engage him in the Study of Theology, so it is also well known that he embraced the favourable Opportunity he now had of learning the Greek Tongue, under the most Skilful Masters (viz.) William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, and William Latimer. Grocyn is said by one who lived about this Time to have been the first Professor, or Publick Teacher of Greek in Oxford to a full Assembly of Young Students. " Knight affords an interesting and tolerably copious account of Linacre, as well as of Grocyn ; and in connection with the former he relates an anecdote, on the authority of Erasmus about Bernard Andreas, tutor to Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII. But I shall not enter into these matters, as Linacre, though a great pro- moter of Greek authors, scarcely conies within my plan. Yet I may mention that among the friends whom the learned Hollander made here was Cuthbert Tunstall, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and author of the first book on arith- metic published in this country, and Richard and Schoolmasters. 103 Pace, who succeeded Colet in the Deanery of St. Paul's. There is, however, a passage which I may be suffered to transcribe, where, speaking of the time when Erasmus was contemplating a de- parture homeward. Knight observes:- " Before Erasmus left England, he laid the plan of his useful Tract de conscribendis (pistoli*, for the Service, and at the Suggestion of his noble Pupil the Lord William Montjoy, who had complained that there were no good Rules, or Examples of that kind, to which he could conform himself. Erasmus took the hint very kindly, and making his just Reflections, npon the emptiness of Franciscus Niger, and Marius Phalelfus,* whose Rooks upon that Argument were read in the common Schools, he seems resolv'd at his first leisure to give a New Essay of that kind ; and accordingly upon his first return to Paris he fell upon it, and finished it within twenty Days. " So we see that, prior to the visit of Erasmus to us at the end of the fifteenth century, there * Knight refers to the Epistoloe ot Franciscus Philelphus, printed at Milan in 1471. -104 Schools, School-Books, were already polite letter-writers current, and current, too, as school-books. Erasmus came to the conclusion that he had done his own work too hastily, and the appearance of nn edition of it in England about thirty years later, and likewise of a counterfeit, induced him to re- vise the undertaking, which was finally published at Basle in 1545 in a volume with other analo- gous tracts by various writers. A story which Knight relates about his au- thors literary enterprise in the epistolary line is too amusing to be overlooked: "In that Essay of the way of writing Epistles, Erasmus had put in two sorts of Declamations, one in the praise, the other in dispraise, of Matrimony, and asking his young Pupil IA Montjoy how he lik'd that of the first sort. * Oh sir,' says he, ' I like it so well, that you have made me resolve to marry quickly.' Ay !' but says Erasmus, k you have read only one side, stay and read the other.' 'No,' replies IA Montjoy. 'that side pleases me ; take you the other!' 7 " The subject is an obvious one for humorous controversy ; but there is a similar idea in Rabelais, who makes his two chief cha- and Schoolmasters. 105 racters debate the advantages and drawbacks of wedlock. Altogether, Erasmus must have done very much toward the advancement of a taste for Hellenic culture in our country, and his biogra- pher apprises us that he exhorted the physicians of his time to study that language as more neces- sary to their profession than to any other. Yet the knowledge of the tongue w^as very sparingly diffused in England at and long after that time; and Turner, in the dedication of his Herbal to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, complains of the ignorance of the apothecaries of his day even of the Latin names of the herbs which they em- ployed in their pharmacopoeia. The illustrious and erudite Dutchman did, doubtless, what he could, and made several of the classics more familiar and intelligible by new editions, with some of which he connected the names of Eng- lish scholars and prelates ; but the time had not arrived for any general movement. II. Knight, in his Life of Dean Golet, enume- rates several of the schools which were founded shortly before the Reformation " This noble 106 Schools, School-Books, impulse of Christian charity," says he, "in the founding of grammar schools, was one of the providential ways and means for bringing about the blessed reformation ; and it is therefore observable, that, within thirty years before it, there were more grammar schools erected and endowed in England than had been in three bundled years preceding : one at Chichester by Dr. Edward Scory, bishop of that see, who left a farther benefaction to it by his last will, dated 8th December, 1502 : another at Manchester by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who died 1519 : another at Binton in Somersetshire, by Dr. Fitzjames, Bishop of London, and his bro- ther, Sir John Fitzjames, lord chief justice of England : a fourth at Girencester in Gloucester- shire, by Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham : a fifth at Roulston in Staffordshire, by Dr. Robert Sherbone, bishop of St. David's, predecessor to Dr. Colet in the deanery of St. Paul's : a sixth at Kingston-upon-Hull, by John Alcock, Rishop of Ely : a seventh at Sutton Colfield in War- wickshire, by Dr. Simon Harm an (alias Veysey), bishop of Exeter : an eighth at Farn worth in Lancashire, by Dr. William Smith, Bishop of and Schoolmasters. 107 Lincoln, born there: a . ninth at Appleby in Westmoreland, by Stephen Langton, bishop of Winchester: a tenth at Ipswich in Suffolk by cardinal Wolsey : another at Wymbourn in Dor- setshire, by Margaret, countess of Richmond : another at Wolverhampton in Staffordshire, by Sir Stephen Jennings, mayor of London : an- other at Macclesfield, by Sir John Percival, mayor of London : as also another by the lady Thomasine his wife at St. Mary Wike in Devon- shire, were she was born : and another at Wal- tharnstow in Essex by George Monnox, mayor of London, 1515: besides several other schools in other parts of the kingdom. " Knight concludes by saying that "the piety and charity of Protestants ran so fast in this channel, that in the next age there wanted rather a regulation of grammar schools than an increase of them." George Lily, son of the grammarian and schoolmaster, and canon of St. Paul's, refers doubtless to these benefactions when, in his Chronicle, he speaks of the encouragement of learning by the princes and nobility of England, and goes on to say that their good example was 108 Schools, School-Books, followed by Dr. John Colet, . . . " who about this time (1510) erected a public school in London of an elegant structure, and endowed it with a large estate, for teaching gratis the sons of his fellow-citizens for ever." The foundation was for one hundred and seventy-three scholars a number selected in remembrance of the miracle of the fishes. III. Colet drew up, or had drawn up, for the regulation of his new school the subjoined Rules and .Orders, to be read to the parents before their children were admitted, and to be accepted by them : " If youre chylde can rede and wryte Latyn and Englyshe suffycyently, so that he be able to rede and wryte his own lessons, thenheshalbe admitted into the schole for a scholar. " If youre chylde, after reasonable reason proved, be founde her unapte and unable to lernynge, than ye warned therof shal take hym awaye, thatheoccupyenotoure rowme in vayne. " If he be apt to lerne, ye shal be coritente that he continue here tyl he have competent literature. and Schoolmasters. 109 w -lt' lie absente vi dayes, and in that mean seesonyeshew not cause reasonable, (resonable cause is only sekenes) than his rowme to be voyde, without he be admitted agayne, and pay iiijd. "Also after cause shewed, if he contenewe to absente tyl the weke of aclmyssion in the next quarter, and then ye shew not the contenuance of the sekenes, then his rowme to be. voyde, and he none of the schole tyl he be admytted agayne, and pave iiijd. for wry ting his name. "Also if he fall thryse into absence, he shal be admytted no more. ''Your chylde shal, on Chyldermas daye, wayte vpon the boy byshop at Powles, and offer there. ''Also ye shal fynde him waxe in winter. "Also ye shal fynde him convenyentbokes to his lernynge. "If the offerer be content wiih these articles, than let his childe be admytted." The founder of St. Paul's, in his statutes, 1518, prescribed what Latin authors he would have read in the school. He recites, in the first place, the Latin version by Erasmus of 110 Schools, School-Books, his Precepts and the Copia Verborum of the same Dutch scholar. He then proceeds to enumerate some of the early Christian writers, whose piety was superior to their Latinity, Lact-intius, Prudentius, and others. But while he does not say that Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, and Terence are to be used, he utterly eschews and forbids such classics as Juvenal and Persius, w r hom he evidently indicates when he speaks of "Laten adulterate which ignorant, blinde foles brought into this worlde, and with the same hath dystained and poysonyd the olde Laten speche and the veray Romayne tongue which in the tyrne of Tully and Salust, and Virgiil, and Terence, was usid" which is so far reasonable from his standard ; but he adds incongruously enough : "whiche also sainte Jerome, andsainte Ambrose, and saint Austen, and many holy doctors lernid in theyre tymes." Whereby we arc left at liberty to infer that these holy doctors were on a par w r ith Virgil and Sallust, Cicero and Terence. What sort of Latin would be current now if all the great writers had perished, and we had had only the works of the Fathers as text-books? and Schoolmasters. 111 We all have pretty similar beginnings, as the prima stamina of a man and any other verte- brate are said to be undistinguishable to a certain point ; and as St. Jerome learned his accidence of Donatus, so Virgil got his rudi- ments. But much as we owe to St. Jerome, it was a mischievous error to adopt him or such authors as Lactantius inapublic school, where the real object was to instil knowledge of the Latin language in its integrity and purity. It was a mischievous error, and it was, at the same time, a perfectly natural one. We are not to blame Colet and his coadjutors for having been so narrow and so biassed ; but it must always be a matter of regret and surprise that St Paul's, and all our other training institutions, public and proprietary, should, down to thepresentera, have been under the sway and management of men whose intellectual vision was as contracted and oblique as that of Colet, without the excuse which it is so easy to find for him. The rules for St. Paul's, which are set out at large by Knight, were unquestionably of a very austere character, though in harmony with the feeling of the time; and Knight, in his Life Of 112 Schools, School-Books, the founder, ascribes the apparent harshness of the discipline enforced under his direction to the laudable motive of preparing boys for the troubles of theworld, and inuring them to hard- ship. But Erasmus was notorUhe side of the mar- tinets. For he explicitly condemns an undeserving strictness ofdiscipline,which made no allowance for the difference in the tempers of boys; and another point with which he quarrelled was the horse-in-a-mill system and the way of learning by rote, which had begum to find favour both in his own country and with us. Itis vain, however, to expect that there should have been many converts to such a man's opi- nions on educational questions at that period. Even in the small circle of his English friends and correspondents there was a wide diversity of sentiment. Sir Thomas More might agree with him mainly; but, on the other hand, Colet was clerical in his leaning and Spartan in his notions of scholastic life; and he deemed it good, as I have above said, to work on the tenderness of youth before it acquired corruption or pre- judice, that '' the new wine of Christ might be put into new bottles." and Schoolmasters. 113 IV. There can be no desire to deprive Golet of any portion of the honour which we owe to him for promoting the cause of education in London; but it would at the same time be an error to conclude that the good Dean was the first who established a school in the metropolis. The foundation which he established about 1510 consolidated and centralised the system, which down to that time had been weakly and loosely organised. Hear what Knight says : " The state of schools in London before Dean Golet's foundation was to this effect : the Chan- cellor of Paul's (as in all the ancient cathedral churches) was master of the schools (magister scholamim), having the direction and govern- ment of literature, not only within the church, but within the whole city, so that all the masters and teachers of grammar depended on him, and were subject to him ; particularly he was to find a fit master for the school of St. Paul, and pre- sent him to the Dean and Chapter, and then to give him possession, and at his own cost and charges to repair the houses and buildings be- longing to the school. This master of the gram- mar school was to be a sober, honest man, of H 114 Schools, School-Books, good and laudable learning He was in all intents the true vice-chancellor of the church, and was sometimes so called; and this was the original meaning of chancellors and vice-chan- cellors in the two universities or great schools of the kingdom." The same writer traces back St. Paul's school to Henry the First's reign, when the Bishop of London granted the schoolmaster for the time being a residence in the bell-tower, and be- stowed on him the custody of the library of the church. A successor of this person had the monopoly of teaching school in London con- ferred on him by the Bishop of Winchester, saving the rights only of the schoolmasters of St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Martin-le-Grand. The old cathedral school, which that of Golet doubtless gradually extinguished, lay to the south of his, and appears curiously enough not to have occupied the basement, but to have been, as w r e should say, on the first floor, four shops being beneath it. It was close to Watling Street. A passsage in the Monumenta Franciscana shews that the site of Golet's original school, which perished in the Great Fire, had been in the and Schoolmasters. 115 possession of bookbinders, and in theimmediate neighbourhood was the sign of the Black Eagle, which, as we learn from documentary testimony, was still there in 1550. At the epoch to which I am referring, the vocation of a bookbinder was, I think, invari- ably joined with that of a printer, and I appre- hend that these shops formed part of a printing establishment. The Black Eagle was an emporium for the sale of books, and it is to be recollected that in early days, where the typographical part was done in some more or less unfrequented quarter of the city, it was a common practice to have thevolumeon sale in amore public thoroughfare. St. Paul's Churchyard, in the days of Golet and in the infancy of his valuable endowment, w r as beyond question not only a place of great resort, but a favourite seat of the booksellers. For in the imprint to an edition of the Hours of the Virgin, printed at Paris, the copies are said to be on sale at London " apud bibliopolas in cimiterio sancti Pauli 1514; " and of this fact I could readily bring forward numerous other evidences. 116 Schools and Schoolmasters. Besides the vendors of literature, however, the site soon became one of the places of settle- ment of the teachers of languages, to whom the immediate proximity of St. Paul's served as an useful introduction and advertisement ; and in the time of Elizabeth a French school was established here, for the benefit of the general public, of course, but more especially, doubtless, with a view to such Paulines as might desire an extension of their studies. ( 117 ) VIII. Thomas Linacre prepares his Rudiments of Latin Grammar for the use of the Princess Mary (1522) Probably the earliest digest of the kind Cardinal Wolsey's edition of Lily's Grammar for the use of Ipswich School (1529) Inquiry into the priority of the Ipswich and St. Paul's Grammars First National Primer (1540) -Lily's Short Introduction of Grammar (1548) Its re-issue by Queen Elizabeth (1566-7) Some account of its contents Its failure. I. THOMAS LINACRE, physician to four suc- cessive sovereigns and tutor to the Princess Mary, is understood to have prepared for the service of his august pupil certain Rudiments of Grammar, doubtless in Latin, at the same time that Giles Du Wes or Dewes wrote for her his Introductory to the French language. The biographer of Dean Golet informs his readers that the production of Linacre was translated into Latin by George Buchanan for Gilbert, 118 Schools, School-Books, Earl of Cassilis, whose studies he directed; but the book as printed is in that language, and bears no indication of a second hand in it. The undertaking, however, was deemed by Queen Catherine too obscure, and Ludovicus Vives was accordingly engaged to draw up something more simple and intelligible, which was the origin of his little book De ratione studii puerilis, where, from delicacy, he made a point of commending the labours of Linacre and the abridgment of the Rudiments by Erasmus. The volume, edited by Linacre about 1522, appears, anyhow, to be entitled to rank as the earliest effort in the way of a grammatical digest; and, apart from its special destination, it was calculated to supply a want, and to find patrons beyond the range of the court. Except its utilisation by Buchanan for Lord Cassilis", we hear little or nothing of it, never- theless, after its original publication by the royal printer. Perhaps itdid not compete successfully with the editions of Lily, as they received from time to time improvements at the hands of professionnal experts, and united within certain and Schoolmasters. 119 limits the advantages of consolidation and com- pleteness. The prestige of Lily had grown con- siderable, and in the case of a technical book it has always been difficult or impossible for an amateur to hold his ground against a specialist. II. Allowing for the possibility of editions of which we have no present knowledge having formerly existed, if they do not yet do so, it may be that Dean Golet caused some text-book to be prepared for the use of the scholars at St. Paul's ; and I shall by and by adduce some evi- dence in favour of such an hypothesis. But, at any rate, in 1529 Cardinal Wolsey gave his sanction, and wrote a preface, to an impression of Lily's Rudiments with certain alterations, more especially for the use of his school at Ipswich, but also, as the terms of the title state, for the benefit of all other similar institutions in the country. The Cardinal's preface is dated August 1,1528. It is followed by the Docendi Methodus, the Rules, the Articles of Faith, Precepts of Living, Apostles' Creed, Decalogue, &c. ; and the rest of the book is occupied by the Introduction of the 120 Schools, School-Books, Eight Parts of Speech and the Rudiments of Grammar. Of this collection there was no exact reprint, but portions of the contents appear in the Ant- werp impressions of 1535 and 1536, designed for the English learners in Flanders; and Lily's Rudiments, with and without the other acces- sories, were periodically republished even later than the so-called Oxford Grammar of 1709. Now, as St. Paul's was the more ancient foun- dation, it is allowable, at all events, to suspect that the book issued nominally for the Ipswich school \vas borrowed by the Cardinal or the person employed by him from one drawn up by Lily in his lifetime for Colet. St. Paul's had been established in 1510; the Dean survived till 1519 ; and surely so many years would hardly have elapsed without witnessing the preparation of some Pauline text-book on lines parallel to those of the Ipswich one of 1529, more particu- larly when we see that in the Preface to his 1534 Rudiments he speaks of the " new school of Paul's," and that in 1518 Erasmus had exe- cuted a Latin metrical version of the Lord's Prayer and Precepts of Good Living for the and Schoolmasters. 121 school under the title of Chris tiani hominis Institutum. The short paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer in English by Colet, which I have found at present only in an edition of the Salisbury Primer, 1532, was made for his own scholars, and had, of course, been in existence prior to 1519; so that we find ourselves groping in the dark a little in the inquiry which deals with such a fugitive and perishable description of literature, and have to do the best that we can with the fragmen- tary relics w r hich survive or have been so far recovered. The Coleti ceditio, &c., of 1534 had much in common with Wolsey's book; but the Dean of St. Paul's claims the honour of having adapted some portions of the Delectus to what he con- sidered to be the special requirements of his own institution. For he says in the Proem : "Al be it many have wryten, and have made certayne introducyons into Latyn speche, called Donates and Accidens, in Latyn tongue and in Englysshe, in suche plenty that it shoulde Seme to suffyse ; yet never the lesse, for the love and zele that I have to the newe schole of Powles, 122 Schools, School-Books, and to the children of the same, somwhat have I also compyled of the mater ; and of the viii. partes of grammer have made this lytell boke ; ... in whiche lytell warke if any new thynges be of me, it is alonely that I have put these partes in a more clere ordre, and have made them a lytell more easy to yonge wyttes, than (me thynketh) they were before." The passage here quoted may be taken to supply a sort of testimony to the original publi- cation of the Dean's alleged recension of the accepted text of Lily's Introduction (including the Rudiments] not very long, if at all, posterior to 1510, as in 1534 St. Paul's had been founded a quarter of a century. The modification of the Grammar for Pauline use was almost unques- tionably due to Lily, and merely the Proem the Dean's own. III. The St. Paul's book has, on the whole, a strong claim to precedence over that of 1529. But under any circumstances, in or before the last-named date, we possessed an uniform Gram- mar in Ueu of the archaic sectional series of Stanbridge and Whittinton. and Schoolmasters. 123 But even that of Wolsey went no farther than to recommend itself to general acceptance. It had no official character. Nor was it till late in the protracted reign of Henry VIII, that a general Primer for the whole country was pre- pared and published. In 1540 a volume in two parts appeared under the royal authory, with- out any clue to the editor, reducing the text to a more convenient method and compass. This book is anonymous; but Thomas Hayne says in 1640 that it was done by sundry learned men^ among whom he had heard that one was Dr. Leonard Cox, tutor to Prince Edward. Another probable coadjutor was John Palsgrave, author of the Eclair cissement. The Address to the Reader before the first part proceeded, no doubt, from the compiler's pen, and contains an energetic eulogy of Prince Edward, to whom " the tender babes of England " are exhorted to look up as a model and example. This portion includes the Parts of Speech and other rudiments in English, while the second part contains a digested recension of the Latin series under the title of A Compendious Institu- tion of the whole Grammar. 124 Schools, School-Books, This bipartite manual formed, of course, an improvement on the system formely in vogue, which must have been very puzzling to boys. But it seems very doubtful indeed if this Primer of 1540 was practically recognised, or whether the Government took any measures to enforce what purported to have been done under its immediate sanction. Whoever they were who arranged for publica- tion the Primer had probably a hand in the Alphabetum Latino- Any licum of 1543, which is here incidentally noticed, and which is more than it professes to be. For it comprises, in addition to a series of alphabets, the Lord's Prayer, the Salutation of the Virgin, the Com- mandments, the Apostles' Creed, and a few prayers, in Latin and English. It was, in fact, a supplement to the Primer itself. IV. In January 1547, Henry was succeeded by his son, and the change is marked by the substitution of A Short Introduction of Grammar generally to be used, in two parts, the English followed by the Latin, for the original Primer of 1540. A complaint appears to have arisen at and Schoolmasters. 125 the same time that the large book was incon- venient for beginners ; and we are told that Fox the martyrologist was commissioned to prepare Tables of Grammar for the use, probably, of the lower forms in schools. But we know nothing farther of them; and the Introduction, to which they were designed as a companion, was not reprinted more than once in Edward's life. Nor is there any vestige of it till we arrive quite at the close of the rule of Mary, when the Paris press produced an edition under some circum- stances not at present explainable,yet, of course, with the peculiarity of being entirely unofficial. So that when we sum up, it amounts to this, that the first and second types of the so-named universal Grammar, as settled in 1540 and 1548 respectively, reached four impressions in seven- teen years, not including that of 1557, w r hichlies ^utside the series. Making due allowance for the far scantier population and the momentous difference of social conditions, this remains a strange pheno- menon, if we reflect that, in addition to the public and private schools previously in exist- ence, the Government of Edward had planted 126 Schools, School-Books, throughout the country the endowments of which Christ's Hospital is the most familiar type. But even when there was a change in the Administration in 1558, and the authority of Elizabeth was established in Church and State, the interest in educational development led to no revival of the Introduction, and, unless all intervening copies have perished, there was a clear lapse of ten years before the new Pro. testant regime took steps to re-issue the book. This was in 1567. In the Preface very just stress is laid on the mischief proceeding from what is termed " a diversity of Grammars " and from different schoolmasters adopting different methods and books. The proclamation attached expresses at large the objects and advantages of the publication, while it certainly seems to claim for the Queen's father more credit than, looking at the circumstances he deserved. For the Piimer of 1540 had been preceded by those of Lin acre and Wolsey, just as the Short Intro. duction of 1548 and 1567 was, in the main, a reproduction of Henry's book. But the same un- qualified encomium is pronounced on Henry by and Schoolmasters. 127 John Palsgrave,the celebrated lexicographer and teacher of languages, in the prolix and fulsome dedication to his English Acolastus, 1540, which must have been written and in type when the copiesofthePrimerhad scarcely left the binder's hands. Palsgrave does not intimate here any personal concern in the undertaking. The Preface of 1567 is followed by the Latin letters, the vowels and consonants, and the Greek letters; after which comes a prayer, u Almighty God and merciful Father," which is still retained at some of our public schools. The Introduction of the Eight Parts of Speech constitutes the body and remainder of the Eng- lish part. There are six forms of grace before meat, and six others of grace after meat. The Latin section opens with the Greek alphabet, and proceeds to the parts of grammar, concluding with Erasmus's De Ratione. But, as I have stated more than once, this later text-book does not substantially vary from that of 1548. The royal proclamation granted the monopoly of printing to Reginald Wolfe, and forbad the employment of any other Grammar throughout 128 Schools, School-Books, her Highness's dominions. The document de- clares that Henry VIII, in the midst of weighty affairs belonging to his office, had not forgotten nor neglected the tender youth of his realm, but had, from a fervent zeal for the godly bring- ing up of the said youth, and a special desire that they might learn the Latin tongue more easily,instituted a new uniform Grammar ; which was so far really the case, inasmuch as the 1540 volume was the first official one, and also at the date of its promulgation the most complete and satisfactory. V. But in examining this general Grammar for all England and the dominions annexed, one at once misses the graphic and amusing illus- trations which present themselves in many of the earlier books which we have been studying. The examples, instead of being drawn from the occupations and various phases of everyday life, are almost without exception purely technical and commonplace. There is no allusion which one would welcome as casting an incidental light on contemporary history or manners. It is mostly a dead level. The learned men have and Schoolmasters. 129 done this ! It makes us cheerful, amid the habitual dearth of something to leaven the text, to stumble upon a few of the little touches in the older books retained as an exception, such as : " Yivo in Anglia. Veni per Galliam in Italiam/' or ." Vixit Londini : Studuit Oxo- niae. " How differently Herman in his Vulgaria, 1519, handled his subject, and his pages were intended for schoolboys and students too ! The frequency with which the Primer was henceforth reprinted, contrasted with the very limited call for copies from 1540 to 1566, seems to furnish an indication that the book and the system were at last gaining ground, and begin- ning to meet with more general acceptance. But the irreconcilable diversity of opinions, which has always prevailed, respecting etymo- logy, syntax, pronunciation, and other cardi- nal points, militated against the success on any very grand scale of an official Primer; and the Tudors, arbitrary and absolute as they were in all questions of political significance, were not prompted by the feeling of the time to resort in such a case as this to penal and peremptory i 130 Schools, School-Books, legislation. The eighteenth century saw Lily's Grammar still more or less in vogue under the name of the original author, not to speak of the obligations of its successors to it ; but the Tudor book, constructed in some measure out of it? and ushered into existence under the most aus- picious and powerful patronage, sank after a not very robust or influential life of six decades (1540-1600) into complete oblivion. Our great Elizabeth has been dead near three hundred years, and no genuine popular demand for mental improvement has yet come from the people. In the sixteenth century in the Queen's time and in her father's the spirit which pro- moted education was based either on political or commercial motives. The universities and schools reared a suc- cession of preceptors who deserted the monastic traditions, and to whom learning was a mere vocation. One large class of the English com- munity sought to acquire the accomplishments which might be serviceable in the Government and at court; another limited its ambition to those which would enable them to prosper in trade or in the wars. and Schoolmasters. 131 V. A class of school-book destined for special use, besides those enumerated in another place, presents itself in the shape of grammatical works dedicated by their authors, not to particular institutions, but to particular localities or parts of the Empire. Edward Buries, who kept school at East Acton in Cromwell's day, accommodated his plan to the requirements of adults, but at the same time announces that it is printed for the advantage of the schools in the counties of Middlesex and Hertford, which strikes us as at once a curious limitation and a sanguine pro- posal, unless Buries was a Hertfordshire man. This was in 1652. A later writer was more catholic and ambitious in his flight; for in 1712 John Brightland pro- jected a Grammar of the English tongue " for the use of the schools of Great Britain and Ireland, " a fact more particularly noticeable, because it is the first hint of any scheme com- prehending the Emerald Isle. I allude elsewhere to the early Accidence drawn up for Scotland by Alexander Hume; and in 1647 the interests of the rising generation in Wales were specially considered by the unnamed introducer of a sim- 132 Schools, School-Books, plified Latin Primer in usum juventiitis Cambro- Britannicoe, which aimed at a monopoly of the Principality without prej udice to persons beyond the border. Besides the Grammar itself, certain Manuals purported to be, not for general educational purposes, but for a given school, and even for a specified class in it. Such was the English Introduction to the Latin Tongue for the use of the lower forms in Westminster School; and at Magdalen School, Oxford, they had, at least as far back as 1623, a small text-book on the declensions and conjugations. I take another opportunity to speak of a Latin phrase-book designed for Manchester in 1660, and of the printed examination papers, exhibiting the lines laid down at Merchant Taylors' about the same time. In a few cases a more elaborate compila- tion was framed, at all events originally, with the same restricted scope, like the Rom an Antiquities of Prideaux, in 1614, for Abingdon. Perhaps, however, the most conspicuous ex- ample of this localisation was the Outlines of Rhetoric for St. Paul's, of which we meet with a third edition in 1659; and which must have and Schoolmasters. 133 been in connection with some new and temporary effort to enlarge the range of studies during the Protectorate, partly under the stimulus of the promoters of the famous Musceum Minervce and the commencing taste for a more complex plat- form. For such subjects do not seem to have made part of the ordinary course of training anywhere since the medieval period, when the Aristotelian system was paramount at our Uni- versities ; although, at the same time, among more advanced students philosophical treatises never ceased to possess interest and attract perusers. But the relevance of the handbook for St. Paul's lies in its professed destination for the young. It is questionable whether, outside the Uni- versities and the establishments affiliated upon them, the sciences were acquirable as part of the normal routine. At Oxford, in the reign of Henry VIII., they taught what was then termed Judicial Astronomy, which was a mere burlesque on the true study of the planetary bodies; and Logic was on the list of accomplishments within the reach of boys, who were sent up either to college or to school ; for in A Hundred Merry 134 Schools and Schoolmasters. Tales, 1526, the son of the rich franklin comes back home for the holidays, and declares, as the fruit of the time and money expended on his education at Oxford school, whither his indul- gent father had sent him for two or three years, his conversance with subtleties and ability to prove the two chickens on the supper-table to be sophistically three. I 135 ) IX. Merchant Taylors' School founded in 1561 Its limited scope and stationary condition during two centuries and a half- The writer's recollections of it from 1842 to 1850 "William Dugard and his troubles. I. I C!\NNOT enter very well, in a general view of the subject, into the history of all the civic foundations which rose up one by one subse- quently to St. Paul's, such as the City of London School, the Mercers' and the Skinners', beyond the incidental notices which I have taken occa- sion to introduce of such institutions, as well as of the system of public grammar schools en- dowed by Edward VI. But I may be allowed to speak of one with which I enjoyed personal associations between the years 1842 and 1850, and to mention that in the third chapter of his Autobiography Leigh Hunt sheds some interest- ing light on the condition of Christ's Hospital 136 Schools, School-Books, when Lamb, Coleridge, and himself were there in the last years of the last century. Christ's Hospital has produced some very eminent men, but whether by virtue of its system or in spite of it, I hardly venture to say. The biographer of the author of Elia tells us what books his distinguished friend read at school ; how little he learned, Lamb himself seems to suggest in that paper on " The Old and the New Schoolmaster. " The origin of Merchant Taylors' School is thus described by Wilson :- "Towards the close of the year 1560, or early in the following spring, the Merchant Taylors' Company conceived the laudable design of founding a grammar school; and part of the manor of the Rose, in the parish of St. Lawrence- Pountney (a mansion which had successively belonged to the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of Exeter, and the Earls of Sussex), seeming eligible for the purpose, Mr. Richard Hills, a leading member of the court, generously contributed the sum of five hundred pounds towards the purchase of it; but the institution was not thoroughly organised till the 24th Sep- and Schoolmasters. 137 tember 1561, on which day the statutes were framed and a schoolmaster chosen. " With the statutes I have no farther concern than with the clause which directs that the two hundred and fifty scholars, to which the school was limited, w r ere " to be taught in manner & forme as is afore devised & appointed. But first see that they can the catechisme in English or Latyn, & that every of the said two hundred & fifty schollers can read perfectly & write com- petently, or els lett them not be admitted in no wise." It is rather curious that the hours of attendance were originally from seven till eleven A.M. and from one till five P.M., and that in winter the boys were to bring no candles of tallow, but candles of wax. This was following the statutes of Dean Colet. Thrice in the day there were prayers ; but instead of one of the sixth form saying them for the rest, as was subsequently customary,each boy seems at first to have prayed for himself. The printed form usually employed was brief enough, and not, like the Manual prepared by Bishop Ken for Winchester, adapted for the use of t( all other devout Christians. " 138 Schools, School-Books, The staff' consisted at the outset of a head- master and three ushers, whose united emolu- ments were forty pounds a year, and the first chief teacher of the school was Richard Mul- caster. It appears that the earliest Probation- Day, as it was termed, was in November 1564, when Dean Nowell and others examined the ushers and the boys with a very gratifying result. These appositions were renewed in 1565, and probably still continue from year to year. They commenced in 1564 at eight o'clock in the morn- ing, and so they did in my time. The practice of visitation by the Court on this day seems to have ceased in 1606. Alderman Sir Thomas White, some time sub- sequently to the foundation of the school by the Company, augmented the endowment, so as to enable the institution to develop itself, and enlarge its sphere of utility in connection with Oxford University and in other ways. White was a member of the Court when the scheme was adopted, but he was not, strictly speaking, as he has been usually termed and considered, the founder of Merchant Taylors'. We do not arrive, meanwhile, at any clear and Schoolmasters. 139 or complete notion of the books which were used at the school, but it is to be inferred that Lily's Grammar was the Latin text-book. In the rules made for Probation-Day in 1606-7, I find (Esop's Fables in Greek, Tally's Epistles, and the Dialogues of Corderius named as works in which the boys were to be tested. The subjects taken on this day were Greek, Latin, and dicta- tion,writingbeingnecessarily included. Neither Hebrew, nor arithmetic, nor the mathematics are enumerated; there are the six forms, but no monitors or prompters. The School's Probation presents itself for the first time as a printed production, or at least as something compiled in book form, under the date of 1608. It is* printed entire by Wilson; but he does not state, nor do I know, what ori- ginal, whether printed or not, he employed. II. Probation-Day still continued in my time to be an important event a sort of red-letter day in our calendar. The hour for assembling was eight o'clock, instead of nine; it had been half-past six while the school was exclusively composed of residents within a~limited radius; 140 Schools, School-Books, but the enlarged time was a sore trial in the winter where one had to travel from a suburb, as I did from Old Brompton. They supplied breakfast at the place, not gratuitously, but at a fixed tariff. It would not have been much for a wealthy Company to provide an entertainment once or twice a year for two or three hundred lads at a shilling or so a head ; but the Merchant Taylors, I think, have always been notorious for parsimony. Very little was accomplished before the meal, and after its completion we had to set to work, the old room upstairs being as ill- adapted for the purpose of an examination as can well be imagined, the boys having to use the forms as desks and to kneel in front of them. We were a very short distance from the Middle Ages. Matters were not much changed since the time of the original establishment of the charity. Indeed, it appears from Dugard's School's Pro- bation, 1652, that in the seventeenth century the Company paid for some kind of collation : " There shall be paid unto the Master of the School, for beer, ale, and new manchet-bread, with a dish of sweet butter, which hee shall have ready in the morning, with two fine glasses set and Schoolmasters. 141 upon the Table, and covered with two fair nap- kins, and two fine trenchers, with a knife laid upon each trencher, to the end that such as please may take part, to staie their stomachs until the end of the examination. . . ijs." The number of boys was in 1652 compara- tively limited ; but of course without a revival of the ancient miracle two shillings' worth of victuals would not have gone far in allaying the hunger of a far smaller gathering, and this allow- ance must have simply been for such as had missed their meal at home, or desired additional refreshment. The old examination itself presents numerous points of curiosity, as we look at it through the present medium. Considerable stress seems to have been laid on dictation. The master opened, on the sudden, Cicero, the Greek Testament, JEsop's Fables in Creek, and read a passage, which the boys of a particular form had to take down, and then turn into some other lan- guage, or into verse, or make verses upon it a pretty piece of trifling, much like the nonsense- verses which we used to have to compose in my day, and as profitable. 142 Schools, School-Books, Some of the English sentences to be turned into Latin are odd enough : " Bacchus and Apollo send for Homer; " " I went to Colchester to eat oysters; " " My Uncle went to Oxford to buie gloves;" "The Atheist went to Amsterdam to chuse his religion. " Others might have been autobiographical : "Marie was my sister, she dwelt at London; " " Elisabeth was my Aunt, she dwelt at York;" " Anna was my Grand- mother, she dwelt at Worcester. " In another place, under Sententioe Varietas, there are five-and-twenty w r ays of describing in a sentence the great qualities of Cicero. Greek was certainly studied with a good deal of attention here in the early time, judging from the space which is devoted to it in the scheme of Dugard, in whose small volume the questions and theses in that language occupy twenty pages. Erasmus had, doubtless, had a large share in popularising amongus the cultivation of Hellenic grammar and letters. Even when the present writer was at the school, Hebrew was by no means assiduously or scien- tifically followed, nor do I believe that on the staff of masters there was any one who properly and Schoolmasters. 143 understood the language. But it was part of the programme, and the late Sir Moses Monte- fiore, who usually attended on Speech and Prize Day, was the annual donor of a Hebrew medal. Speech -Day at Merchant Taylors' was the sole occasion on which the large schoolroom in Suf- folk Lane was ever honoured by the presence of the fair sex. The lower end of the room was converted into an extempore stage, and the monitors and prompters took part in some reci- tation, or select scene from the Latin or Greek dramatists. At a later period French themes were introduced. As far back as the reign of Charles I., the large contribution which the ladies and other friends of the scholars made to the audience, and their imperfect acquaintance with the dead languages, rendered it a subject of regret and complaint that the entertainment was not given in the vernacular, and the writer of a small volume called Ludus Ludi Litterarii, 1672, pur- porting to report a series of speeches delivered at various breakings-up, states that the majority of them were in English on this very account.. As early as the time of Henry VIII., the prac- 144 Schools, School-Books^ tice of exhibiting some dramatic performance at the close of the term, and usually at Christmas, was in vogue; but these spectacles were, it is to be suspected, almost uniformly in the original language of the classic author, or in the schol- astic Latin of the period. A feeling in favour of a reform in these ar- rangements had, as has been mentioned, arisen when Hawkins wrote for the free school at Hadieigh in Suffolk his play entitled Apollo Shroving, 1627, where one of the characters desires the Prologue to speak what he has to say in honest English, for all their sakes, and de- scribes the predilection for employing Latin as more appropriate to the University. Occasionally, instead of plays, there were mu- sical entertainments; and the custom of signal- ising the termination of the school-work seems to have been followed by the private academies. But the antipathy to change and the tempta- tion to a display of erudition have always proved too strong an obstacle to improvement ; and w r hen the writer was last present at this anni- versary, the ancient precedent was still in force, and the Court of the Merchant Taylors and and Schoolmasters. 145 general company listened in respectful silence to interlocutions or monologues as mysterious to them as the Writing on the Wall. III. William Dugard, head-master from 1646 to 1660, so far as his light and information were capable of carrying him, did, no doubt, good service to the Company and institution with which he was during so many years associated. But, on the ground of misconduct and negli- gence, his employers thought proper, on the 27th December 1660, to discharge him from the place of chief schoolmaster, giving him, however, till the following Midsummer to find another appointment. Dugard states in An humble Remonstrance Presented to the Right Worshipfull Company of Merchant-Tailors, Maii 15, 1661, that the Com- pany assigned no cause for their proceeding . buthe says at the same time : " It is alleged in your Order, That many Complaints have been frequently from time to time made to the Master and Wardens of the Company, and to the Court, by the parents and friends of the young Scholars, of the neglect of the chief-Master's dulie in that K 146 Schools, School-Books, School, and of the breach of the Companies Orders and Ordinances thereof. " To this Dugard replies that he had never heard of any complaints in all the seventeen years he had filled the post, and he declared his readiness to submit in silence if any parent could prove aught against him. He had been in the profession, he said, thirty-three years, and ^ in all places wherever I came, 1 have had ample testimonials of my faithfulness and dili- gence, and my scholars' proficiency." The writer attributes his fall to the presence among the members of the Court of persons injustly hostile to him, who had represented that the school was suffering from his adminis- tration, and would go down unless some timely remedy was adopted. But Dugard averred that the decline of the school and the shrinkage of its numbers were due to the Company's order of March 16, 1659, which forbad him to admit any scholar who had not a warrant from the Master and Wardens, and the consequence was that parents, not caring to go to the Court, took their sons elsewhere. As many as sixty boys had been lost in this way and Schoolmasters. 147 within a twelvemonth, he maintains. ik True it is," he pleads, "that an hundred years ago, when it was an hard matter to get a Scholar to read Greek, there was such an Order made, that no Scholar should be taught in the School, unless first admitted by the Company. But afterward there was found a necessity to dispense with that Order, and so it was with my Predecessors; which I can prove for above threescore years bygone. They (and my self too from them, untill the last year) had such an indulgence that did not limit or restrain them to admit quarterly- Scholars, who did not immediately depend on the Charity of the Company : and the Motto engraven on the School speaks as much; Xulli proecludor, Tibi pateo." The Remonstrance did not please the Merchant Taylors, and in a second document, dated June 12, 1661, Dugard tried to soften what he had said; for his language, it must be allowed, was rather energetic, considering that he was in the hands of those who had the power to act as they judged fit. Whatever the precise result was, there are two or three curious points brought out in the course 148 Schools, School-Book*, of the head-master's vindication, and one can hardly avoid a conclusion that the main cause of the discontent of the Court was not even so much the application of a portion of his time to literary pursuits, as the abuse of the permission to set up a printing-press by employing the machinery, intended only for the production of school text- books, for political publications of a republican stamp. This fact does not transpire in the tract itself, but is ascertained from the imprints to books; and moreover, in 1650, at the end of a periodical publication, he had announced himself as Printer to the Council of State; so that altogether the Merchant Taylors might be naturally afraid of incurring the displeasure of the new masters of England by retaining the holder of opinions hostile to the Stuarts. He had sold the press at the desire of the Company for 300 less than the cost; and this was by no means the full extent of his sacrifices and misfortunes. For he gives his principals to understand that he had grown lean by the observance of fast-days in accordance with their recent order; and, moreover, that during his nineteen years' term of office he had lost 800 and Schoolmasters. i49 by unpaid quarter wages, thus making it seem probable that he was directly responsible for the fees. Altogether, nothing worse than indiscretion, perhaps, was chargeable to Dugard. "I bless God for it," he expressly says, " I know the Divel himself cannot justly accuse me of any notorious or scandalous Grime." Probably not; but there are seasons when indiscretion is criminal, and besides his procla- mation of his appointment at the time to the Commonwealth as their official printer, in 1657 there'camefrom his press the reply of Milton to Salmasius, an anti-royalist manifesto not calcu- lated to be palatable to the restored dynasty or- to the civic feeling, and certainly, so far as one can form a judgment, an encroachment on the special objects and raison d'etre of Dugard's collateral occupation. ( 150 Successors of Lily Thomas Robertson of York Cultivation of the living languages Numerous works published in England upon them Their various uses The Vocabu- laries lor travellers and merchants Rival authors of ('nimmurs Different text-books employed at schools Milton's Accidence (1669) Old mode of advertising- private establishments. I. AFTER the death of Lily his work was carried on and developed by other men, who gradually achieved the task of consolidating, or reducing into a more compact form, the rather perplexing series ot elementary treatises edited byWhittin- ton. Among these followers of the Master of St. Paul's was a schoolmaster at Oxford, the Thomas Robertson of York whom I had lately occasion to name in connection with Ascensius, and who at all events produced in 1532 at Basle an edition of Lily's Grammar with a Preface and Notes. Schools and Schoolmasters. 151 Robertson applauds, in his dedication to Dr. Longlond, Bishop of Lincoln, himself a man of letters, the system of Lily, and testifies to the excellent way in which the boys at Oxford prospered under his educational regimen. But, nevertheless, he does not conceal his notion and expectation of improving on his master; and indeed there is no doubt that we have here the earliest clear approach to our modern grammar- book, although the whole is in Latin, except certain quotations and names in Greek, as he compares the practice of the Greek poets with that of the Romans, much as Robert Etienne a little later pointed out the conformity of the French with the Greek. Philological parallels had become fashionable. In his section on Derivatives Robertson has some matter, as to which the modern etymo- logist may form his own conclusions. This is a specimen : " Vox uocis, a voco. lucundus a iuuo. Lex legis, a lego. Junior a iuuenis. Rex regis, a rego. Mobilis a moueo. Sedes a sedeo. Humanus ab homo, lumentum a iuuo. Vomer a uomo. Fomes a foueo. Pedor a pede." 152 Schools, School-Books, Of the miscellaneous labourers in this field Robertson was one of the most conspicuous; nor did his name and work die with him, for his tables of Irregular Verbs and Nouns were printed with Lily's Rides at least as late as the reign of James I. It is out of my power to cross the boundary- line of conjecture when I ofler the opinion that the Oxford employment of Robertson was on the old Magdalen staff. II. But there was no lack of instruments for carrying out the scheme of education in Eng- land, whatever the imperfections of it might be. There were, besides the ordinary pedagogue, whose accomplishments did not, perhaps, ex- tend beyond the language of his own country, writing, and arithmetic, professors for French, Italian, and Dutch, and men whose training at college qualified them more or less to give instruction in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The German, Spanish, and Portuguese do not seem to have been much cultivated down to a comparatively recent date, which is the more extraordinary since our intercourse with all and Schoolmasters. 153 those countries was constant from the earliest period. There were certainly English versions of the Spanish grammars of Anthonio de Corro and Gesare Oudin made in the times of Elizabeth and her successor, as well as the original pro- duction by Lewis Owen, entitled, The Key into the Spanish Tongue. But these were assuredly never used as ordinary school-books, and were rather designed as manuals for travellers and literary students; and the same is predicable, I apprehend, of the anonymous Portuguese Dic- tionary and Grammar of 1701, which is framed on a scale hardly adapted for the requirements of the young. Yet at the same time these, and many more like the Dutch Tutor, the Nether-Dutch Academy, and so forth, were of eminent service in private tuition and select classes, where a pupil was placed with a coach for some special object, or to complete the studies which were not included in the school programmes. Moreover, it is not to be overlooked that in the polyglot vocabulary and phrase-book the student, either with or without the aid of a tutor 154 Schools, School-Books, possessed in former times a very valuable ma- chinery for gaining a knowledge of languages for conversational and commercial purposes ; and these works sometimes comprised the German, as well as the more usual tongues employed in correspondence and intercourse. Thetitle-page of one of them, published at Antwerp in 1576, expressly intimates its utility to all merchants; and a second of rather earlier date (1548) is specified as a book highly necessary to every- body desirous of learning the languages embra- ced in it, which are English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Flemish, German, and Latin a remarkable complement, as very few are more than hexaglot. But these helps were of course outside the schoolroom, and were called into requisition chiefly by individuals whose vocations took them abroad, or rendered an acquaintance with foreign terms more or less imperative ; and un- doubtedly our extensive mercantile and diplo- matic relations with all parts of the world made this class of supplementary instruction a liveli- hood for a very numerous body of teachers. Perhaps of all the philological undertakings and Schoolmasters. 155 of the kind, the most singular was that of Augus- tine Spalding, a merchant of London, who in 1614 published a translation of some dialogues in the Malay dialect, from a book compiled by Arthusius of Dantzic in Latin, Malayan, and Malagassy; and he informs us that his object was to serve those who might have occasion to travel to the East Indies. II. Shakespear, in his conception of HOLO- FERNES in " Love's Labours's Lost," is supposed to have taken hints from one of the foreigners who settled in London in his time as teachers of languages, the celebrated JOHN FLORIO, who is best known as the first English translator of Mon- taigne, but who produced a good deal of useful professional work, and became intimate with many of the literary men of his day. We can- not be absolutely sure that Florio sat for Holo- fernes; but at any rate the dramatist has depicted in that character in a most inimitable style the priggish mannerist, as he knew and saw him. The City of London itself, with all its great industrial benefactions, abounded with private schools and with tutors for special objects. 156 Schools, School-Book*, Some of them were authors, not only of school- books for the use of their own pupils, but of translations from the classics and from foreign writers ; and they had their quarters in localities long since abandoned to other occupations, such as Bow Lane, Mugwell or Monkwell Street, Lothbury Garden, and St. Paul's Churchyard, where accommodation was once readily procur- able at rents commensurate with their resources. Some of these men had originally presided over similar establishments in the provinces, and had come up to town, not doubt, from ambitious motives. Two of them, in Primers which they published in 1682 and 1688, when such distinctions were important, call their volumes the Protestant School and the Protestant Schoolmaster, in order to reassure parents, who distrusted Papists and Jacobites. A few years before, Nathaniel Strong, dating from the Hand and Pen, in Red-Cross Alley, on Great Tower Hill, launched what he somewhat unguardedly christened The Perfect Schoolmaster. This part of the metropolis was at that time rather thickly sown with teachers of all kinds; as you drew nearer to Wapping, the and Sctioolmaslei's. 157 schools of geography and navigation became more conspicuous. It was about the period when Mr. Secretary Pepys was residing in Hart Street. In connection with these private schools on the east side of London, for the special advan- tage of those who desired to embark on a sea- faring, naval, military, or other technical career, there is a very characteristic and suggestive ad- vertisement by one John Holwell at the end of an astrological tract published by him in 1683, where he states that he professes and teaches at his house on the east side of Spitalfields, opposite DorsetStreet, next door to a glazier's, not merely such matters as arithmetic, geography, trigono- metry, navigation, astronomy, dialling, gaug- ing, surveying, fortification, and gunnery, but ASTROLOGY in all its parts ; which appears to be an uncustomary combination, and to bespeak a separate class or department. Astrology, which was a sort of outgrowth and development from the judicial astronomy of the early Oxford schoolmen, had been a source of controversy since the time of Elizabeth, but had gained a footing in the following century through 158 Schools, School-Books, the exertions of several indefatigable advocates and writers, of whom William Lilly, John Par- tridge, and John Gadbury were the most emi- nent and influential. Lilly, during the Civil War, is said to have been consulted by both poli- tical parties; and he published a small library of pamphlets professing to see into futurity. III. There was a host of rival authors, some bringing general treatises in their hand, others special branches of the subject handled in a new fashion, from all parts of the kingdom to the London publishing firms. Dr. Walker, head- master of King Edward the Sixth's Grammar School at Louth in Lincolnshire, completed his monograph on Particles in 1655; it is the only work by which he is at present remembered ; and it occasioned the joke that his epitaph should be : Here lie Walker's Particles. But even MILTON could not desist from enter- ing into the competition, and, two years after the appearance of Paradise Lost, when the writer was, of course, sufficiently well known both as a political controversialist and a poet, yet scarcely so famous as he became and remains,came out a and Schoolmasters. 159 little volume called Accidence Commenced Gram- mar, of which the main object was to reduce into an English digest the Latin Accidence and Grammar, by which the illustrious writer de- clared and complained that ten years of an ordi- nary life were consumed. But advocates of particular theories had a very slender chance of success, even where their promoters were persons so distinguished as Ben Jonsori and Milton, unless they possessed some adventitious interest or appealed to popu- lar sentiment. .4 Little Booh for Little Children, by Thomas White, minister of the Gospel, had an astonish- ing run, for instance; there were at least a dozen editions; but it was embellished with choice woodcuts of the Gatnach school, and enlivened by a string of stories which, if they are not vapid and silly, are simply outrageous and revolting. The sole redeeming feature is, that among the alphabets occurs what is sometimes called " Tom Thumb's Alphabet," " A was an Archer, and shot at a Frog, " which is not found in the earlier primers, so far as I know, and may have been specially written by White or for him. 160 Schools, School-Books, But the numerous experimental essays of am- bitious schoolmasters and other friends to the cause of learning which found their way into type at various times, were, as a rule, speedily consigned to oblivion ; the production of a suc- cessful school-book was a task demanding a rare union of tact in structure with influence in initia- tive quarters; and Lily's Primer, itself based on the labours of his predecessors, was generally adopted by the endowed schools throughout England, Wales and Scotland at first, and in- deed till somewhere in the early years of the eighteenth century, with some modifications of detail and spelling, but at last in the form of the Eton or the Westminster Grammar, which Carlisle reports in 1818 as in almost universal use in this country. The exceptions which he names were then very few, and we see that they were nearly always in favour of some text-book introduced by local agency. This was the case at Reading, where it ap- pears that the system of teaching was founded on those of Westminster, Eton, and Winchester. At Aylesbury, Owen's Latin Grammar and the Eton Greek Grammar used to be employed. and Schoolmasters. 161 At Bodmin, Valpy's Greek Grammar, and at Faversham, Lily's Latin Primer, edited by Ward, were preferred. At some minor schools, where a boy was intended for any of the great founda- tions, special books were placed in his hands to facilitate preparation. But the course of instruction at some of these institutions, outside the elementary stage, was remarkably liberal and extensive, and enabled a boy of ability to ground himself, at all events, very fairly in the Greek and Roman classics. This was, it must be borne in mind, however, the dawn of a ne-w era the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A class of men who influentially helped to carry on the succession of school-books and the slower process of amendment were the private tutors in noble or distinguished families, who, when their services were no longer required, if they did not obtain immediate preferment, re- ceived pupils or opened proprietary establish- ments. They were, for the most part, university graduates and persons of fair attainments, who were glad enough to introduce into print, with a double eye to their own scholars and the L 162 Schools, School-Books, public, the system or theory with which they had started, and which in their hands under- went, perhaps, certain modifications. Matthias Prideaux, of Exeter College, Oxford, and A. Lane, M. A., were at the outset of their careers retainers of this kind in the great Devon- shire family of Reynell. The former signalised himself by the Introduction to History, which, whatever our verdict upon it may be,was a highly successful venture, and, after serving its original purpose as a class-book for his private pupils, the sons of Sir Thomas Reynell, was printed and held the market for many years. Lane, who was a man of ability and intelligence, makes his patron, Sir Richard Reynell, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, share with him the credit of his Rational and Speedy Method of attaining to the Latin Tongue, 1695, which he had been en- couraged by Sir Richard to pursue with young Reynell, a boy of eight, and which formed, no doubt, the basis of his system when he embarked on tuition as a career. He presided at first over the free school atLeominster, but subsequently set up for himself at Mile End Green, where he would be at fuller liberty to follow his own bent. and Schoolmasters. 163 Lane desires us to believe that the progress made by his young pupil, while he was under his charge, was little less than miraculous ; but an earlier writer, Christopher Syrns, in his Introduction to the Art of TeacJting Ihe Latin Speech, 1634, gives hope to the dullest boy that, by the use of his method, he may acquire it in four years. From the sixteenth century downward, there seems to have been a succession of competitors to public favour and support in this, as in every other, department of activity; and among the whole crowd of aspirants there was not one who succeeded in discovering the true principles of the art till our ow r n time. IV. The absence of newspapers or other ready means of communication necessitated a resort to a system of advertising educational establish- ments through the medium of broadsides, in which were set forth the advantages of par- ticular institutions and the branches of know- ledge in which instruction was to be had there. As early as 1562, Humphrey Baker, of London, published an arithmetical work entitled The 164 Schools, School-Book*, Wellspriny of Sciences, which was frequently reprinted both in his lifetime and after his decease; but he was a teacher of the art, as well as a writer upon it, and there is a printed sheet announcinghis arrangements for receiving pupils, and giving lessons in that and various other subjects. For, as the terms of the docu- ment, herewith annexed, shew, Baker had in his employment other gentlemen, who assisted him in his scholastic labours : "Such as are desirous, eyther themselves to learne, or to have theyr children or servants instructed in any of these Arts and Faculties heere under named : It may please them to repayre unto the house of Hum fry Baker, dwell- ing on the North side of the Royall Exchange, nextadjoyning tothesigne of the shippe. Where they shall fynde the Professors of the said Artes, &c. Readie to doe their diligent endevours for a reasonable consideration. Also if any be minded to have their children boorded at the said house, for the speedier expedition of their learning, they shall be well and reasonably used, to theyr contentation The Arts and Faculties to be taught are these, . . . God save the Queene." and Schoolmasters. ^ 105 The case of Baker merely stands alone be- cause we do not happen to be in possession of any similar contemporary testimony. But schoolmasters who resided at their own private houses found it, of course, indispensable to adopt some method or other of making their professional whereabouts known, as we find Peter Bales, the Elizabethan calligraphist, and author of the Writinc/ School-master, 1590, notifying, at the foot of the title to his book, that it was to be sold at his house in the upper end of the Old Bailey, u where he teacheth the said Arts." Bales probably rented the house, and underlet such portions as he did not require; for at the end of Ripley's Compound of Alchemy, 1591, Rabbards, the translator, asks those who had any corrections to suggest in the text to. send them to him at the house of Peter Bales. Preceptors naturally congregated near the centre of mercantile life. ( 166 ) CIIAP1TRE XL PropoM'd University ot London in 1347 -- The Museum Mh/erm' at Bethnal Green Its catholic character and liberal programme Calligraphy Shorthand Bright's system patended in 1588 ~ Education in the provinces The old school at Manchester Shakespear's Sir Hugh l-lvun* and Holofernes "William Hazlitt's account of his Shropshire school in 1788. I. IT is a fact, probably within the knowledge of very few, that two hundred years and more before the actual establishment of the University of London, a project for such an institution was mooted by an anonymous pamphleteeiywho in ay be considered as a kind of pioneer, preceding the Benthams and Broughams. I hold in my hand Motives Grounded upon the Word of God, and upon Honour., Profit, and Pleasure for the present Founding an University in the Metropolis, London, 1647. It purports to Schools mid Schoolmasters. 167 be the work of " a true Lover of his Nation, and especially of the said City. " The lines and object in this piece are purely clerical. The author maintains the insufficiency of the two existing Universities and the College in Ireland to rear as many " sons of the Pro- phets "an euphemism for parsons to attend upon the spiritual needs of the English and the Londoners. He puts down on paper statistics of the num- ber of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, and he argues that if the total were much larger 10,000 instead of 5900 -there would be no means of raising the 20,000 preachers necessary in his view to carry on the business of religion. He pleads the fall of Episcopacy in support of his scheme, as " we cannot hope," he says, "that so many will apply their studies to Divinity, and therefore have the greater need to maintain the more poor scholars at our Universities," or, in other words, the absence of the prizes in the lot- tery had taken the best men out of the market. In fact, the writer himself does not shrink alto- gether from presenting the commercial side of the question, for he observes : "Without injury 168 Schools, School-Books, unto any, an University in London would in- crease London's Trading, and inrich London, as the Scholars do Cambridge and Oxford, where how many poor people also are benefited by the Colleges, yea, the countries round about them/' So far, so good; but he, in the very next para- graph, strikes a chord which jars upon the ear. We see that he is a partisan of that theory which flourished here down to our own day, and which contributed so powerfully to retard and cripple our scholastic and academical studies. Hear what he says : " If here in London there be a College, in which nothing but Latin shall be spoken, and your children put into it, and from ten years old to twelve hear no other Lan- guage, in those two years they will be able to speak as good Latin as they do English, and as readily. The Roman children learned Latin as ours do English...;" and so he goes on as to Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, and Spanish. The sole point here, in our modern estima- tion, is the admission of the three living lan- guages into the 'curriculum, in order to qualify the students in later life to make themselves understood abroad either as merchants or as and Schoolmasters. 169 diplomatists. But here he \vas before his time. Nothing of the kind was to be attempted in England for generations. For generations Eng- lishmen were to be instructed only in the dead tongues, and were to have not an English, but a Latin Grammar put into their hands age after age. He talks about the Roman youth learning Latin as we do English; but he failed, perhaps, to perceive that they did not learn British or Gaulish as w r e do Latin. His text is wealthy in Scriptural quotations and parallels; but what- ever one may think of his notions regarding the details and advantages ol such a plan, this un- named " true Lover of his Nation' 1 is entitled, at any rate, to the credit and distinction of having been apparently the first to suggest what we have now before us in the shape of an accom- plished fact. It is not too much to assert, probably, that if the appearance of this tract had been followed by the execution of the ideas enunciated in it, the force of opinion would by this time have spared very little of the work of the original promoters. 170 Schools, School-Books, II. The Miisoeum Minervce., instituted by Sir Balthazar Gerbier d'Ouvilly at Bethnal Green in 1635, presents a thorough contrast to those philanthropic or eleemosynary institutions of which I have lately spoken, inasmush as it was a novel and costly apparatus of Continental origin, calculated only for the children of rich persons and for those who desired to complete themselves in various accomplishments. Lec- tures were delivered on several subjects, and printed afterwards for circulation ; but the enterprise did not succeed, and the outbreak of the Civil War probably sealed its doom. Yet as late as 1649 the management, or the founder himself, issued a prospectus of the dif- ferent branches of learning and culture which were taught at this establishment. The language of this document, which is curious enough to append entire, portends the approaching col- lapse, and reads like a final appeal to public spirit and patronage : " To all Fathers of NOBLE FAMILIES and Lovers of VERTU'E : Sir Balthazar Gerbier desires once more that the Publique may be pleased to take notice of his great labours and and Schoolmasters. 171 indeavours by the Erection of an Academy on Bednall Green without Aldgate. To teach Hebrew, Greek, Latine, French, Italian, Spanish, High Dutch, and Loiv Dutch, both Ancient and Modern Histories, joyntly with the Constitutions and Governments of the most famous Empires and Dominions in the- World, the true Naturall andExperimentall Philosophy, the Malhema ticks, Arithmetic!;, and the keeping Booties of Accounts by Creditor and Debitor. All excellent Hand- H.'ritiny, Geometric, Cosmography, Geography, Perspective, Architecture, Secret Motions of Scenes, Fortifications, the besieging & Defending of Places, Fire- ~\Vorks, Marches of A rm ies, Order- ing of fiattailes, Fencing, Vaulting, Riding the Great Horse, Mustek, Playing on all sorts of Instruments, Dancing, Drawing, Painting, Limn- ing, and Carving, &c." It is at once apparent that the programme of the Bethnal Green Academy was too ambitious and expensive to suit moderate careers ;>nd limited resources. Perhaps if it had been so fortunate as to outlive the Restoration it might have proved a success, as the range was suffi- ciently capacious to accommodate those who 172 Schools, School-Book*, contented themselves with ordinary school or college routine ; those who preferred a study of the sciences and arts ; and, again, such as desired a special professional training. The establishment of the Mmce-urn in 1635 had been inaugurated by a dramatic perfor- mance, which the Court honoured with its presence; and in the following year the Consti- tutions, as they are called, were printed. These give, but of course with more detail, the particulars which present themselves in the advertisement just noticed; and they also shew that there' was a preparatory school attached to the Musoeum, from which the pupils might be drafted into the higher one. The subjects taught exhibit a diversity of character and a width of sympathy which are powerfully at variance with the meagre pro- grammes of the old-fashioned public founda- tions. They comprised Heraldry, Conveyancing, Common Law r , Antiquities (including Numis- matics), Agriculture, Arithmetic, Architecture, Fortification, Geography, Languages, and Elo- cution, with many more matters. It is worth remarking that now for the first and Schoolmasters. 173 time the German tongue was included in the list of those which were recommended and set down for study, while the Dutch also occurs in the list. Elocution or u the art of well- speaking." as it is termed, was also a novel feature; and, in point of fact, Gerbier, who had travelled much abroad and observed the superior educational systems of foreign countries, sought to introduce here the same catholic and liberal spirit, instead of the imperfect and cramped course of studies with which Englishmen were forced to be contented, and which had scarcely emerged from mediaeval simplicity and crudity. The Mtimrttm Minervm, of which a Shropshire gentleman, Sir Francis Kinaston, of Oteley,was the first Regent, collapsed about 1650; but its example and influence survived, and it was the forerunner of a broader and more enlightened educational policy and of the modern type of training colleges, into which even those ancient endowed schools which remain have been com- pelled by the force of public opinion, one by one, to resolve themselves. These Academies present a very powerful con- trast to the archaic school in the multiplicity of 174 Schools, School-Books, acquirements, and in the breadth or variety of culture which they afforded and encouraged. They betokeu a developmen of social wants and refinements, and the force of influences re- ceived from surrounding countries. It was a supply which responded to a demand; and it helped to create or extend a field of literary industry in the form of technical publications dealing with the principal subjects, which the Musoeuin Minervoe and other analogous insti- tutions included in their scheme. To the trea- tises on Riding, Swimming, Drawing, Writing, and a few other arts were added Manuals for the use of those who studied, at the College or under private instructors, the sciences of Fencing, Vaulting, Small Sword Exercise, Fortification, and the accomplishments specified in the pro- gramme of the Minerva Museum. A constant succession of text-books for pupils in nearly all these branches of a polite education kept the makers and the vendors of them busy from the age of Elizabeth downward; and long lists might be furnished of contributions to every department, both by professional experts and by amateurs of practical experience. and Schoolmasters. 1/5 Ladies, who desired to learn anything special in excess of the narrow educational routine then deemed sufficient for the call of their sex, de- pended on private tutors, who usually waited upon them at their own homes. Thomas Greet- ing taught Mrs. Pepys the flageolet, for example, and the same lady had lessons in drawing from Alexander Browne, who made the diarist angry at first, because he was asked by Mrs. Pepys to stay dinner sometimes, and to sit at table with her husband. The importance of calligraphy was recognised long before the date of any literary monuments of its development. The earliest professor of the art who appeared in print among us was a Frenchman, Jean de Beauchesne, who resided in Blackfriars, and published in 1570 his writ- ing-book, in which he affords specimens of all the usual hands, English and French secretary, Italian, Chancery, and Court. Even the extant productions of this class, including those of the immortal Gocker,would fill a considerable space in a bookcase; and many belonged to the call- ing without the parade of authorship, while of such fugitive performances the remains are apt 176 Schools, School-Books , to be incomplete, and to present us with a list of names far from exhaustive. In his "Pen's Triumph," 1660, Cocker, who is better remembered as an author on arith- metic, perhaps for no farther reason than the force of the adage, but who was also a lexico- grapher and a voluminous producer of writing- books, instructs his pupils and the public not merely in all the hands at that time employed for various objects, but how " to write with gold,' 1 which was, of course, no novelty, but had been more in vogue on the Continent than here . Entire works were executed in autograph MS. by experts, both in England and abroad, for the purpose of presentation to noble or royal per- sonages; and Ballard gives a copious account of a lady, named Esther Inglis, who, in the early portion of tfre seventeenth century, signalised her talent and ingenuity in this way. Her work was remarkable for the minuteness and exqui- site delicacy of its characters ; but nearly all the professional writing-masters introduced into their copybooks bold and intricate designs, and figures of animals, for the sake of rendering the and Schoolmasters. 177 volumes more attractive, and illustrating the capabilities of the goose-quill. Among our foremost literary celebrities, Shakespear wrote the Court hand, judging from his signature, and Paeon and Ben Jonson the Italian. Charactery, or the art of shorthand, was in- troduced into the Nonconformist schools as a taught subject for the sake of enabling youths or others to take notes of sermons and lectures; and some of the discourses from the pulpit in the time of Elizabeth purport to have been printed from shorthand notes. Dr. Bright, who was the writer of a work on Melancholy long antecedent to Burton's, procured an exclusive right in 1588 to publish a system which he had invented for this purpose, and which we find described by him as " an art of short, swift, and secret writing." He set in motion an idea which met with such numerous imitators and improvers, that a catalogue of the publications on Tachygraphy down to the present date forms a volume of respectable dimensions. Bright was nearly a century before the more celebrated Rich, who flourished about the Restoration of M 178 Schools, School-Books, the Stuarts, and whose cypher was adopted by Pepys in the composition of his diary. III. The public schools were not the first in emulating and continuing the policy which Ger- bier had laboured so hard and so long to estab- lish. On a less expensive and ostentatious scale certain private academies adopted the idea of supplementing the subjects taught in the great foundations by some, at least, of the manly or elegant arts which had figured in the old Beth- nal Green prospectus. At the end of a Musical Entertainment, pre- pared in 1676 for recitation by some school- boys in the presence of certain persons of qua- lity, the master favours us with some particulars of the subjects which pupils might take up in his establishment, and it is also inferable that the hours of study extended to at least five o'clock in the evening. He says in a kind of postscript to the printed tract : i( The Arts and Sciences taught and practis'd in the Academy are these. All sorts of Instruments, Singing and Danc- ing. and Schoolmasters. 179 French and Italian. The Mathematicks. Grammar, Writing and Arithmetic};. Painting and Drawing. Fencing, Vaulting and Wrastling." This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Academy was evidently one designed more par- ticularly for the children of noble or wealthy people. He adds : " Or any young Gentleman design'd for Tra- vel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language. " Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnished by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment." This is altogether worth attention. It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the name or loca- lity of the college where all these advantages and temptations (in the way of buying your Songs of the King's own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centnries ago. IV. In all the great provincial centres there were, of course, educational institutes supported 180 Schools, School-Books, by local or royal endowment ; and in all these the method of teaching and general policy fol- lowed that pursued in the metropolis, except that, as we shall presently see, some of the estab- lishments in the country trod in the footsteps of the Academy just described more promptly and more cordially than St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', which modified their constitutions only to save themselves from ruin. Of the seventeenth-century school at Man- chester we gain an accidental glimpse and notion from the Delectus of Lathi Phrases which was prepared for use there by a former scholar, Thomas Bracebridge. It is a MS. volume of no interest or moment, unless it is locally and personally regarded; but one is apt to cherish every added fraction of light as to the state of education in the Midlands in former days ; and this Delectus carries us back precisely to the Restoration, so far as its mere date is concerned, but furnishes a fair idea of the sort of phrase- book which a Manchester teacher of 1660 thought suitable for the boys of his old school. In Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster, Shakespear has not improbably and Schoolmasters. 181 preserved to us some fragmentary reminiscences of his own school-days at Stratford. The pro- bation through which William Page is put by Sir Hugh at his mother's instance might very well be a literal or close transcript from actual experience. With what mingled feelings the poet must have contemplated a class of men to whom such minds as his have ever owed so little ! Both Sir Hugh and the Reverend Doctor Primrose may be accepted as provincial types of the clerical preceptor, as they seemed to two excellent observers in their respective centuries. We easily remark the difference between them and such a creation as Holofernes. The course of studies followed in the rural districts of England at alater period is illu strated by a letter from Hazlitt, the essayist, to his elder brother, the miniature-painter, when the former was attending a school at Wem in Shropshire in 1788. He was at that time ten years old. After stating that he had been learning to draw, he proceeds: "Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid's Metamorphoses and Eutropius. . . . I began to cypher a fortnight after Christmas, 182 Schools, School-Books, and shall go into the rule of three next week. ... I shall go through the whole cyphering book this summer, and then I am to learn Euclid. We go to school at nine every morn- ing. Three boys begin by reading the Bible. Then I and two others show our exercices. We then read the Speaker [by Enfield]. Then we all set about our lessons ... At eleven we write and cypher. In the afternoon we stand for places at spelling, and I am almost always first. ... I shall go to dancing this month." The glimpse which we here obtain of a small priv'ate seminary in a Shropshire village a hun- dred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education. From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr. Lempriere, whose name the lad transformed into Doloungh- pryee, was a visitor at the school ; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792. It was still in use at Merchant Taylors' in 1850. The proprietary establishments for boys,which spread themselves by degrees over the land, formed a valuable succedaneum to the Edward and Schoolmasters. 183 and other endowed schools, and useful nurseries for pupils who aimed at more than elementary learning. But they at the same time proved a source of emulation and material improvement; and during the last fifty years the distance be- tween the two systems has sensibly decreased. The great charities and other ancient foun- dations like St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors 1 , Eton, Harrow, have only maintained their relative superiority by reforming and extending their prospectus; and there is scarcely a country town at the present moment without one or more private seminaries, where a better educa- tion is given than was within the reach of our grandfathers at any of the large public schools of the metropolis. Even in the time of Carlisle, who wrote in 1818, some of the principal institutions in the provinces were treading closely on the heels of Christ's Hospital and other endowments, and one or two, as at Dorchester, at Abingdon, and at Witton near Chester, seem to have been on a more liberal and enlightened footing. ( 184 ) XII. Educational condition of SCOTLAND Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters Bud. anan and other early writers on grammar -Thomas Ruddiman and his im- portant contribution to the spread of elementary teach- ing Decline of culture during the Civil War. I. WHEN \ve turn to Scotland, we find the compendium of the Grammar of ^Elius Donatus, of which I have already furnished some account, in use there from time almost immemorial. It appears that the Scotish seminaries adopted this favourite class-book in common with those of England at least as far back as the time of Andrew of Wyntown, who was nearly contem- porary with Langland and Chaucer. In his Original Chronicle of Scotland he speaks of the Barnys (bairns) lering Donate at their begin- ning of Grammar; which is a very interesting and important piece of testimony in its way since Schools and Schoolmasters. 185 there is so little to enable us to form an opinion of the rise and growth of elementary learning in North Britain, although there maybe just suffi- cient light cast incidentally or indirectly on the subject to lead us to judge that Scotland, if not indeed the North generally, was in this respect, as in others, far behind the Southern English. In Scotland, the influence of Knox and his supporters favoured the early institution of parochial schools throughout the country,where a class and range of instruction prevailed which, combined with native religious tendencies, had the effect of increasing, in comparison with Eng- land, the average of educated intelligence with- out developing much breadth of thought or much intellectual refinement. The aims of the parish schools are humble, and beyond its limited possibilities there are its impediments and its snares. In addition to schools, the friends of education in the North, as early as the reign of William III., commenced an agitation for the establishment of parochial libraries even in the Highlands. The move- ment was set on foot by certain ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and its basis and scope 186 Schools, School-Books, would have been narrow enough if the idea had been realised. But nothing beyond a discus- sion and some correspondence seems to have resulted at the moment. Nor do we, even as time goes on, find much information obtainable on this part of the sub- ject. But both the systems and the books em- ployed were for some centuries of foreign origin; and the grammatical publications of an Aber- deen man, John Vans, whose name seems to be the earliest on the roll of native authors, were, so far as we at present know, without exception published, as well as written, in France, to which Scotland perhaps owed, among other matters, her adoption of the Continental law of Latin pronunciation. Vans grounded his Rudiments, printed at Paris repeatedly about 1520, on the old Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus, which bespeaks a backward- ness of information, since at this date Lily's Grammar was already in use in the South, and even the systems of Whittinton and the other disciples of the Magdalen School method had been almost completely discarded there, except, perhaps, as occasional auxiliaries. and Schoolmasters. 187 At a later period, the eminent Scotsman Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody, and two others of his countrymen, Andrew Symson and James Garmichael, reduced to a simpler plan the principles of elementary learn- ing and the outlines of etymology. The first explicit attempt to produce a gram- mar in Scotland for the special use of that country is due, however, to Alexander Hume, who is known to us not only as an educational reformer, but as a philological student. His New Grammar for the Use of the Scotish Youth, 1612, was a popular compendium founded on Lily; it seems to have met with limited and brief acceptance, and his tract on the Ortho- graphy and Congruity of the British Tongue, which was a literary essay intended rather for the closet (to use the old-fashioned parlance), remained till lately in MS. II. But books of instruction and for employ- ment in schools continued, down to the days of THOMAS RUDDIMAN, to be at once scarce and unsatisfactory, insomuch that, side by side with these and other unrecovered productions, it was 188 Schools, School-Book*, found possible and convenient to keep in print the old text-books of Stanbridge, of which edi- tions continued to be issued at intervals both here and in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century. Ruddiman may be considered as the apostle of scholastic education and literature in Scot- land ; and as he was not born till 1674, this amounts to a proposition, that his country was at least two centuries behind England in know- ledge and culture. Even Ruddiman was brought up at the parish school, and was, moreover, for some time a parochial teacher. Rut, partly by force of character and partly by good fortune, he extricated himself from his early associa- tions, and became the Lily of the North. His Rudiments of Grammar were published in 1714, when he was already in middle life ; they were little more than the St. Paul's Primer calculated for the meridian of Edin- burgh ; but they proved eminently successful, and encouraged him to proceed with that more important philological enterprise the In- stitutions of Latin Grammar, which, like the disquisition of Alexander Hume recently men- and Schoolmasters. 189 tioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece of authorship. But, notwithstanding the useful labours of Huddiman, his country, from political and other agencies, remained yet for a considerable length of time in a very stagnant condition, nor had any sensible improvement been achieved in the educational machinery of that portion of the empire within the recollection of those still living. Mental training and culture, as they are now understood, are the growth of the last half century. But the cost of such accomplishments as were taught at Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews was lower than in England, and the standard higher than in Ireland; and from both countries pupils were often sent in former days to complete their education, where their parents could not have aflorded the means to maintain them at Oxford or Cambridge. From a hundred to a hundred and thirty years since, the fees at Glasgow- University did not exceed 20 a year, and a frugal lad found seven or eight shillings a week sufficient for his board and lodging. III. Many causes contributed/ toward the 190 Schools, School-Book*, middle of the seventeenth century, to favour the disorganisation and decay of scholastic learning ; but, above all, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the consequent disorder, de- pression, and inquietude, seem to have reduced the educational standard, and to have thrown the task of instruction, in a great number of cases, into the hands of the clergy, from the want of funds or the lack of inclination to support the former lay-teachers. The acute political crisis, which lasted without interrup- tion from 1640 to the commencement of th- Protectorate in 1653, affected even the ancient academical and civic endowments; and the two Universities, the noble foundations of Edward VI., and the public seminaries instituted i London and other great centres by priy munificence, suffered a common paralysis The alliance between the Church and i schools was one formed or developed at a period of exceptional difficulty and pressure; but even when the immediate necessity for such a bond existed no longer, and affairs in England had returned to their normal state, the clergy saw too clearly the importance of and Schoolmasters. 191 the hold which they had gained on the national training and thought to allow education to pass back, farther than was avoidable, under lay control. In the time of the Commonwealth, and when Cromwell assumed the supreme authority, there were all over the country, throughout England and Wales, men in holy orders and in the en- joyment of benefices who combined with their sacerdotal functions, as many do still, the duties of schoolmasters and lecturers. Doubtless, s< among them there were some fairly qualified for the trust which they received and under- took ; but the majority is alleged, in an authen- tic official document before me of 1654, to have been far otherwise. This State-paper is lied " An Ordinance for the Ejection of indalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Minis- ers and Schoolmasters," and w r as published in the autumn of the year above named. Two singular features it unquestionably pos- sesses : the intimate association between the parson and the pedagogue, and the striking pic- ture which it presents to our view of the lax and profligate condition of the class which Cromwell 192 Schools, School-Books, and his advisers saw thus clothed with the two- fold responsibility of mental and spiritual tuition. The points on which the Commissioners of the Protectoral Government were authorised to inform themselves, and to exercise the discretion vested in them by the ordinance, reveal a very unsatisfactory and corrupt state of things, and the existence of abuses for which neither the Civil War nor the Republican administration can be thought to have been answerable. There is scarcely a vice or irregularity which is not named or implied in the instructions delivered to the Commission; and the encouragement of "Whit- son-ales,Wakes,Morris-Dances,Maypoles,Stage- plays, or such like licentious practices," strikes one as relatively a very venial offence against good morals and professional decorum. But the antipathy to sports and dramatic exhibitions was an inheritance from the more rigid Puritans, and the Articles of Inquiry in the archidiaconal visitations of this period never forgot such pro- fane infringements of clerical morality. The persons who were selected to sit on these committees for the several urban and provincial districts included many God-fearers of the pre- and Schoolmasters. 193 vailing type; but at the same time the choice was evidently made with some judgment and impartiality, and the printed lists exhibit a not- able proportion of divines and others not likely to sanction or recommend too violent, a course. In fact, so considerate w r as the temper of the Administration itself, that an express proviso was inserted in the ejecting ordinance, by which some of the stipend of the cure was to be set apart, where the minister and school- master was judged incompetent, for the support of his family. Samuel Harmar, in his Vox Populi, or Glou- cestershire's Desire, 1642, represents the w r ant of proper maintenance for teachers, although many persons of moderate resources were will- ing to contribute liberally to the object; to the burden on families by reason of the gratuitous instruction of children, who, if they were but in the way of earning even twopence a day, might help themselves and their parents,whereas they wasted their time in playing about the streets, and acquired the habit of swearing and other immoral practices. The restriction of educa- tional management, for the most part, to the N 194 Schools and Schoolmasters. clergy accounts for the dearth of literature shed- ding real and valuable light on the condition of the young and the state of schools in very early days ; and Har mar's pamphlet is principally occupied with vapid theological ineptitudes. His main proposal was excellent; it declared for the establishment of schoolmasters in every parish throughout the country ; but even this was merely what Knox and his supporters had long before advocated, and partly accomplished, in Scotland. There is a little volume by Richard Croft, Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, being a sermon preached by him at the opening of the Free School of Feckenham in 1696, throughout the sixty-eight pages of which there is not an iota worthy of citation, nor a hint serviceable to my inquiry. How different it might have been, had a layman been the writer ! ( 195 ) CHAPITRE XIII. Female education Women of quality taught at home- General illiteracy of the sex Strong clerical contro 1 Ignorance of the rudiments of knowledge among girls Shakespear's daughters Goldsmith's Poems for Young Ladies Rise of the Ladies' School Political importance of the training of women. I. THE neglect of female education in the United Kingdom down to a recent date pro- ceeded from an absence of any adequate^ or organisable machinery for the purpose, and from the complete monopoly of learning by men in early times. In Scotland this mischief was re- medied to a certain extent much sooner than in England, owing to the institution of Academies, where both sexes received instruction under one roof from the same masters; and this circum- stance may help to explain the general superio- rity of the Scots, within certain limits, to the 196 Schools, School-Books, Southern Britons in this respect, the better up- bringing of the mother communicating itself to her children. Common academies for boys and girls were not wholly unknown in England, however, but they were of very rare occurrence, and have now become still rarer, as they barely exist at all except as dame-schools. Now-a-days, of course, the most elaborate and costly apparatus is provided for the mental cultivation and training of girls of all ranks; and the daughter of a citizen may acquire ac- complishments which were long beyond the reach of daughters of kings. Formerly the lower classes of females remained as illiterate as the corresponding rank of men, and the studies of the gentlewoman were superintended by her parents and her tutor or her governess. But in the Middle Ages, and long after the re- vival of learning, the only persons capable of conducting the education of a lady who had emerged from the nursery and passed the rudi- mentary stage were ecclesiastics; and the lay- men who gradually qualified themselves for the task, such as Ascham and Buchanan,were scho- and Schoolmasters 197 lars of a scarce type, who had gained their pro- ficiency in the gymnasia and universities of Italy, Germany, or France. The Italian influence was doubtless the earliest, but the German was the most powerful, and has proved the most lasting. In France from a very remote period the dame-school appears to have existed in some measure and form, for a fourteenth -century sculpture, already mentioned in the remarks on scholastic discipline, depicts an establishment of this kind a petty school for boys kept by a woman. If there was any such thing among us. I have met with no record of it ; but the prac- tice, from the early intimacy between those countries, would be more apt to find its way first of all from the French into Scotland. To such as have had under their eyes the letters and other literary monuments which re- veal to us the condition of the more cultivated section of the English female community in the old days, it seems superfluous to insist on the strange ignorance of the prindpia of knowledge, and on the fallow state of the intellectual facul- ties which these evidences establish. The Pas- 198 Schools, School-Books, ton and Plump ton Correspondence, Mrs. Green's Letters of Illustrious Ladies, and Sir Henry Ellis's three Series of Original Letters, may perhaps be quoted as affording an insight into the present aspect of th?. question before us;, and I think that the most striking proofs of the inatten- tion to female culture in this country are to be found in documents previous to the Refor- mation, when the influence brought to bear on the sex was almost exclusively monastic or clerical. The great political and religious movement which Henry VIII. was enabled by circum- stances to carry through undoubtedly imparted a large share of lay feeling and prejudice to the educational system ; and this tendency was pro- moted and strengthened during the short reign of Edward VI. by the foundation of chartered schools throughout the kingdom for the instruc- tion of youth in grammar and other primordial matters. II. But the progress thus made did not sen- sibly affect the other sex. Girls still depended, as a rule, on the old methods and channels of and Schoolmasters. 199 learning; the arts of reading, writing, and arith- metic formed the ordinary routine and limit? unless an acquaintance with French, or even with Italian, happened to be added as a special accomplishment. Very occasionally a maiden of studious character was permitted to avail herself of the tutor maintained at home for her brothers, as was the case of the Honourable Mrs. North, a younger daughter of Lord North of Kirtling, who learned Latin and Greek in this manner ; and from Margaret Roper to Mrs. Somerville, or indeed in the cases adduced by Ballard in his Memoirs of Learned Ladies, there were from time to time even in the old days splendid ex- ceptions to the prevailing low r level of female culture. But under any circumstances, until the period arrived when ladies were competent to undertake the tuition of ladies, all these matters necessarily devolved, in the first place, on the mother, and finally on a preceptor, who was necessarily a man, and most probably in holy orders. His contribution to the development of character was exceedingly preponderant, and was beyond doubt a most important factor in maintaining and extending the power of the 200 Schools, School-Books, Church, and indemnifying the clergy for the direct political influence of which the Reforma- tion dispossessed them. The Ladies' School or College may be con- sidered a product of the acute political distem- pers which accompanied the Ci\ 7 il War. Mis- tress Bathsua Makins, who had been governess to one of the daughters of Charles I. the Prin- cess Elizabeth set up, after the fall of the King, an establishment at Putney, to which Evelyn mentions that he paid a visit in com- pany with some ladies on the 17th May 1649; but I find no reference to this institution in Lysons. A similar case existed somewhat later at Highgate ; and the admirers of Charles and Mary Lamb, at least, do not require to be told that in the little volume called "Mrs. Leicester's School," 1809, there are some interesting hints, both historical and autobiographical, in relation to the old-fashioned seminary at Amwell. But, as a rule, these agents in our later civilisation and social refinement, important as they were, have left behind them few, if any, traces of their existence and management. They bred those who were content to become, in course of time, and Schoolmasters. 201 the wives and mothers of England, and to study the arts of domestic life. In such are centred the strength and glory of the country; but their careers, like " the short and simple annals of the poor," have escaped literary commemo- ration. u A Gentleman of Cambridge," as he styles himself on the title of an English adaptation of the Abbe d'Ancourt's Lady's Preceptor, 1743^ defines the qualifications then thought neces- sary and adequate for a young gentlewoman. He does not go beyond a thorough knowledge of English, an acquaintance with French, and Italian, a familiarity with arithmetic and ac- counts, and the mastery of a good handwriting; and yet how few probably reached this mode- rate standard a century and a half ago nay, how few reach it now ! In the time of the early Stuarts, the training of girls in English country towns, if it is to be augured from that of the Shakespears at Strat- ford, even where the parents were in good cir- cumstances and the father a man of literary tastes and occupations, was still extremely pri- mitive and scanty. The poet's elder daughter, 202 Schools, School-Book,^, Susanna, seems to have just contrived to write, or rather print, her name ; but Judith used a mark, and Mrs. Quiney, whose son became Judith's husband, did the same. Both the Ouineys and the Shakespears were persons of substance and of local consideration; and in this case, at any rate, the explanation seems to be that such ignorance was usual, and did not prejudicially affect the position and pro- spects of a gentlewoman. The institution in England of elementary schools for girls only dates back to the neigh- bourhood of the Restoration ; but the number of establishments long remained, doubtless,very limited, and the scheme of instruction equally naiTOTV. The frontispiece to Anthony Huish's Key to the Grammar School, 1670, presents us with an interesting interior in the shape of a girls' school, where the mistress is seated at a desk surrounded by female pupils. Goldsmith's Poems for Young Ladies, u Devo- tional, Moral, and Entertaining," 1767, partly arose out of Dr. Fordyce's Sermons for Young Women. The editor assures his fair readers that the Muse in this case is not a syren, but a friend; and Schoolmasters. 203 and there is plenty of the religious element in the volume. But there are, on the other hand, extracts from Pope's Homer, stories from Ovid and Virgil, Addison's Letter from Italy, and a selection from Gollins's Oriental Eclogues. The source from which it came was a guarantee that its pages would be agreeably and sensibly leavened with matters not divine; it surpasses the average intellectual nutriment provided foi women a century ago. Dr. Goldsmith was a decided improvement on Dr. Watts, and he could scarcely escape from being so, whether he offered them his own poetical compositions, or, as in the present case, merely exercised his judgment in selecting from the works of others. No one can object to Pope's Messiah or his Uni- versal Prayer, which constitute the prominent features in the devotional section, when they are in such excellent company as Gay, Swiffe, and Thomson. But there is nothing in this volume to have prevented the editor offering a copy to either of the vicar's daughters. The universal and unchanging aim of the ecclesiastical authority is manifestly temporal, and Henri VIII. and his coadjutors, and their 204 Schools, Sahool-Beoks] immediate successors in the foundation of Pro- testantism, acted wisely in making it part of their scheme to furnish the realm with public semi- naries based on an improved footing in the earliest endowed grammar schools, which set the example to private individuals and corporate bodies. These schools, which, as we know, had been preceded and doubtless suggested too by that at Magdalen College, Oxford, and others framed on a humbler scale or (like the City of London and St. Paul's) under different auspices, opened the way to a partial secularisation of teaching throughout England. The preceptors employed were more often than not academical, unbene- ficed graduates with a certain clerical bent; but the Statutes laid down rules for the management of the Charity and for the limitation of the sub- jects to betaught;andtheschemewasassuredly at the outset, and continued down to the last thirty or forty years in fact, within the recol- lection of the present writer so narrow and imperfect, that it supplied what would now be regarded as the mere groundwork of a genteel education. and Schoolmasters. 205 III. But a farther and still more important step toward the emancipation of scholastic eco- nomy and discipline from Church control was taken when, first in Scotland, and subsequently, and also in a more limited degree, in England, after the union of the kingdoms, proprietary establishments were opened for boys or girls only, or for boys and girls, where the religious instruction, instead of being, as under the archaic conventual and Romish system, the primary feature, became a mere item on the prospectus, like Geography or History. This was the commencement of an entrance upon modern lines, and struck a fatal blow at the monastic and academical ideas of instruction, by widening the bias and range of studies, and liberating the intellect from religious tram- The success and multiplication of these new institutions obliged the old endowments to re- form themselves, and to meet the demands of the age ; and the pressure was augmented, of course, by the concurrent rise of large public gymnasia of a novel stamp, as well as by the development of some of the already existing 206 Schools, School-Books, institutions conformably to the great changes in political and social life. The proprietary system, which had started by adopting, as a rule, the mixed method, or rather by the reception of pupils of both sexes under the same roof, was eventually, and, ex- cept so far as dame-schools were concerned, finally modified in favour of the dual .plan ^ and independent colleges for young gentlemen and for young ladies were the result. In these latter the drift is certainly more and more lay; and as knowledge and culture spread, and the influence and fruits of masculine thought make themselves more and more ap- preciable, the Church in England will gradu- ally loosen its grasp of the national intellect, and will probably owe to the higher education of women its collapse and downfall. The ladies of England have propped up the tottering edifice long enough, and no one whose opinion is worth entertaining will lament the inevitable issue. But whether the conse- quences of this vital movement will be other- wise beneficial, ithas scarcely yet, perhaps, been in active operation a sufficient time to enable and Schoolmasters. 207 us to judge. If it involves the sacrifice in any important measure of feminine refinement and dependence, we shall be forced to confess that the help to be rendered by our daughters and grand-daughters to the cause of intellectual en- franchisement and victory will have been bought at a cruel price. As the o'ld foundations discovered it to be imperative to comply with the growing philoso- phical temper in order to enable them to exist side by side with the improved types of school and teacher, so the successful conduct of ladies' colleges will become impossible in the future unless that liberality of doctrine and sentiment in all matters connected with theology which breathes around them and us is cordially re- cognised. A spirit of disaffection to clerical guidance and clerical imposts has for some time shown itself in Great Britain among those who are becoming, in the natural course of events, husbands, fathers, and ratepayers ; the revolt of the other sex has also commenced ; and the wise initiative of the Board School in ex- cluding the Bible and Catechism- from their Schools and Schoolmasters. 208 programme must be ultimately obeyed by every school in the three kingdoms. The Bible is for scholars, not for school-folk; and, as Jeremy Bentham demonstrated nearly a century ago, the Catechism is trash. ( 209 ) XIV. The Abacus or A. B. C. Its construction and use The printed- A. B. C. The first Protestant one (1553) -Spell- ing-booksAnecdotes of the A. B. C. Propria quos Maribus and Johnny quos Genus The Catechism and Primer. I. THE manner in which the earliest Abaci were constructed and applied is precisely one of those points which, in the absence of speci- mens of remote date and documentary infor- mation as to their form and use, we have to elucidate, as far as possible, from casual allu- sions or internal testimony. The most ancient woodcuts representing a school interiordisplay the method in which the master and pupils worked together; but here the latter appear, as I have stated elsewhere, to reiterate what their teacher reads from a book, or, in other words, o 210 Schools, School-Books, the scene depicts a later stage in the educational course, In the Jests of Scoyin, a popular work of the time of Henry VIII. , and probably reliable as a faithful portraiture of the habits and notions of the latter half of the fifteenth and opening de- cades of the following century, one of the sec- tions relates "How a Husbandman put his son to school with Scogin.' 1 From the text it is plain that the lad was very backward in his studies, or had commenced them unusually late, considering that it was the farmer's ambition to procure his admission into holy orders. "The slovenly boy," we are told, " would begin to learn his A. B. G. Scogin did give him a lesson of nine of the first letters of A. B. G., and he was nine days in learning of them ; and when he had learned the nine Christ-cross-row letters, the good scholar said, c am ich past the worst now? ' ' The important feature in this passage is the reference to the Christ-cross-row, which con- tained the nine letters of the alphabet from A to I in the form of the Gross. The time con- sumed in this particular instance in the acquisi- and Schoolmasters. 211 tion of a portion of the rudiments is, of course, ascribable to a pleasant hyperbole, or to the scholar's phenomenal density; but the Abacus or Christ-cross-row was, no doubt, the first step in the ladder, and although it was superseded by the Horn-book and the Primer, it did not sub- stantially disappear from use in petty schools till the present century. Its shape and functions, however, underwent a material change, and instead of being employed as a medium for grounding children in the Accidence, it became a vehicle for arithmetical purposes, and re- sembled a slate in form and dimensions, con- sisting of a small oblong wooden frame fitted with rows of balls of wood or bone strung on transverse wires. To those who, like the pre- sent writer, saw this apparatus in common use to induct the young into the art of counting, its pedigree was naturally unknown. It was an evolution from the contrivance which Scogin put into the hands of the country bumpkin whom he was engaged to prepare for the priesthood, and who, as we learn from subsequent passages in these Anecdotes, was actually ordained a deacon within a limited period. 212 Schools, School-Book*, II. To the Abacus, prior to the Reformation, was added the printed A. B. C. accompanied by prayers and a metrical version of the Deca- logue, and in 1553 appeared the first Protestant A. B. G. and Catechism for the use of schools and the young. It is after this date and the accession of Elizabeth that we find a marked and permanent stimulus given to elementary literature; and the press from 1553 onward teemed with A. B. G.'s of all sorts ; as, for in- stance, " an a. b. c. for children, with syllables, 1558 ; " " an a. b. c. inJLatin," 1559; " the battle of A. B. G.," 1586; u the horn a. b. c. 1587; " and even the title itself grew popular, not only for manuals of other kinds, but for publishers' signs and ballads. There was " the aged man's A. B. G.," the "Virgin's A. B. G.," and " the young man's A. -B. G." Subsequently to the A. B. G. of 1553, there seems to be nothing actually extant of this nature till we come to The Pathway to Read- ing, or the newest spelling A. B. C. of Thomas Johnson, 1590, which I have not been able to inspect, but as to which there was a litigation between two publishers in the following year, and Schoolmasters. 213 seeming to shew its popularity and a brisk demand for copies. A few years later (1610) there is A New Book of Spelling, with Syllables, a series of alphabets, followed by the vowels, alphabetical arrange- ments of syllables, and remarks on vowels, in the course of which the writer furnishes us with an explanation of the virtue and force of the final e in such monosyllables as Babe. From vowels he proceeds to the diphthong, where he animadverts on the abuse of the wfor the u. He then presents us with the Lord's Prayer, the Greed, the Decalogue, &c., as ortho- graphical theses. At the end of the Scriptural selections we arrive at this curious heading : "Certain words devised alphabetically without sense , which whosoever will take the pains to learn, he may read at the first sight any English book that is laid before him." These words are divided into two classes, dissyllables and words of three and four syllables, and introduced by a few 7 lines of introduction, in which the words are divided by way of guidance. The spelling-book of 1610 was printed for 214 Schools, School-Books, the Stationers' Company, by which it had been perhaps taken over; and as the Company did not usually have assigned to it any stock except old copyrights, there is little doubt that there were earlier impressions. At any rate, it is a Shakespearian volume, and, as the only manual for children or illiterate adults except the Pro- testant A. B. G. of 1553, it becomes interesting to consider that the great poet himself may have had a copy in his hands of some edition, if at least his scholastic researches ever went beyond the Horn-book and the Abacus. The volume may be regarded as a pioneer in the direction of English orthography and pro- nunciation ; and when the author propounds that you might proceed from his pages to the Latin tongue, he does nothing more than fol- low in the steps of all teachers of that time, as well as of every other age and country down to almost yesterday. While I have the book before me, it may be worth while to transfer to these pages a speci- men of it : kach, kech, kich, koch, kuch, kash, kesh, kish, kosh, kush, kath, keth, kith, koth, kuth and Schoolmasters. 215 And so it runs through the alphabet. In the Lord's Prayer and other selections the syllables are also divided for the convenience and ease of the learner. The biographer of Dean Colet mentions that Mr. Stephen Penton, Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, in the days of Charles II., publi- shed a Horn-book or A. B. G. for children. This, which Knight oddly characterises as a piece of humble condescension on the part of so worthy and noted a man, I have not yet seen. In Russia they have, or had very lately, the stchotijSii kind of Abacus, a small wooden frame strung with horizontal wires, on which slide a series of ivory balls, each wire representing a certain value from the kopeck upwards. This piece of machinery is used in all commercial transactions, whether they take place in shop, market, counting-house, or bank ; and familia- rity and practice enable the parties concerned to calculate the amount payable or receivable with equal ease and rapidity. There is a similar machine in use among the natives of British India, and also for mercantile purposes, not as a vehicle for acquiring the science of numbers in the schools. 216 Schools, School-Books, III. It is said to have been John Rightwise, second head-master of St. Paul's, and son-in- law of Lily, who introduced into his prede- cessor's book the Propria quoe Maribus and As in Prozsenti, to w r hich were subsequently joined the Rules of Heteroclites or Irregular Nouns, probably digested from Whittinton by Robertson of York. This last section, from the commencing words, combined perhaps with the Christian name of Rightwise, was the origin of Johnny quce Genus. But an early authority* claims for Lily him- self the honour of having written the Propria quo3 Maribus and As in Proesenti, and informs us that Rightwise merely published them with a glossary. In some of the schools the course seems to have been to commence with the A. B. G. and Catechism, and then proceed to the Primer. At the end of the A. B. C. of 1757 are these lines : " This little Catechism learned by heart (for so it ought), The PRIMER next commanded is for children to be taught. " * Introduction to Hayne's Latin Grammar, 1640. and Schoolmasters. 217 When I speak here of the Primer, I must take care to distinguish between the Service-book so styled and the Manual for the young. It is singular enough that the most ancient which has come under my eyes is of the age of Eliza- beth, and includes not only the Catechism, but "the notable fairs in the Calendar," as matters "to be taught unto children." This type of Primer is very rare till \ve ar- rive at comparatively modern days. The mis- sion which it was designed to fulfil was one precisely calculated to hinder its transmission to us. The practice of printing children's books on some more than usually substantial material is not so modern as may be supposed ; for there is an A. B. C. published at Higa for the use of the German pupils, the German population pre- ponderating there over the Russian or Polish, on paper closely resembling linen, and of a singularly durable texture ; and this little volume belongs to the commencement of the last century, several generations before such a system was adopted in England. In the Preface to his New English Grammar, 218 Schools, School-Books, 1.810, Hazlitt complains of the want of any under- taking of the kind, and it has not been really supplied till our own day, when the labours of the Philological and English Text Societies and the payment of increased attention to Early English Literature prepared the way to re- form in a quarter where reform was so sadly needed. The same writer, while edition upon edition of the famous Grammar of Lindley Murray was pouring from the press, like Hayley's Triumphs of Temper and Moore's Loves of the Angels, ex- posed the fallacies of the system, and lamented the mischief done by such erroneous doctrines. Murray, of whose lucubrations, now r obsolete to petrifaction, sixty issues were exhausted bet- ween 1795 and 1859, aimed not only at popular instruction, but at literary dignity and scientific eminence ; for during a portion of the time while his star was in the ascendant two parallel texts, a literary and an elementary one, were kept in print. Looking back from the vantage- ground which it is our privilege to occupy upon this phenomenon, we contemplate it not with the awe inspired by a mighty ruin, of which and Schoolmasters. 219 the remaining fragments are a gladdening and proud survival, bud with a feeling of amazement that such a heresy in opinion and taste should have lived so long, and have been so lately dissipated. The hazy ideas of the old-fashioned school- master on this particular part of his business are brought out in tolerably prominent relief in the reply to a gentleman who had expressed to Dr. Duncan of the Ciceronian Academy at Pimlico his wish that his son might learn English in lieu of Latin Grammar. " Sir, " said the Doctor, " Grammar is Grammar all the world over." ( 220 ) XV. Ascham's Schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster The tarliest Anglo-Latin Dictionary Ocland's Ang.'orum Proelia. I. THE Schoolmaster, by Roger Ascham, is a work so celebrated and so classical,and has been so often reprinted, that it seems almost super- erogatory to pass any remark upon its character and merits. It arose, as we all know, out of a conversation at Windsor in 1563 between Sir Richard Sackville, Treasurer of the Exchequer, and the author, and it is a literary treatise rather than a technical one. Ascham did not live to see it in type, nor was his patron spared to witness its completion in MS ; it was published in 1570 by the author's widow, and dedicated to Sir William Cecil, who was one of the party at Windsor when the idea was first ventilated. The opening paragraphs of the Preface, where Schools and Schoolmasters. 221 Ascham describes the company at dinner, and Sackvile afterwards drawing him aside, and lead- ing him to turn his thoughts to the production of such a book, are as famous and unforgettable as Latimer's noble and touching narrative to us, in one of his sermons before the King, of his boyhood and the obligations under which he lay to his father for sending him to a good school. Ascham's Schoolmaster, 1^70, is a volume, as its title perhaps may import, for the teacher indeed rather than for the learner. It is a manual of valuable suggestions and counsels for the guidance and use of those under whose direction the course of school-work was carried out, although immediately it was designed for the benefit of Mr. Robert Sackville, the deceased Treasurer's grandson. The writer confesses his indebtedness to Sir John Cheke and to Sturmius, among the moderns, and to his old masters, as he calls them, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Sir Richard Sackville, who was happily instru- mental in persuading Ascham to undertake the task, told him that he had found the disadvan- tage in his own case of an imperfect education; 222 Schools, School-Books, " for a fond scholemaster," quoth he, " before I was fullie fourtene yeare olde,draue me so, with feare of beating, from all loue of learninge, as nowe, when I know what difference it is to haue learninge, and to haue little or none at all, I feele it my greatest greife, and finde it my greatest hurte, that euer came to me ; that it was my so ill chance to light vpon so lewde a schoolmaster." Ascham was of his friend's opinion in regard to greater clemency and patience on the part of teachers, and he also preferred such text-books as Cicero de Officiis to the Manuals compiled by Herman, Whittinton, and the rest of the old school of English grammarians. The passage in the Schoolmaster where the author narrates his interview, before he went on his travels into Germany, with Lady Jane Grey at her father's house in Leicestershire, is familiar enough; it exhibits a converse case, so far as the severities of school-teachers are concerned; for that ami- able and unfortunate woman found her only compensation for the harshness and rigour of her parents in a gentle and beloved tutor, " who," she told Ascham, "teacheth me so ient- and Schoolmasters 223 He, so pleasantlie, with such faire allurements to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing whiles I am with him." One sees that Ascham, while loth to say too much on such a topic, did not cordially relish the old translations into English verse of some of the classics, even when the translator was such a. man as Surrey or Chaucer ; and there I agree with him, and indeed I think that many more are inclined so to do. Richard Mulcaster, first head-master of Mer- chant Taylors' School, and for several years after his retirement from that position principal of St. Paul's, was the author of two works of comparatively slight interest and importance at the present day, whatever estimate may have been formed of them by some of his learned contemporaries. Of the two " fruits of his writing,'' as he terms them, he dedicated the earlier, "Positions," 1581, a kind of introduc- tion to the matter, to Queen Elizabeth, and the other. " The First Part of the Elementary," 1582, to Lord Leicester, in two rather turgid and verbose epistles. Bat it is a question whether either production met with much ap- 224 Schools, School-Books, plause on its appearance, though ushered into notice under such influential auspices ; cer- tainly they never grew popular or reached a second impression. They were both calculated for the guidance of teachers, like Ascham's Schoolmaster; but they present a stiff and didactic frigidity, which is absent in the famous and favourite manual of his predeces- sor, who knew how to make us the partakers of his own learning in a more agreeable man- ner than the professional pedagogue. I think it very possible that the very few readers which the publications of Mulcaster have found have arrived at the conclusion of their labour with- out being much wiser than when they embarked in it. But, of the two, I prefer very decidedly the Positions, which are written in a more natu- ral style, and contain occasional passages of interest. This gentleman lived to see the close of the long reign of which he had witnessed the opening, and to write some dull verses upon the death of the Queen. II. The early teacher and his pupils enjoyed, when the typographical art had been applied and Schoolmasters. 225 to the production of educational works p^evi- ously accessible in a limited number of MSS., the considerable advantage of books of refer- ence for Latin, Greek, French, and eventually Italian and other tongues. Within a year of each other (1499-1500), the Ortus Vocabulorum and the Promptorius Parvulorum furnished our schools, so far as Latin was concerned, with two excellent lexicons, both formed out of the best compilations of the kind current abroad. These were the Ainsworth and Riddle of our ancestors, who resorted to them where the re- quired information was not forthcoming in the Primer or the Delectus. Both these phrase-books passed through a series of reprints between the commencement and middle of the sixteenth century. The for- mer purports to have been grounded on the Catholicon of Balbus, 1460, the Cornucopia of Perottus, the Gemma Vocabulorum, and the Medulla Grammatices, with additions by As- censius. The Promptorius, or, as it is also called in some of the issues, Promptuarium, appears to be substantially identical with the Medulla. p 226 Schools, School-Books, But the earliest regular Anglo-Latin Dic- tionary in our literature is that of Sir Thomas Elyot, first published in 1538, and frequently reprinted with additions by others from a variety of English and foreign sources, until it became the bulky folio known a COOPER'S THESAURUS. Elyot, the first compiler, tells us, in the dedication to Henry VIII. prefixed to the editio princeps, that he had accomplished about half his labour when it reached the royal ear through Master (subsequently Sir) Anthony Denny that he had such a project in hand ; whereupon the King caused all possible facili- ties to be afforded him, and the books in the royal library to be open to his inspection. It is hard to say how far Elyot flatters his sove- reign when he assures him that, after it was all done, he was so afraid of his Lexicon being faulty and imperfect, that he felt as if lie could have torn the MS. to pieces, "had not the beames of your royal maiestie entred into my harte, by remembraunce of the corn- forte whiche I of your grace had lately re- ceyued." In the epistle to Henry just referred to, the and Sekaolmasters. 227 author pays a tribute to the encouragement which he had experienced from Lord Crom- well; and in the British Museum is the copy presented to the Lord Privy Seal, with a holo- graph Latin letter prefixed, in which hardly any form of adulation is spared, so far as Crom- well's virtues, magnanimity, culture, and other cognate qualities are concerned, and nothing is said about him being secondary to royalty in these matters, as in the printed inscription is expressed. But much, after all, is to be for- given to a man of rank who in those days chose to consume his time, as Elyot did, in the pur- suit of letters. The plan of the work is familiar enough, first, through the later, impressions, which are among the commonest volumes in Early Eng- lish literature ; and, secondly, from the fact that the principle on which it is constructed is similar to that of Ainsworth and others. The main difference seems to be where certain Latin words, by an intelligible survival, con- inued in Elyot' s day to bear a meaning which subsequently grew obsolete ; as, for instance, in the case of Aviarium, "a thycke wodde 2 C 28 Schools, School-Books, without waye," although he at the same time adds the ordinary acceptation. Still the credit remains with Elyot, of course, of having supplied a model for many succeed- ing lexicographers and phraseologists ; and if we turn, for example, to the Dictionary for Children, by John Withals, 1553, or the Mani- pulus Vocabulorum of Levins, 1571, we see that the general plan is similar. Elyot, in fact, got rid of the tiresome and perplexing arrangement which renders the books of reference and in- struction prior to his day, like the Promptorius and the Eclair cissement de la langue Frangoi&e, so uninviting to consult. Save in respect to development and exten- sion, there is no substantial difference, in fact, between the dictionaries of Elyot and Littleton or of Littleton and Ainsworth. The general plan is the same, whereas in some of the early lexicons the arrangement is so obscure and de- fective as to render them comparatively useless for practical purposes. The old Ortus Vocabu- lorum, one of these archaic works of reference, had been largely formed out of the Cornucopia of Perottus, and Cooper owed very considerable and Schoolmasters. 229 obligations to the Lexicon of Stephanus, which lie was censured by a critic of his day for not properly acknowledging. The Short Dictionary for Children by Withals, already specified, supplied the obvious need for a more portable work than either Elyot or Cooper. It met with a cordial response from the constituency to which it appealed, and was reprinted, with large additions and improve- ments, by successive editors down to I he time of Charles I. Littleton, who brought out his Dictionary in 1678, was Rector of Chelsea. He includes the barbarous Latin for the first time. Robert Ainsworth, whose famous Latin Dic- tionary belongs to the reign of George II., having been first printed in 1736, planned his enterprise on a sensible and enduring basis, and earned for himself the reputation of a classic and a type. He had of course the advantage of all the improvements of Elyot, Cooper, and Littleton, besides the numerous other minor lexicographers, of whom he supplies an interest- ing chronological account in his preface ; but his substantial quarto volume, " designed for 230 Schools, School-Books, the use of the British Nations," was a clear ad- vance on its precursors. He gives not only the Latin-English and English-Latin appellatives, the Christian names of men and women, the proper names of places, the ancient Latin names of places, and the more modern names, but the Roman calendar, the Roman coins, weights and measures, and ancient law-terms. Of the pre- ceding workers in the same field, whom he commemorates, he may very well have known some personally. The catalogue, enriched with biographical particulars, begins with the Prom p- 'luar'uun Parvulorum, and closes with Elisha Coles, embracing a period of nearly two cen- turies. III. The Latin Lexicon was an indispensable vailc-utectnn where boys had to translate the classics of that language into English ; arid the taste for some of the Roman writers, includ- ing Ovid, so far from declining, appears in the time of Elizabeth to have spread in schools. The authors at whom the criticism is more par- ticularly aimed may be guessed in the absence of the names; but the clerical party about 1580, and Schoolmasters. 231 being of opinion that these ancient productions were injurious to morality, availed themselves of a most singularly fortunate opportunity for substituting a work which should be to Latin versification what Lily's Grammar was to Eng- lish accidence a standard and a model. A year or two prior to the discovery of this pernicious influence, Christopher Ocland had printed a metrical narrative in doggerel metre of the martial achievements of the English people from the time of the Plantagenets down to that of Elizabeth, whom he places before Zenobia ; and this gentleman or his friends had sufficient influence to procure, through the Lords Com- missioners in Causes Ecclesiastical, letters- patent prescribing the use of his Anglorum Predict in all grammar-schools in England and Wales in lieu of the books ofless moral authors. The privilege, dated May 7, 1582, was accorded in consideration not only of the freedom of Ocland's volume from profligacy, but of " the quality of the verse," an encomium quite seriously intended, in whatever degree it may strike us as ironical. This literary gem, which was to supersede 232 Schools and Schoolmasters. Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and the rest of the hea- thens, was dedicated to Zenobia by the worthy writer in some lines which are a fair sample of the " quality of the verse." They begin : - ' Regia Nympha, soli (sic) moderatrix alma Britanni, Quse pace et vera religione nites, Qure vit;o mentis, morum & candore coruscans, Zenobiarn vincis, siqua vel ante fuit." Such was the Oclandian Muse which the Lords Commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical ac- counted preferable to the compositions which were the glory of their own and the delight of every succeeding age ! Despite the lofty patronage and auspicious circumstances under which the Anglorum Prcelia was launched on its proud career, the imbecility of the whole idea appears to have been promptly appreciated; and the "lascivious poets," whom it was to have effaced, con- tinued, and to this day continue, u to corrupt the youth." ( 233 ) XVI. Ben Jonson and Shirley writers of Grammars Some account of the former Thomas Hayne's Latin Grammar A curious anecdote about it. I. THE English Grammar inserted among Ben Jonson's works in 1640, and also to be found in the modern editions, is not the pro- duction originally compiled by that eminent writer, but a series of notes and rough material collected perhaps for a new undertaking after the destruction of Jonson's books and MSS. by an accidental fire. It appears that the author had taken considerable trouble to collect to- gether the literature of this class already exist- ing in our own and other languages, with a view to comparison and improvement, and he was probably assisted by friends, as Howell speaks so early as 1620 of having borrowed for him Davis's Welsh Grammar, "to add to those 234 Schools, School-Books, many which he already had." Sir Francis Kinaston cites "his most learned and celebrated friend, Master Ben Jonson," as the possessor of a very ancient grammar written in the Saxon tongue and character, by way of illustrating what it could scarcely illustrate the state of our language in the time of Chaucer. This book doubtless perished with the rest. The work in its present state is divided into chapters : Of Grammar and the Parts; Of Letters and their Powers; Of the Voivels', Of the Consonants, and so forth. In the third chapter, under Y, the writer remarks : " Y is mere vowelish in our tongue, and hath only the power of an i, even where it obtains the seat of a consonant, as in young, younker, which the Dutch, whose primitive it is, write junk, junker. And so might we write iouth, ies,ioke. . . " u G is a letter," he says, " which our fore- fathers might very well have spared in our tongue; but since it hath obtained place both in our writing and language, we are not now to quarrel with orthography or custom." Nor is c the only member of the alphabet with which Jonson considers that we might have advan- and Schoolmasters. 235 tageously dispensed ; for in a subsequent page he declares that "q is a letter we might very well have spared in our alphabet, if we would but use the serviceable k as he should be, and % restore him to the right of reputation he had with our forefathers. For the English Saxon knew not this halting q, with her waiting- woman n after her, but exprest quail. \ ( kuail, , jDy quest. ( , 1 kuest, jD quick. quill. In other words, Jonson, discarding c and q, was with those who nowadays ask us to say Kikero, Kelt, Kcesar ; and he seems al*o to be an advocate for such terminations as st or pt for ed in exprest, confest, profest, stopt, dropt, cropt, wherein he has a follower in Mr. Furni- vall. His demonstration of the manner in which the several letters ough to be sounded as pro- nounced is occasionally very amusing. "T," he informs the reader, " is sounded with the tongue striking the upper teeth." " P breaketh softly through the lips." " N ringeth somewhat more in the lips and nose." But of H he 236 Schools, School-Books, remarks : " Whether it be a letter or no, hath been much examined by the ancients, and by some of the Greek party too much condemned, and thrown out of the alphabet." This last piece of criticism should have its consoling effect on those among the moderns who also repudiate it, and may not be aware that they have the Greek party in Jonson's day on their side, only that the Greek party did not offer the deposed letter any substituted position. Jonson's Grammar, as we have it, is a book for scholars and philologists, however, rather than for the elementary stage of education. The method is discursive and the style obscure; and it is chiefly prizable as an evidence of the versatility, the extensive reading, and the perse- verance of the author. He quotes among his examples Sir Thomas More, Gower, Lidgate, Fox's Martyrs, Harding's Chronicle, Chaucer, and Sir John Cheke. It is curious enough that Jonsori's notion as to the superfluities of our alphabet is supported to some extent by the orthography sanctioned by M. Vimont in his Relation de la Nouvelle France , 1641, where he puts Kebeckior Quebec ; and Schoolmasters. 237 but the change must necessarily influence the pronunciation. Neither of these writers was avowedly an advocate of Phonography ; but the adoption of that principle of spelling Avould necessarily in- volve the dispensation with certain letters which at present form part of the English A. B. G. In the dedication to Lord Herbert of his little book, JAMES SHIRLEY refers to the abun- dance of such treatises at that time before the public, "by which some," he says, "would pro- phetically imply the decay of learning, as if the root and foundation of art stood in need of warmth and reparation." But he furnishes no information respecting himself or the motives which led him to write the volume, although it is readily inferable that he did so to augment the slender income which he derived, after the clos- ing of the theatres, from school-work in White- friars. Some of the illustrations are in such couplets as the subjoined : " In cli, do, clum, the Gerunds chime and close, Urn, the first Supine, u the latter shews." As late as 1726, Jenkin Thomas Phillipps reprinted Shirley's Grammar with additions. 238 Schools, School-Book*, On the title-page of this edition it is said to be " for the use of Prince William." In 1640 Thomas Hayne published his Gram- malices Lathioe Compendium. A copy before me was presented by the author to Charles II. when a boy, and has an autograph inscription on the blank page before the title to the young Prince. It also passed through the hands of his brother, James Duke of York, who has writ- ten James Duke of Yorke in a childish hand on the fly-leaf. During the troubles it seems to have passed out of their hands, and was bought at Oxford on the 4th October 1G47 by a later owner, who records the fact at the top of an- other page. It was subsequently at Stowe, and the fine old blue morocco binding betrays no sign of a schoolboy's thumbs. Hayne supplies a highly interesting survey of the progress and development of this branch of literature and learning in former days, and some of the later attempts made with a view to improve the method, and explains his own plan, which introduces the English and Latin in parallel columns, and systematises and tabu- lates the cases and declensions in a more and Schoolmasters. 239 lucid manner than the prior experiments. If \ve set it side by side with Whittinton's eleven divisions, we see that it is a great advance. From the commencement of the seventeenth century an increasing volume of literature cal- culated to assist the diffusion of useful and im- proving knowledge supplemented the books expressly designed for schools. These publi- cations, belonging to nearly every department of science and inquiry, were often reproduced with the same steady regularity as the educa- tional works themselves ; and nothing more tri- umphantly establishes the unceasing progress of discovery and reform than the fact that the standard manuals of one century become the waste paper of the next. As one arrests a stray copy of Heylin's Cos- mography, Godwin's Roman Antiquities, edited for the use of Abingdon School, Provost Rous's Attic Archaeology, Prideaux's Introduction to the Reading of Histories, or any other book of the same stamp, on its passage from an old collec- tion to the mill, a not unlikely reflection to arise is that, considering their straitened oppor- tunities and the force of clerical influence, the 240 Schools and Schoolmasters. culture and light of our ancestors were in fail- relative proportion to our own. The literary thought and bias of the age were naturally affected by these shallow and meagre repertories of information, which were as far removed in scholarship from the Roman Anti- quities of Adams and the Dictionary of Lem- priere as Adams and Lempriere are removed from Dr. Smith's series. ( 241 ) XVII. Limited acquaintance with the Greek language in England Erasmus first learns, and then teaches, Greek at Cam- bridgeNotices of a few Philhellenists Study of the language at Rhodes by Lily Languid interest in it among us Disputes at Cambridge as to the pronuncia- tion Remarks on this subject The tract by John Kay Few books in the Greek character printed in England. I. THE few scattered notices, which offer themselves in Warton and other authorities, of Englishmen of very remote days who entered on the study of the Greek tongue, tend mainly to illustrate the fact, how sparingly and imper- fectly that noble and precious language was cultivated down to the age of Elizabeth ; and of course this circumstance involves the almost complete neglect of it in our universities and academies. Warton himself cites a case in which a scholar travelled from Malmesbury to Canterbury in order to improve a rudimentary Q 242 Schools, School-Books, acquaintance with Greek which he had gained through a local monastic seminary. The first man who helped at all largely and sensibly to render Greek a part of the educa- tional system was Lily the grammarian, who spent some years of his life at Rhodes, and introduced a study of the language into the routine of St. Paul's, whence it found its way by degrees to the other great foundations in London and in the provinces. The biographer of Colet has something to say on this subject : "Such was the infelicity of those times, that the Greek tongue was not taught in any of our grammar-schools ; nor was there thought to be any great need of it in the two Universities by the generality of scholars. It is worth notice that [John] Standish, who was a bitter enemy to Erasmus, in his declamation against him styles him Grceculus isle; which was a long time after the phrase for an heretic." " But," he adds, " Dr. John Fisher. . . was of another mind, and very sensible of this im- perfection, which made him desirous to learn Greek in his declining years." and Schoolmasters. 243 The Bishop, however, who through Erasmus was recommended to William Latymer, one of the foremost Philhellenists of the clay, could not persuade that scholar to enter on the task, as he considered the prelate too old to acquire the language; and Knight tells us that, in order to escape from the application, he advised Fisher to send for a professor out of Italy. Englishmen, even at a later period than this, occasionally went to Florence or elsewhere to learn Greek; but Erasmus made himself, with the assistance of Linacre, tolerably proficient in it, on the contrary, during his first visit to Eng- land in the time of Henry the Seventh (1497-8), and was sufficiently versed, at all events in the rudiments, to give lessons to others while he remained at Cambridge. Doubtless he did so in aid of his expenses. "In Cambridge," observes Knight, "Eras- mus was the first who taught the Greek gram- mar. And so very low was the state of learning in that University, that (as he tells a friend) about the year 1485, the beginning of Henry the Seventh's reign, there was nothing taught in that public seminary besides Alexander's Parva 244 Schools, School-Books, Loyicalia (as they called them), the old axioms of Aristotle, and the questions of John Scotus." Erasmus himself was for some time Greek Header at Cambridge, and was contemporary there with Richard Croke, of King's College, who'did valuable service in promotingthe cause of classical learning at that University, and pub- lished several tracts relating to the Greek lite- rature and tongue, including Introdiictiones ad Lingumn Gru'catn and Elemcnta Grammatics Ciru'co' the earliest attempts to place before students in a handy form the alphabet of the subject. At Oxford it was an Italian, Cornelius Yitel- lius, who became the first Greek professor, and William Grocyne, who with Latymer and Lina- cre was the earliest Greek scholar in England, was among his pupils. It is to be suspected that, while a man of genius like Erasmus could scarcely have failed to make something of whatever he seriously undertook, his conversance with Greek was always comparatively superficial, and it is merely an additional piece of evidence how little the language was cultivated at Cambridge and Schoolmasters. 245 at that epoch, that he was enabled to earn money as a teacher of it. It was not apparently till 1524 that Greek- type was introduced into our printing-offices. Linacre's book T)e Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis, published in that year, is generally received as containing the first specimen found in any production of the English press. The Greek alphabet occurs in the Primer of 1548. II. Florence, Rome, Padua, and Rhodes were four great centres whither foreigners were then accustomed to resort for the study and mastery of Greek. In the Life of Dean Colet it is shown how he travelled in Italy, and met with two of his countrymen at Florence, Grocyn and Linacre, and with a third at Rome, Lily, afterwards the famous grammarian, who, after learning Greek at Rhodes, had proceeded to Rome to render himself equally adept in Latin, so that, when he finally settled in London, he had served a laborious apprenticeship and taken unusual pains to become an instructor of others. Colet himself, it is to be noted, displayed in 246 Schools, School-Books, earlier life a bent towards theology and the Fathers, though he had scanty sympathy with the survivals whom he found around him, both at home and abroad, of the monastic school- men and expounders of the old divinity. "He had observed these schoolmen/' says his biographer indeed, " to be a heavy set of formal fellows, that might pretend to anything rather than to wit and sense, for to argue so elaborately about the opinions and the very words of other men : to snarl in perpetual ob- jections, and to distinguish and divide into a thousand niceties : this was rather the work of a pooi 1 and barren invention than anything else." Knight preserves a rather diverting anecdote of a preacher who spoke in his sermon before Henry VIII. against the Greek tongue, and of a conference which Henry caused lobe arranged after the discourse, at which in his presence the divine and More should take opposite sides, the former attacking, and the latter vindicating, the language. More did his part, but the other fell down on his knees and begged the King's pardon, alleging that what he did was by the and Schoolmasters. 247 impulse of the Spirit. " Not the spirit of Christ," says the King to him, "but the spirit of infatuation." His majesty then asked him whether he had read anything of Erasmus,whom he assailed from the pulpit. He said " No. " "Why then," says the King, "you are a very foolish fellow to censure what you never read." "I have read," says he, "something they call Moria." "Yes," says Richard Pace, "may it please your highness, such a subject is fit for such a reader." The end of it was that the preacher declared himself on reflection more reconciled to the Greek, because it was derived from the Hebrew, and that Henry dispensed with his further attendance upon the Court. The feeling and taste for Greek culture which Lily, Erasmus, and others had introduced and encouraged, were promoted by the exertions of Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith at Cambridge, and by Dr. Kay or Cains; and a controversy, almost amounting to a quarrel, which Cheke had with Bishop Gardiner on Greek pronunciation, stimulated the movement by attracting public attention to the matter, and 248 Schools, School-Books, bringing into notice many Greek authors whose works had not hitherto been read. The literary contest between Cheke and Gardiner was printed abroad in 1555, and only eleven years later a paraphrase of the Phoenissai of P'uripides by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh was performed at Gray's Inn. III. The tract published by the learned John Kay in 1574 on the pronunciation of Greek and Latin is rather pertinent to the present move- ment for varying the old fashion in this respect. Kay instances the cases of substituting olti for illi, queis for quihus, mareitoicjrmarito,maxume for maxime ; and in Greek words, the ancients, says he, certainly said Achilles, Tydes, Theses, and Ulisses, not, as people sometimes now do, Achillews, Tudews, Teseivs, and Ulusseivs. The author likewise refers to the employment of the aspirate in orthography, as in hydropuis,therwce, Bathonia, and Hyberma, which used to be read ydropisis, termw, Batonia, and Ivernia. He was clearly no advocate for the latter-day mode in England of hardening the g and the c as in Regina and Cicero. and Schoolmasters. 249 But the fact is that, where there are no posi- tive data for fixing the standard or laying down any general principle, there can never be an end of the conflicting views and theories on this subject, and the best of them amount to little more than guess-work. The modes of pronouncing both the Greek and Latin languages have always probably varied, as they do yet, in different countries; and the Scots adhere to the Continental fashion as regards, at all events, the latter. Experience and practical observation seem to shew that every locality has a tendency to adapt its rules for sounding the dead tongues to those in force for sounding its current vocabulary ; as a Roumanian lad, for instance, in learning Latin, will instinctively follow his native asso- ciations in giving utterance to diphthongs, vowels, and compound words. The Greek language, in respect to this point of view, occu- pies an anomalous position, because it enjoys a partial survivorship in the Neo-Hellenic dia- lect; and it has been natural to seek in the method employed by their modern representa- tives and descendants a key to that employed 250 Schools, School-Books, by the inhabitants of ancient Hellas in pro- nouncing words and particles, and, in short, to the grammatical laws by which theirspecchwas regulated. It appears, however, that philologists have been disappointed in the results of this test, as the differences between the two idioms are often so wide and material. Yet, nevertheless, a Greek of the nineteenth century must be allowed to be a rather important witness in tak- ing evidence on such a question, as the whole strength of received tradition and Siprimd facie argument are on his side; and when we find that he gives to the long E or r.rot. the force of A, and to the diphthong u that" of E, we grow somewhat sceptical as to our right to impose on those particles a different function, especially seeing that the Ionic dialect and the metrical arrangement of the Iliad ostensibly support this interchange of phonetic values. I need scarcely advert to the favourite theory that, so far as the Greek long E is concerned, it had its source in the vocal intonation of the sheep, which is, after all, far from an invariable standard. The Englishman, in dealing with such themes and Schoolmasters. 251 as foreign spelling and pronunciation, treads upon eggs, so to speak, as he lives within the knowledge of the whole world in a glass house of his own. IV. But scarcely any books in the Greek character were printed in England until Edward Grant, head-master of Westminster School, brought out his Groecce Linguae Spicilegium, or Greek Delectus, in 1575. It saw only a single edition, and is still a common book, not having been apparently successful; and the next attempt of the kind did not even appeal to the English student, though the work of a native of North Britain; for Alexander Scot published his Universa Grammatica Grceca at Lyons in a shape calculated to invite a yet more limited circula- tion than the essay of Grant. Perhaps one of the earliest English publica- tions relative to the study of Greek poetry was the Progymnasma Scholasticum- of John Stock- wood, published in 1596. Stockwood had been master of Tonbridge School, a foundation estab- lished by the Skinners' Company, and while he was there brought out one or two professional 252 Schools, School-Books, works. This was avowedly taken from the Anthology of Stephanus, and presents a Greek- Latin interlinear text. Again, in 1631, William Burton, the Leicester- shire historian, and a schoolmaster by profes- sion, delivered at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, an oration on the originandprogress of Greek, which many years later, when he had charge of the school at Kingston-on-Thames, was edited by Gerard Langbaine. It was a scholarly thesis, and of no educational significance, except that it exhibited the survival of some languid inte- rest in the topic at the University. Very few Greek authors found early transla- tors here beyond the selections prepared for schools; but it is remarkable that the example in this way was set by a citizen of London, and a member of the Goldsmiths' Company, Thomas Niccols, who in 1550, at the instance of Sir John Gheke, undertook to put into English the His- tory of Thucydides. This was almost a century before the version by Hobbes of Malmesbury. The partial translation of the Iliad by Arthur Hall of Grantham, 1581, was taken from the French. But Chapman accomplished the feat and Schoolmasters. 253 of rendering the whole of Homer, as well as the Georyics of Hesiod and theNeo-Greek #ero and Leander. At a later date, Thomas Grantham, a schoolmaster in Lothbury, who seems to have been in a state of perpetual warfare with his cri- tics as to the merits of his fashion of teaching, brought out at his own expense, and possibly for the use of his own pupils, the first, second,and third books of the Iliad. The grand work of Herodotus was approa- ched in 1584 by an anonymous writer, who completed only Clio and Euterpe. But these intermittent and isolated cases shew how languid the feeling for Hellenic literature and history long remained in England ; nor, when we regard the unsatisfactory character of the translations from the Greek, with rare ex- ceptions, down to the present day, is it hard to see that the want was at least as -largely due to incapacity on the part of scholars as to indif- ference on that of the public. Many of the schools employed a small ele- mentary selection from the Greek writers, of which a fifth edition was printed in 1771. When Charles Lamb was at the Blue Coat 254 Schools and Schoolmasters. School (1782-9), the Greek authors read there appear to have been Lucian and Xenophon, the former in a Selection from the Dialogues. The present writer, who was at Merchant Tay- lors' School from 1842 to 1850, used Xeno- phon, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and some volume of Analecta. When the school was founded in 1561, it was difficult to find a boy to read Greek ; but in the following century it enters rather prominently into the prospectus on Examination-day. All the great seminaries differ in their lists; the choice depends on the personal taste of the masters from time to time; and there is a certain virtue in traditional names. But the truth is that in England, after all, although this language has continued to be taught in all schools of any standing or peten- sion, the critical study and genuine appreciation of it have always been confined to a narrow circle of scholars; and nowadays there is a growing tendency to prefer the living languages, as they are called, to the dead. ( 255 ) XVIII. Ancient French school-books for English learnersTheir his- torical and philological interest Succession of writers and teachers Hollyband, Florio, Delamothe, and others Sketches of their work Their imperfect acquaintance with our language -Other publications of an educational cast. I. TURNING to the French language, there is a very singular relic of early times in the shape of an Anglo-Gallic Vocabulary of the end of the fifteenth century, in which the spelling of both languages is strikingly archaic : Here is a good boke to lerne to spekefrench. Vecyung bon lievreaapprendre parler fraun- choys. In the name of the fader of the sonne. En nom du pere et du fils. And of the holy goost I will begynne. 256 Schools, School-Book^, Et du saint esprit ieveuel comencbier. To lerne to speke frenche. A apprendre a parlor franchoys." After this exordium follow the numbers, the names of precious stones, articles of merchan- dise, fruits, wines, &c. Wine of rochell is ren- dered vinde rosele. What we know as Beauneis called byane in French and beaune in English. On the fourth page, among "Other maner of speche in frenche/' occur : " Sir god giue you good day. Sire dieu vous doint bon iour. Sir god giue you good euyn. Sire dieu vous doint bon vespere. Holde sir here it is. Tenez sire le veez ey." The z in tenei seems to have been specially cut, for it is of a different font or case, and, curi- ously enough, in the next sentence it is wrongly inserted in ditez (for elites). The question is asked how much one man owes another, and the reply is ten shillings, for which the French equivalent is taken to be dix soulz. But there were no shillings in England at that time ; per- and Schoolmasters. 257 haps the writer was thinking of the skilling, with which our coin has no more than a nominal affinity. The Eclair cissement de la langue Francoise, by John Palsgrave, 1530, and the Introductory to learn, pronounce, and speak the French tongue, by Giles Du Wes or Dewes, written some years later for the use of the Princess Mary in the same way as Li nacre's Latin Grammar had been, are sufficiently familiar from their reproduction in modern times under the auspices of the French Government. Dewes was not improbably re- lated to a person of the same name who acted as preceptor to the son of Cromwell, Earl of Essex. Both he and Palsgrave were professional teachers; but Palsgrave was a Londoner, who had completed his studies in the Parisian Gym- nasium; and he at all events was a Latin, no less than a French scholar. In the dedication of his English version of the Comedy of Acolas- tus to Henry VIII. in 1540, he speaks at some length, and in laudatory terms, of the official Primer issued in that year, and he also conveys to us the notion of being then advanced in life. Nearly, if not quite, contemporary with him R 258 Schools, School-Books, and Dewes was Pierre du Ploiehe, who in the time of Henry published a very curious little volume of more general scope, called A Treatise in Englishand French right necessary and profit- able for all young children. Du Ploiche, when this work appeared, was residing in Trinity Lane, at the sign of the Rose. He gives us in parallel columns, the English on the left hand, and the French equivalent on the right, the Catechism, ihe Litany and Suffrages, and a series of Prayers. These occupy three sections; the fourth, fifth, and sixth sections are devoted to secular and familiar topics : For to speake at the table, for to aske the way, and for to bie and sell; and the concluding portion embraces the A. B. G. and Grammar. The English is pretty much on a par with that found in educational treatises produced by foreigners, and the French itself is decidedly of an archaic cast, though, doubtless, such as was generally recognised and understood in the sixteenth century. I shall pass over the reli- gious divisions, and transcribe a few specimens from the three groups of dialogue on social or personal subjects. and Schoolmasters 259 The third chapter, where the scene at a meal is depicted, affords, of course, some interesting suggestions and illustrations, yet little that is very new, except that we seem to get a glimpse of the practice, borrowed from monastic life, of some one reading aloud while the rest were at their repast. For one says : "Reade.Maynerd, Lisez Maynart" to which the other rejoins : "Where shall I reade?" and the first answers : "There where your fellow lefte yesterday," so that it was apparently the custom to take turns. We perceive, too, that the dinner was both ushered in and wound up with very elaborate graces. In this dialogue, as well as in the next about asking the way, there is mention of almost every description of utensil, but no reference to the fork, which was not yet in general use. There is a delicate refinement of phraseology here and there, aswhere "You ly" is rendered "Vous espargnez la verite;" and Du Ploiche does not fail to advertise himself and his address, for when one of the interlocutors demands : "Where go you to schole?" the other is made to reply : "In trinytie lane at the signe of the Rose.' 260 Schools, School-Books, The annexed extract from the same chapter may assist in fixing the date of the publica- tion to 1544: " And you sir, from whence "Etvous seigneur, d'ouvenez com you? vans'? I come from Bulloigne. le viens de Boido^(i<>. From Englande, from Ger- D'Enyleterre, d'Allemaigne. many. What newes? Quelle nouuelies? I know none but good. le tic scay rien que bien. I harde say i'aij ouy dire That the Englishe men quo les anglois haue kylled many frenche ontoccis beaucoup de Fran- men, cois. And where ? Et on? Before Bulloigne. Deuanl Boulongne. When came the newes? Quant vinrent tez nouuellel This morninge by a post." A ce matin par vng poste." The portion which yields this matter com- prises all the incidents of a long journey, the arrival at the inn, the call for refreshment, the baiting and putting up of the horse, the retire- ment to rest, and the breakfast before departure in the morning. The sixth section, on buying and selling, exhibits no remarkable examples, or rather nothing that I can, with so large a choice, afford to cite, and the grammatical part follows the and Schoolmasters. 261 usual lines. The present treatise came to a new edition in 1578, but it does not seem to have been very successful. In point of fact, the taste and demand for such a class of hand-books or primers had not fully set in. With the reign of Elizabeth the habit of foreign travel and the consequent value of a conversance with languages, especially French and Italian, imparted the first ..jnarked stimulusand developmenttothisclass ofliterary enterprise. II. Claude Desainliens, who transformed him- self into Claudius Holy -Band or Hollybtind, and who seems in his earlier days to have had quar- ters over or adjoining the sign of the Lucrece in St. Paul's Churchyard, became a voluminous producer of the dictionaiies, grammars, and phrase-books so popular in early times, and in- cluded in his range the Italian as well as the French series. Long after his death his works continued to be in demand, and were edited with improvements by others. Desainliens be- gan, so far as I know, with his French Littleton in 1566, and his French Dictionary was not 262 Schools, School-Books, printed till 1593. In 1581 he had moved from the Lucrece to the Golden Ball, just by. Perhaps of all his multifarious performances his French and Italian Schoolmasters were the two which met with the greatest favour ; and the longer career of the former may perhaps be ascribed to the more general cultivation of the French language in England. The Italian School- master originally appeared in!575 as an annex to a version of the story of Arnalte and Lucenda ; but in the subsequent impressions of 1597 and 1608 the philological portion occupies the place of honour, and the story is made to follow. In the former the rules for pronunciation and such matter as fell within his knowledge as an Italian may be passed as representing what was the correct practice and view r at the period; it is with the English illustrations and equivalents that one is apt to be surprised and amused ; and one, moreover, figures the occasional be- wilderment even of an English pupil at the strange unidiomatic forms which Desainliens has adopted. In other words, instead of trans- lating English into Italian, he has translated Italian into broken English ; as, for instance, and Schoolmasters. 263 where in a dialogue a man is inquiring the way to London, we find at the conclusion such pure Italicisms as Have me recommended : I am yours : Bemaine with God. Then, again, terms are misapplied, of course, as thus : "Tell me deere fellowe, is it yet farre to the citie? " And when he has entered his inn, he calls to the host : "Bring me for to wash my hands and face." At the same time the pages of this and similar volumes abound with fruitful illustrations of all kinds, which we should have been very sorry indeed to lose ; and it is to be recollected that the English glosswas secondary, and that the bizarre style and texture of this class of book arose from the aim at enabling the learner to be prepared for all sorts of occasions and every variety of conversational topic. The author consequently leads him through the different occupations and incidents of life, and imagines successive interviews and dialogues with such persons as he would be likely to encounter. In the parley with a farrier, it comes out that the charge for shoeing a horse w r as fivepence a foot; and in the section Per maritarsi = To be married, Hollyband starts by rendering 264 Schools, School-Books, bella giovane "Ho fair maiden." He urges her to be prompt in her decision by citing the proverb, "Ladie, whitest the iron is hote, it must be wrought." Much of the matter introduced by Desain- liens is highly curious and even important. I shall transcribe a section or two, as they are brief, for the sake of the English sugges- tions : " To sing and daunce. " fellowes, I wish that wee shoulde sing a song, and I will take the lute. Let vs sing and daunce, when you will. Mystres, will it please you to daunce a galliard with me? pray you therefore. 1 cannot daunce after the Italian fashion. We shall daunce after the high Dutch. Got to, play a galliard vpon the violl. I would rather vpon the virginals. . . . Of the Booke binder. Shew me an Italian, and English bookes and of the best print. I have none bound at this present. Bind me this with silke and claspes. . . . Reach me royall paper to write. Neede you any ynke and bombash? No, but wast paper, & of that which wee call drinking paper. . . . and Schoolmasters. 265 Of the Shoemaker. I would you shoulde make mee a paire of bootes, a ierkin, and a paire of shoes, pantofles, mules, and buskins. AVe will make the sir, & of good leather. See this faire shooing. Put on those pompes. . . ." After all, possibly, such publications as that before me are chiefly valuable for a purpose for which they were not designed for the boun- teous light which they shed on our old English customs and notions; and I do not think that they have been hitherto fully brought into em- ployment. It is obviously impossible for me, however, in the present case to remedy this shortcoming, more particularly as the quotations suffer by curtailment or paraphrase. The Arnalte and Lucenda takes up the major part of the volume, and must be said to be freer from grammatical inaccuracies than that divi- sion of the book devoted to grammar. Nor could a man live in London without catching some of the colloquialisms current among its residents. In his Italian Phrases we meet on the English side of the page with : "Hee look- eth rather like a cutter or fencer then," and 266 Schools,, School-Books, "He goeth accompanied with Roisters and cutters." The French Dictionary of D-esainliens was entirely superseded by that of Handle Cotgrave in 1611. The latter spared no pains to make his book a really valuable performance; he in- vited help from others, and modelled his labours on a fairly intelligible plan, and it remains to this day in the enlarged edition by Howell a standard and indispensable work of reference. It was the only one available for the school-boy and student for a considerable length of time. III. Delamothe and Erondelle were contem- porary with Desainliens, and may have been equally eminent and successful as teachers; but they did not display the same degree of literary activity. The former indeed produced nothing but a French Alphabet (1595). Pierre Erondelle was a native of Normandy ; and besides new and improved editionsofhis predecessorDesainliens, he brought out in 1605 a quaint book of lessons for the acquisition of French, which he called The French Garden for English Ladies and Gentlemen to walk in; Or A Summer day's and Schoolmasters. 267 Labour. The volume mainly consists of thirteen dialogues in French and English, embracing the various occupations of the day, from the first rising in the morning till bedtime. Some of the conversations are remarkable for their archaic naivete so far as English ideas of decorum in speech are concerned ; but they are nothing more than the plainness of phrase which was once recognised both here and on the Continent, and the banishment of which has, at all events, not of itself added to our morality. Sterne, in his Sentimental Journey, signalises as a French trait the incident of the lady of quality with whom he drove in her carriage ; but he must have been aware that the tone in the same circles at home was equally pronounced ; and editors of the earlier Georgian literature have to exercise a pruning hand in dealing with MSS. to be presented now-a-days to public view. Another of these foreign professors was Jacques Bellot, who published several educa- tional works for the instruction of the English in the French grammar and language. Among these LeJardinde Vertu et Bonnes Moeurs, 1581, where the English and French are given, as 268 Schools, School-Books, usual, in parallel columns, is the most remark- able. There is a Table of Errata for both lan- guages; but that for the English might, from a native point of view, be indefinitely extended, as Bellot proves himself as incapable of compre- hending our idiom as the rest of his countrymen. He renders "Lamemoire duprodigue est nulle" by "Of the prodigall ther is no memory," and "La seulle vertu est la vraye noblesse" by "The only vertue, is the true nobilitie." The writer trips, as may be conjectured, just in those nice points in which even an English- man is not always at home. New and improved systems were continually submitted to the public, or rather, in the lan- guage of those days, to the Nobility and Gentry. In 1634, the Grammar of Charles Maupas of Blois, an esteemed and experienced teacher, who during a career of thirty years numbered among his pupils many of the young men of family in Holland as well as in England, was adapted by William Aufield for the use of his countrymen. The original is still regarded as a standard work, though discarded by the schools. Both the French and English are of the antique and Schoolmasters. 269 cast, of course, and many of the examples and much of the phraseology are obsolete; but the book was written for Frenchmen and translated for Englishmen, to both of whom the speech of these days would have seemed at least equally strange, and proved not less embarrassing. The pages of Maupas, as he is presented to us in his English dress, acquire an oddity and an almost humorous side, which areabsentfrom the French text itself; as, for instance : "Of making Stop. "Hola, ho there, prou well, well, so so; assez enough, euough; demeure, arreste, stay, stay, budge not." "Of teeling Pain. ; 'Aou, haou, aouf, ah, of, alas. The same words will serve in English." "Of Joy. "Gay, deliait, alaigrement, heighday, as a man woud wish, merrily then, * Claudius Mauger and Paul Festeau were two other professors at a somewhat later date, who endeavoured to secure patronage for their me- thods and books by throwing special tempta- tions in the way of customers. The former,who seems to have been resident in London, intro- 270 Schools and Schoolmasters. duced into his pages as an attractive novelty a series~of Dialogues illustrative of English exploits by land and sea, as well as of contemporary French history, while Festeau baited his hook with the two scarcely reconcilable assurances tha this plan was the exactest possible forattain- ing the purity and eloquence of the French tongue, as it was spoken about 1660 in the Court of France, and that Blois, his native place, was the city " where the true tone of the French tongue was found by the unanimous consent of all Frenchmen." ( 271 ) XIX. Foreigners' English. I: A GOOD deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of the treatment of our language either collo- quially or with a literary object. This was a source of difficulty which must have been generally appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the author of a French Gram- mar printed in 1578, announced in 1580 The English Schoolmaster ', for teaching strangers to pronounce English. That such a book was pub- lished is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and we have meanwhile to content ourselves with speculating what kind of 272 Schools, School-Books, affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign teacher so igno- rant of our language ! But it was not amiss for Bellot to try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer ; nor was it till after the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the Familiar Letters, who brought out in 1662 A New English Grammar, prescribing as certain rules as the language will bear, for foreigners to learn English. This was nearly a century after Bellot; and Howel was both a linguist and a scholar. Like many other laudable endeavours, how- ever, the proffered help was not much appre- ciated ; and although the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have within the last quarter of a century made remarkable progress in the study of English, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or indisposed to conquer their ancientprejudices. Doubtless, the closer affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our own considerably facilitated the mastery of English by the Teutonic and Schoolmasters. 273 community ; and it was principally in Flanders that the earliest attention was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travel- lers and students, into which the English, as a rule, was admitted more on account, probably, of its service to the foreign visitor in England than for the sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early vocabu- laries and primers elsewhere noticed. In the old plays the foreigner is invariably introduced making, consciously or otherwise, the most alarming havoc in our vocabulary and grammar ; but the dramatist seems, as a rule, to have drawn a good deal on his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it must be said, even with Shakespear's Dr. Cams, who speaks broken English, but hardly a Frenchman's broken English. The Duke de Jar many of the same writer would probably have had the same nondescript gib- berish put into his mouth had he been brought on the stage; this sort of dramatis persona was among the comic effects. The Mrs. Plawnish of a modern novelist thought that bad English might be good French; 274 Schools, School-Books, but the jargon of Cains is sui generis; he u hacks our English," as mine host puts it, but not naturally, although Shakespear must have had the opportunity of studying such a character from the original. But he even confers on the French doctor in the Merry Wives the very name of an actual English one, who was living in his boyhood, and who was not merely a con- tributor to literature, but a writer on philological subjects; so that those who had been acquainted with the real Gains were apt to feel some mys- tification at his dramatic presentment, claim- ing a nationality which did not belong to him, and murdering a language which was his own . As regards the familiarity of the French and Germans with our idiom, the position is changed; for while that of the former remains nearly stationary, that of Germany has grown more accurate and more general. II. But the conversance with our language in former times, even among those who devoted their attention to philology and instruction, was excessively scanty and inexact. If no more than and Schoolmasters. 275 a bare quotation, example, or equivalent in English is given, the solecisms are sometimes ludicrous in the extreme; and this branch of the subject is sufficiently interesting and novel to induce me, before I conclude my inquiry, to shew somewhat farther than I have done in the account of the foreign professors of languages settled in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ignorance of English exhibited by two distinct classes of writers, namely, by foreigners occupying' among us of old the position of tutors or teachers, and by the authors of publications designed for employ- ment by ourselves visiting the Continent, or by our neighbours coming hither. The notions entertained by educated profes- sional Frenchmen, and even by Hollanders and Germans, about our grammar and idiom were from the outset down nearly to the present cen- tury of the vaguest and most puerile character. Perhaps one of the most edifying monuments of this inveterate repugnance to the acquisition of so much as the alphabet of our poor tongue is to be found in a volume printed at Niirnberg so late as 1744 under the title Representation of 276 Schools, School-Books, the High-landers ivho arrived at the Camp of the Confederated Army, 1743, where beneath the first of a series of plates occurs the eluci- dation : "The Highlanders in their accostumes clothes and downwards hanging cloak." The explanatory description of the next engraving is "A High-lander who puts on his cloak about his schoulders, when weather is sed to rain." These solecisms of course arose from the in- competence of the foreign artist or publisher, or both; but even where an ignorant typographer in a Continental town was employed to set up an English book by the author himself, the lia- bility to blunders was very great, and we are not to be surprised at slips of the press in such a work as Bishop Hooper's Declaration of the Com- mandments, printed at Zurich in 1549, when at the end the writer apprises us that "the setters of the print understand not one word of our speech !" The most diverting illustrations of the jargon which was intended to pass for good conversa- tional English abound in the pocket-guides and dictionaries, of which some went through seve- ral editions, and were evidently in great request and Schoolmasters. 277 by the sections of society to which they ap- pealed. One of them is an octoglot vocabu- lary, 1548, and a second a series of Colloquies in six languages, accompanied by a dictionary, 1576. The English examples in the latter are highly curious, as affording an insight into our language as it was spoken at that date by foreign students and visitors; and, in point of fact, it is hard to choose between the two, which is the more remarkable. Let us take the Preface to the earlier publication from an impression of 1631 before me : "To THE READER. "Beloved Reader this boocke is so need full and profit- able / and the vsance of the same so necessarie / that his goodnes euen of learned men / is not fullie to be praised for ther is noman in France / nor in thes Nederland / nor in Spayne / or in Italic handling in these Netherlandes Avhich hat not neede of the eight speaches that here in are writen and declared : Fer whether thad any man doo marchandise / or that hee do handle in the Court / or that hee fo lowe the warres or that hee be a trauailling man / hy should neede to haue an interpretour / for som of theese eight speaches. The which wee considering have at our great cost and to your great profite / brought the same speaches here in such- wise to gether / and set them in order / so that you from- yence fouath shall not neede eny interpretour / but shalbe able to speake them your self/ . . ." 278 Schools, School-Books, An extract from one of the interlocutions must suffice : " D. Peeter / is that your sone ? P. Yea it is my sonne. D. it is a goodlie childe. God let him al wayes prosper in virtue. P. I thancke you coosen. D. Doth he not go to the scole? P. Yes / hee learneth to speake French. D. Doth hee? it is very well done. John/ can you well speake French? J. Not very well coosen, but I learne. D. "Wher go you too schoole? J. In the Lumbeardes s treat. D. Have you gon long too schoole ? J. About half a yeare." So the dialogue goes on, and there is a series of them. III. A second exemplification of the super- lative obstacles which persons born out of England have at all periods encountered in the endeavour to comprehend on their own part, and render intelligible to others, our insular speech, is taken from the Italian Grammar of Henry Pleunus, printed at Leghorn at the end of the seventeenth century. Now, here, in lieu of the alleged width of and Schoolmasters. 279 acceptability, which meets the eye in the travel- ler's pocket-dictionary just described, we get a positive assurance that the author was a master of the English tongue; and it may be predi- cated of him that, compared with the majority of foreigners, he exhibits a proficiency very con- siderably above the average, though we honestly believe it to be grossly improbable that "every one speaks English at Legorne," as he says in one of the Anglo-Italian dialogues. There can be no desire to be hypercritical in judging such a production, or to lay stress on occasional slips of spelling and prosody; but the English of Pleunus very often strikes one nor is it sur- prising that it should be so as Italian liter- ally rendered. He probably never attained an idiomatic phraseology; and one would have said less about it, had it not been for that sort of professorial assumption on the title-page. Going back in order of time, I shall furnish some specimens of the tetraglot History of Aurelio and of Isabel Daughter to the King of Scotland, translated from the Spanish, and printed in 1556 at Antwerp. I propose to quote a passage where two knights in love with Isabel 280 Schools, School-Books, propose to cast lots for her : "I fynde none occasion that is so iuste, that by the same lof you, or you of me maye complayne vs : inas- much that euery one of vs by him selfe is ynoughe more bounde vnto the lone, that he beareth to Isabell, then vnto any other bounde of frendshippe. And therfore I see not, that I for respecte of you, nor you also for mine to be ought to withdraws from the high enterprise alreadie by vs begonne. Nor in likewise might be called a vertuouse worke, that we both to- gether in one place sould displane thelouingly sailes [voilles amour euses in the French column], for that shoulde be to defile, that so great be- twene vs and more, then of brother conioyned frendship." Here it is not so conspicuously the ortho- graphy that is at fault, as the composition and syntax. But up and down this little book, too, there are some drolleries of spelling. The translator from the Spanish of Juan de Flores, whoever he was (a Frenchman probably), under- stood French and Italian ; but surely his con- versance with the remaining tongue was on a par with that of the majority of his Continental and Schoolmasters. 281 fellow-dwellers then, before, and since; and doubtless his printer has not failed to contribute to the barbarous unintelligibility of the English text. This is the book to which Collins the poet mistakenly informed Warton that Shake- spear had resorted for the story of the Tempest. But a far stranger monument of orthographical and grammatical heresies exists in The historijke Pvrtreatvres of the woll * Bible, printed at Lyons in 1553. It is a series of woodcuts, with a qua- train in English beneath each picture descrip- tive of its meaning, and is introduced by an elaborate epistle by Peter Derendel arid an Address from the printer to the reader. Both, however, probably proceeded from the pen of * It may be worth while to note that the use ot woll for tvhole was not an unusual type of orthography and pro- nunciation in early English. Thus, in the Interlude of th Four Elements (1519), we have : For, as I said, they have none iron, Whereby they should in the earth mine, To search for any wore." And in the Image of Hypocrisy, part 3, Robin Hood is called Robyn Whode, Lord Chancellor Westbury used to pro- nounce whole in the same way, and he would also say whot for hot. When Mr. Registrar Hazlitt was engaged with him on the Bankruptcy Bill, he remarked more than once : "I am sick, Hazlitt, of the woll business." 282 Schools, School-Book^ Derendel, who was doubtless connected with Pierre Erondelle, a well-known preceptor in London at a somewhat later date. The verses w r hich occur throughout the volume are literal translations, presumably by Erondelle, from the French, and are singular enough, and might have tempted quotation ; but, eccentric as they are, they are completely thrown into the background by the prolegomena, and more especially by the preface purporting to come from the printer of the work, which is the common set of blocks relating to Biblical subjects, made in the present casejto accompany an English letterpress. I will transcribe only the commencement of the preface, whoseever it may be : "The affection mine all waies towarde the hartlie ernest, louing reader, being cotinuallie com- maunded of the dutie of mi profession, mainot but dailie go about to satisfie the in this, withe thow desirest and lookest for in mi vacation, the withe, to mai please the, I wolde it were to mi minde so free and licentiouse streched at large, as it is be the mishappe of the time restrained." and Schoolmasters. 283 t The discovery of Moses by Pharaoh's daugh- ter is thus poetically set forth : "The kinges daughter fonde him in great pitie The russhes amonge, withe to him fauourable, As god did please, him to saue thought worthie, His owne mother giuing him for noorce able." Once more, the fall of Abimelech in Judges ix. is portrayed after the ensuing fashion : "Hauing killed his bretherne on a stone, Abimelech was forced ielde the ghoast : For besieging with for warre Thebes, anon A strocke he had, of a woman with lost." The spelling and the syntax in these examples are equally outrageous; yet they are possibly not more so than might be expected from per- sons unversed in the intricacies and anomalies of our language. But the point is, that the undertaking was executed for the special behoof, not alone of English residents abroad, but also of English students of sacred history at home; for there was nothing of the class at that time in our literature or our art. It is almost incompre- hensible on what ground English was selected, as French would have been as serviceable to the educated reader here, while the Anglo-Gallic patois must have proved a puzzle to all alike. The early English educational books pro- 284 Schools and Schoolmasters. duced by foreign printers were not quite in- variably so wide of the mark in an idiomatic respect. Some of them were doubtless read in proof by the English author or editor; and such may have been the case with a version of the Short Catechisme of Cardinal Bellarmine pub- lished in 1614 at Augsburgh, where the slips do not exceed an ordinary Table of Errata. Now and then, too, the writer himself was alone responsible for the eccentricities which presented themselves in his book, as where Stanyhurst, in his version of the &ne-id, pub- lished at Leyden in 1582, renders the opening lines of Book the Second thus : ""With tentive list'ning each wight was setled in harckning ; Then father ^Eneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie. You me bid, Princesse, too scarrifie a festered old scare, How that the Troians wear prest by Grecian armie." Here it was the idiosyncrasy of the Briton which reduced a translation to a burlesque, and disregarded the canons of his own language, as well as taste and propriety in diction. For the entire work is cast in a similar mould, and is hete- rodox in almost every particular; some passages are too grossly absurd even for an Irishman who had spent most of his life in Belgium or Holland. ( 285 XX Origin and spirit ot Phonography William Bullokar the earliest regular advocate of it Charles Butler Dr. Jones and his theorv examined. I. THE phonetic system of orthography, which may be regarded as empirical and fallacious, only forms part of such an inquiry as the pre- sent by reason of the presence in our earlier literature of a few books which were apparently designed, more orless, for educationalpurposes. The fundamental theory of the promoters of this principle, both in former times and in our own, seems to have been that the sound should govern the written character, and that all laws of philology and grammar should defer to popu- lar pronunciation. It is, of course, begging the question, in the first place; and one of the warmest enthusiasts on the subject admits that the very pronunciation, which is the product of 286 Schools, School-Books, sound, and on which he relies, differs in different localities. The writers on behalf of phonetics possessed , no doubt, their own honest convictions; but they have at no period succeeded in carrying with them any appreciable number of disciples. Between 1580 and 1634, William Bullokar and Charles Butler endeavoured at various dates to establish their peculiar creed; but it never gained footing or currency, and its influence has left no trace on our language, except in the literary or calligraphic essays of persons unable to read and write, or in one or two isolated cases where the new heresy for the moment infected a man like Churchyard, the old soldier- poet, for on no other hypothesis can we explain the uncouth spelling of his little poem on the Irish Rebellion of 1598, which is an orthogra- phical abortion, out of harmony with the usual style of the author, and surpassing in foolish- ness the wildest suggestions of the professed adherents and supporters of the doctrine. Bullokar published his large Grammar in 1580, and his Brief one in 1586; and he also put forth in 1585 a version of ^Esop's Fables, and Schoolmasters. 287 the utle of which is a curiosity : u .Esopz Fablr, in Tru Ortography with Grammar-Notz. Her-vntoo ar also iooined the Short Sentencz of the Wyz Gato : both of which Autorz are translated out-of Latin intoo English by William Bullokar. Gev' God the praiz That teacheth all waiz. When Truth trieth, Erroor flieth." Butler became a convert in later life to the views previously entertained and promulgated by Bullokar, bringing out a third edition of his History of Bees in 1634, adapted to the new standard; and in his English Grammar, pub- lished a twelvemonth before, he enunciated the same orthographical dogmas. He was of Mag- dalen College, Oxford, and prepared, as early as 1600, a Latin text-book on Rhetoric for the use of his College. This was more popular and successful than his phonetic excursus, and is quoted even still now and again, because it contains a slight allusion to Shakespear. But perhaps the most strenuous and elaborate attempt to reform us in this particular direction was made by Dr. Jones, who drew up a Practical 288 Schools, School-Books, Phonography, "Or the New Art of Rightly Spelling and Writing Words by the Sound thereof," for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Queen Anne, somewhere before 1701, in which year he communicated the fruit of his researches to the public. His description of the art as a new one must be interpreted by his ignorance of the previous labours of Bullokar and Butler, and as a proof that the proposal had met with no response; and the fact that the Doctor's own volume is almost unknown may be capable of a similar explanation. I have no means of judging what kind of reception was accorded to Dr. Jones at the time; but the tone of that gentleman's Preface was certainly not propitiatory or diffident; for he freely speaks of the miserable ignorance of the world and of his own condescension to the undertaking, in order to remove or enlighten it ; and yet, from another point of view, he addressed himself to the task of instituting a grammatical code based on that very ignorance of which he complains. For you have not to travel beyond the introductory remarks to stumble on the following directions for the and Schoolmasters. 289 pronunciation and ergo the spelling of half-a- dozen familiar words and proper names: Aron, bant (bought), Mat'r, Dixnary, jmis (pays), and Wooster ; and at the same time on the very threshold of his text he allows "that English Speech is the Art of signifying the Mind by human Voice, as it is commonly used in Eng- land, (particularly in London, the Universities, or at Court)." Dr. Jones was a learned and well-read medi- cal man, and the monument of his erudition and scholarship lies before me in the shape of this portentous volume of 144 pages, which, if the young Duke had not died from another cause, might have proved fatal to him and to his royal mother's hopes of a successor in the Stuart line. That our national pronunciation is slovenly and against philological laws, nobody will pro- bably deny; but it would not be an improve- ment or a gain to corrupt our written language by levelling it down to our spoken one. INDEX. ABACUS, 209-15. A. B. G., 88, 209-15, 234-7. Abingdon School, 132. 183. Absence from school severely treated, 108-'.). Academies, private, 143-4, 170- 4, 178-83. Accomplishments taught at the Miisceum Minervce, 170-4. at a private academy in 1676, 178-9. Aculastus, 127, 257. Add i son's Letter from Italy, 203. yEsop, 48, 99, 139, 141. 287. Ainsworh, Robert, 229-30. Aldus, 76. Ale, 140. Alexander de Villa Dei, 45-6, 243-4. Alfric, Archbishop, his Col- loquy, 30. Allibone, John, 12. ' Alphabet, Jonson's remarks on our, 234-6. Alphabet am Latino-Angli- cum, 1543, 124. America, 33-4. American Plantations, 17. 84. Amxvell, 51-3, 200. Andreas, Bernardus, 68, 102. Andrew of Wyntown, 184. Anglo-Gallic dictionary, 35. vocabulary, 255. Anglo-Latin literature, 72. Anniquil. John, schoolmaster and grammarian, 11 ,51-3, 91 Apollo Shroving, 1627,144. Apothecaries, early, ignor- ance of, 105. Appleby, 107. Appositions, 138. Aristotle, 244. Arithmetic, 163-4. Arthur, Prince, son of Henry VI [.,68, 102. Arthusius, Gotardus, 155. Ascensius, Jod. Badius, 78-80, Ascham, Roger, 12, 19, 196. 220-3. As in prcesenti, 216. Astrology, 157-8. Astronomy, judicial, 133, 157. Aufield, YV., 268-9. Aurelio and fsabel, History of, 1556,279-81. Aviarium, 227-8. Aylesbury, 160. BACON, Francis, 177. Baker, Humphrey, 163-4. Bailey, Old, 165. " Index. Balbus, Johannes, 50, 225. Bale, Bishop, 98. Bales, Peter, '165. Barchhy, John, 73. Barclay, Alexander, 12. Beaune, 256. Bebelius of Basle, 81. Beer. 140. Bellarmine's (Cardinal) C 1 . Desainliens, Claude, 261-6. Despauterius, 46. Dialogues of Lucian transla- ted into Latin by Erasmus, 100. in English and French 258-9. in English and Italian, 263-5, 279. Dickens's Mrs. Plawnish, 273. Dictionaries, early, 27 el sea. , 225-30. Dictionary, definition, of a, 32. of Johannes de Gar- land ia, 32-4. Discipline, severity of early, 17-26, 10M2. Doctrinal? of Alexander de Villa Dei, 4")-(;. ls<;. Donatus. .Klius. 'iC-9, TO, 86, 121, 184 Dorchester, 183. Dome, John, 39, 87-9. Dorset Street, Spitalfields, 157. D'Ouvilly, SirBalthazar Ger- bier, 170-4. Drawing, 171, 175. Dugard. William, 140, 145-9. Duncan, Dr., 219, Du Ploiche. Pierre. 258-61. Dutch language, 153, 171, 173. DuWes orDewes, Giles, 117, 257. Dyonisie de Mountchensy, 36. EAST INDIES, 155. Edward the Confessor, 17. VI. Vl'23-6, 135. Elizabeth, Queen, 126, 130, 230-2, 241. Elyot, Sir Thomas, 226-9. Endowed grammar schools of Edward VI , 126. English school-books printed abroad, 85, 273. Erasmus. Desiderius,99,103, 118, 120, 127, 244-5, 247. 294 Index. Erondelle,Piei re,2CG-7.281-2. Eton, 18-19, 21. Gardiner, Bishop, 82, 247-8. Gascoigne, George, 248. Gemma Vocabulorum, 225. Geneva, English residents at, 10. Gentleman's Calllnq. The, 13. German influence, 197. language, 152, 171,173. population of Riga, 217. Germany, 222, 274. Gloucestershire's Desire 1642, 193. Gold, writing with, 176. Colden Bali in St. Paul's Churchyard, 262. Goldsmith's Alley, 94. Goldsmith' sPoetns for Younq Ladies, 202-3. Gradus comparationum, 73. Grammar schools, endowed, 126. Grammatica Initialis, 1509, 14. Grant, Edward, 251. Granlham, Lincolnshire, 252. Grantham, Thomas, 253. Gray's Inn, 248. Greek language, 241-54. Greek language, sludv of the, at Oxford, 101-5, 244. Etymology, 151. Euripides, 248, 254. Evans, Sir Hugh, 180-1. Exchange, Royal, 164. FARRIFRY, 2C3. Faversham, 161. Feckeiihain, 194. Female influence, 200-8. Festeau. Paul, 269-70. Fish, 76-7. Fisher, Bishop, 24^-3. Fitzjames, Bishop, 106. . . j ord Chief Justice 108 Fitzstephen, W., 15. Flageolet, l',5. Flanders, 273. Florence, 245. Florio, John, 155. Foreign influence, 3, 38 et seq , 66, 170-4. 273-84. Founders of schools at the Reformation, 10J. Fox, John, 125. Free school at Oxford, 10. Free school at Feckenham, 194. French dame-schools, 197. by Erasmus, 100, 243-5. 266-70. schools, 141-2, 161, 251, 253-4. Du \Ves, 117. tors, 153. Greeting, Thomas, 175. Grey, Lady Jane, 222. Grocyn, W., 102, 244-5. Guarini of Verona, 86-7. Guarna, Andrea. 82. HADLKFGH, Suffolk, 144. Hall, Arthur, of Grantham, 252. Harmar, Samuel, 193-4. 274, 2fcO et seq. seq., 270. v> i cV l r> T Churchyard. 116. Frobenius, 76. Frorne frozen, 76. GADBURY, John, 158. Index. 295 Hart Street, 157. Hawkins, William. I'i4. Hayne, Thomas, 210, 238-9. Hazlitt, William, 1S1-2. Mr. Registrar, 281, note. Hebrew, 142, 153, 108. Henry VII., 68, 245. VIII., 68, 123-4, 126, 128, 133, 143, 198, 205, 220- 7, 246-7, 257-8. Hereditary succession of teachers, 84. Herefordshire, 162. Hero and Leandcr of Mu- seeus, 253. Herodotus, 253. Hertfordshire, 131. Highgate, 200. Highlanders, 276. Hills, Richard, 136. Holidays, ancient school, 15- 17. Holofernes,Shakespears, 99, 155. Holt, John, 70-1. Hohvell, John, 157. Homer, 250, 252-4. Hoole, Charles, 93-4. Hooper, Bishop, 276. Horace, 64, 94 1 . Herman, William, 73-8, 129. 222. his literary quarrel with Lily and others, 81-2. extracts from his Vulyariu, 74-8. Horn-book, 211, 212. Hours of the Virgin, 1514, 115. Ho well, James, 233. Hume, Alexander, 131, 187. Hundred Merry 2 Hunt, Leigh, 135. ILLUSTRATED children's books, 159. Indian abacus, 215. Inglis, Esther, 176. Ingulphus, 17-18. Ink, 76. Instruction, mediaeval met- hod of, 14, 30. Ipswich, Wolsey's school at, 107, 119-20. Ireland, 131,189,284, 286. Italian influence, 3, 86-7, 197, 242-3, 245, 261-6, 278-9. language, 152 el seq, 2J1-6. hand, 177. JEROME, St., 46, 110-11. Jesus College, Cambridge, 11-12. Johnny Quce Genus, 216. Johannes de Garlandia, 32-4, 83. Johnson, Thomas, 212. Jones, Dr., 287-9. Jonson, Benjamin, 177, 233- 6. Julius Csesar, 95-6. KEN, Bishop, 137. Kent, 161. Kinaston, Sir Francis, 173, 233. Kingston-upon-Hull, 106. . Thames, 252. Kimvejmersh, Francis, 248. Knox, John, 185, 194. Kyffin, Maurice, 92. LADIES, 175. colleges for, 2QOelseq. Ladies' lapdogs, 77. Lamb, Charles, 136, 200, 253-4. Mary, 200. Lancashire, 108. Lane, A., 162-3. Languages, living, taught in England, 152 et seq., 18 171, 173. Latimer, Bishop, 221. 296 Index. Latin language. 72, 152, 155, 162-3, 229-30. authors used at St. Paul's, 100-10. barbarous or low '^8 Oxford, 11-12, 51, 70, 84-5, 132, 152, 204. Ma kins, Bathsua. 200. Malagasy language, 155. Malavan language 155 Laureateship, ancient, 67. Lawrence Pountnev,St., 136. Leghorn, English at, 278-9. Lempriere, Dr., 182. Leominster, 162. Letler-xvriting, 103. Levins, Peter, 22S. Lexicons. 225-30. Libraries, parochial, propo- sed in Scotland, ls'5-(5. Liehfield, (0. Lite. medi.M'val. illustrated bv 'incienl ^chool-books Malmesbury, 241. Manchester" 106, 132,180. Manchet bread, 140. Mantuan, Prologues of, 98. Mary, Princess, afterwards Qiieen, 117, 125, 257. Manger, Claudius, 2C-9-70. Man pas, Charles, 2O--9. May-Ftewer, the. s:4. Maypoles, 192. .Mayor of London, 77. Meals, graces at, 259. 31-2. 75-8. English, of the 16th and 17th centuries illus- trated, 259 et seq. Li) 1 v.AVil lia in .the astrologer, 158. Lilv. George, 107. William. 41. (0,81, 84-5, 118-22. 124, 139, 150-2, 161, 1K6. 216. 2/i 2, 2 45, 247. Linacre, Thomas, 102, 1 17-18, 244-5, 257 Lincolnshire, 158. Littleton, Adam, 229. Logic, 133-4. Lombard Street, 278. London, localities of, 76, 77- 8, 93-4. 113-16,156,162, 164- Medulla Grammaticcs, 225. Mercers' School, 135. Merchant Taylors' School, 1C', 21, 132, 136-42, 144-9, 223-4; Middlesex, 131. Mile-Kml Green, 162. Military science, 171. Mill,: for Children, 70. Milton, John, 158-9. Miracle of the fishes, 108. Monastic or conventual schools, 6-7. Montefiore, Sir Moses, 143. 3/o;? umenta Franciscuna quoted, 114. More, Sir Thomas, 65, 70, 112. 2'i6. 5, 258-9, 2C1-2, 278. proposed University of, in 1647-8, 166-9. Longlond, Dr., Bishop of Lincoln, 151 Lord's Prayer, 120-1. Lofhbury Garden, 93, 156. Louth, Lincolnshire, 158. Lucian, 101. 254. LudusLudi Litterarii, 1672, 144. Lvdgate, John, 37, 42-3. 99. Morris dances, 192. Morris, Richard, 45. Motto of Merchant Taylors' School, 147. Mountjoy, Lord William,103. Mrs. Leicester's school, 200. Mugwell or Monkwell Street 156. Muleaster. Richard ,138,223-4, Mules, 265. Murray, Lindley,45, llP-19. Mnsnei(,)n Minereo' at Beth- nal Green, 133, 170-4. Index. 297 GUS, 253, Music taught in the conven- tual schools, 7. _ to ladies by private masters, 175. NASH, Thomas, quoted. 19-20. Neckam, Alexander. 32. Neo-Hellenic, 249, 253. Netherlands. 273, 279. S T e \vinan, Thomas, 92. S'iger, Franciscus, 103. Nominate, the, 27 et scq. S'on sense-verses, 141. Norths of Kirtling, the, 199. sowell, Alexander, Dean of St. Paul's, 138. CCLAXD, Christopher, 230-2. Qd Brompton, 140. Cral instruction, 14. G'tus Vocabalarum. 225, 22S. 0\d in, Cesare, 153. CHd, 95. Oven, Lewis, 153. Oxford, NVaynflete's school i. 11, 12, ol, CO. 68. -J ancient educational Machinery at, 17, 133-4, L Grammar of. 1709,120. PAC, Richard, 102, 247. Pad a. 245. Palstave, John, 123, 127, 22$ Pantfles, 2C5. Papej. manufacture of, 75. . 4 different sizes of, 75. . \ royal, 264. Wotting, 264. Paris hder Philip Augustus, 33-4J Parishehurch.es in London, 78. T 194. . schools in England-,. - in Scotland, 185. libraries proposed in Scotland, 185. Partridge, John, 158. Parvula, 69-70. Parvulonun Institutio, 52. Penton, Stephen, 215. Pepys, S , 157. 175. Mrs., 175. Percy, Bishop, 7. Peroftus, Nicolaus, 39-40, 225. Pes (foot) derived from the Greek, 33. Ph(t>nisso3 of Euripides, 248. Philelphus, Franciscus, 103. Phonography, 237, 285-9. Pictorial vocabulary, 35. Play-days v. holy-days, 16. Pleunus, Henry," 27-9. Poggius (Po^gib Bracciolin 99. Polyglot vocabularies, 153-4, 27C-80. Pope, Alexandei 1 , 205. Popular literature of 1520, 88. Portraitures of the Bible. 1553, 281-3, Portuguese language, 153. Prayers at public schools, 137. Prices of provisions, 65. Prideaux, M., 132, 162, 239. Primer, National, of 1540, 123 t seq. Salisbury, 121. for children, 211, 214. Primrose, Dr., Goldsmith's, 81, 2( ; 5. Printing, notices relative to, 75. Printing-press, private, atta- ched to Merchant Taylors' School, 148-9. Probation-Day, 139-42. Professors of foreign lan- guages, 153. 298 Index. Promptorius Parvnlorum. 225. Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, 248-51. Propria quoc mar Hits, 270. Proprietary schools, 162, 1954J. 202. 206. Protestant refugees at Gene- va, 10. A. B. C., first, 1553, 212. Provincial schools, 132, 160 179-183. culture, 201-2. Pumps, 265. Punctuation, early, 79-?0. Putnev, 200. QUARTER-wages, 148-9. Quinsy, Mrs., 202. RABBARDS, R., 165. Rabelais, lO'i. Reading, 160. Reference, early books of, 239-40. Religious character of early teaching, 6-8. Remedies orholy-days,15-17. Reyriell, Sir Richard, 162. Sir Thomas, 162. Rhetoric, 132. Rhodes, 242, 245. Richmond and Derby, Mar- garet, Countess of, 217. Riding the Great Horse, 171. Riga, 107. Rightwise. John, 216. Ripley's Compound of Al- chemy, 165. Robertson, Thomas, of York 81, 150-2. Rochelle, 256. Roman Antiquities of Pri- deaux, 132. of Adams, 240. coins, weights, and measures, 230. Rome, 245. Rood, Theodore, 51. Roper, Margaret, 199. Rose, Manor of the, 136. sign of the, 258-9. Koulston, Staffordshire, 106. Ruddiman, Thomas, 187-9. Russian abacus, 215. SACKVILLE, Sir Richard, 19. 220-2, Mr. Robert, 221. Salaries of schoolmasters ir 1561, 138. School children (parish) h 1642, 194. School of fish, 76. Schools, monastic or cor- ventual, 6-7. Schools, cathedral, 7-9, 113 established in Englard 1502-15, 105-8, 210. byEdwardV., 126. Schoolmaster, the old aid ne\v, 23-6. of Old St. Paul's, 43- 14, Schoolmasters under the Common wealth, 191-2. Scogin, Jests of, 210-11. Scot, Alexander, 251 Scotland, 131, 184-9, 195197, 205, 279. Scotus, Joh., 244. Scrooby, Lincolnshire,^. Secularisation of teaaing, 204-8. Shakespear, W., 99, 15,177, 180-1, 201-2, 281. his Dr. Caiif and Duke de Jar many, 113-^. Ship of Fools. 12. Shirley, James, 237-8 Shoemaker, dialogueA'ith a, in 1597, 2(15. Short Introduction cGram- mar, by Lily, 84. Shropshire, 173, 1812. Index. 299 181-2. 181-2. Skinners' school at Ton- Sulpicius, Johannes, 40-4, 50. bridge, 135, 251. Surrev, 200. Smith Sir Thomas 247 " Lord "3 Smith's series of dictionaries Survival of early English &c., 240. system of holidays in the Sneezing, folklore of, 78. United States, 17". Somersetshire, 106. Sutton Colfield, 106. Somerville, Mrs., 199. Syms, Christopher, 163, Spalding, Augustine, 155. Spanish language, 153. Speech-Dav at Merchant TABLES of Grammar, by Taylors',' 143. John Fox, 125. Speeches at breaking-up, Teachers, foreign, 5, 66. 143-5. Terence, 46, 51, 90-4. Spelling A. B. C.,'1590, 212. Testament, Greek, 141. Spitalfields, 157. Theology in schools, 205-8. Staffordshire, 106-7. Thucydides, 252. Stage-plays in 1654, 192. Tiptoft, John, Earl of Wor- Stanbridge, John, 11, 39, 44, cester, (Hi. 53-9, 71, 122. Tom Thumb's Alphabet, 159. Standish, John, 242. Tombridge, Skinners' School Stuns puer ad mensatn , at, 135, 251. 42-3. Tree of Knowledge, the, 13. Stany hurst's Virgil, 284. Sterne's Sentimental Jour- Trinity Lane, 258-9. Tumbler, a dog, 77. ney, 267. Tunstall, Bishop, 102. St. Martin's-le-Grand, 114. Turner, Dr., 105. St. Mary-le-Bow, 114. Tusser, Thomas, 18-19. St. Mai'v Wike, Devonshire, Tutors, 161-3. 107. St. Paul's Church, 77. Churchyard 115-16 UDALL, Nicolas, 19, 21. 156, 261-2. Union, educational results School (old) 8 113 of the, 3. (Colet' c ) 100 United States svstem of ho- et seq. 120-2, 132-3, 204, lidays in the, F7. 216, 223, 242. University ot London, pro- Stock wood, John, 251. posed, in 1647-8, 166-9. Stratlbrd-on-Avon, 181, 194. Strong, Nathaniel, 156. Studies at the Musoeum Mi- VACATION, modern, not for- nervoe, 171-2. merly understood, 16. Sturmius, Johannes, 221. Valpy's Greek Grammar, Subjects taught in mediaeval 161. schools, 9-10 Vaus, John, 186. at ^t Panl' c and Mer- V6rsril Polydore 44. chant Taylors', 109-10, 137, Vimon't, M., 236.' 139, 141-2. Virgil, 43-4, 94-5, 110-11, 284. 300 Index. Vitellius, Cornelius, 244. Vives, Ludovlcus, 118. Vocabularies, 27 et seq. polyglot, 153-4. WAKES, 192, WuU-s, 131, 233. Walker, William, 158. Walter de Biblesworth, 35. Wapping, 156. Warwickshire, 60, 19'j. AVatling Street, 114. Wax candles taken by boys to school, 109, 137. - Waynflete. early school at, 11. Bishop, 11, 85. Welsh Grammar, 233. Wem, Salop, 181. Westbury, Lord Chancellor 281, note. Westminster, 17. School. 21, 132. Grammar, 160. West Point School, U. S., 17. White, Thomas, 159. Sir Thomas, 138. Whitsun-ales. 11)2. Whittinton, Robert, 39. Vi. 60-8, 81-2, 94, 96-9, 122, 186, 222. his series of gram- matical treatises described 60-6. Winchester School, 137. Wines, 256. Withals, John, 228-9. Wit ton School, near Chester 183. Wolfe. Reginald, 127. Wolsey , Cardinal, 107, 119-20. Wolverhampton. / 1()7. Women, education of, 4, 195-208. notices of, 77. Word-books, 27 ct scq. Writing, 175-7. books, abundance of, 175. XENOPHON, 254. ZENOBIA, Queen Elizabeth preferred to, 231. I THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. 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