Schools, school-books and schoolmasters; a contribution to the history of educational development in Great Britain

A SELECT LIST

OF

Morfes or fifcitions

BY

WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT

OF THE INNER TEMPLE

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED
1860—1888.

1. History of the Venetian Republic; Its Rise, its Great-
ness, and its Civilisation. With Maps and Illustrations. 4 vol.s.
8vo. Smith, Elder & Co. I860.

A new edition, entirely recast, with important additions, in 3
vols. crown 8vo, is in readiness for the press.

•2. Old English Jest-Books, 1525-1639. Edited with Intro-
ductions and Notes. Facsimiles. 3 vols. 12mo. 1864.

3. Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England.

With Introductions and Notes. 4 vols. 12mo. Woodcut*.
1864-66.

4. Handbook to the Early Popular, Poetical, and

Dramatic Literature of Great Britain. Demy STO. 1867. Pp.
714, in two columns.

5. Bibliographical Collections and Notes. 1867-76.

Medium 8vo. 1876.

This volume comprises a fiill description of about 6000 Early
English books from the books themselves. It is a sequel And
companion to No. 4. See also No. 6 infra.

6. Bibliographical Collections and Notes. SECOND SERIES.

1876-82. Medium 8vo. 1882.

Uniform with First Series. About 10,000 titles on the same
principle as before'

" Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's second series of Bibliographical Collec-
tions 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

a

volume of high value. If any one will read through the fifty-
four 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 book. Other
like entries are ' James I.,' 'Ireland,' ' France,' 'England,1 'Eli-
zabeth,' ' Scotland ' (which has twenty-one and a half columns),
and so on. As to the curiosity and rarity of 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 acquaint-
ances and friends. Ttiis second series of Collections will add to
Mr. Hazlitt's well-earned reputation as a bibliographer, and
should be in every real library through the English-speaking
world. The only thing we desiderate in it is more of his wel-
come marks and names, B.M., Britwell, Lambeth, &c., to show
where all the books approaching 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 AMD

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 Cor-

respondence. Portraits after miniatures by John Hazlitt. 2
vols. 8vo. 1867.

During the last twenty years the Author has been indefati-
gable in collecting additional information for the Life of Hazlitt,
1867, in correcting errors, and in securing all the unpublished
1 tters which have come into the market, some of great interest,
with a view to a new and improved edition.

9. Inedited Tracts. Illustrating the Manners, Opinions, and

Occupations of Englishmen 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.

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, B.C. L., one of his Execu-
tors. An entirely new edition, carefully revised and greatly
enlarged by W. Care.w Hazlitt. 2 vols. 1886. Post 8vo.

( 3 )

Ha. Mary and Charles Lamb. New Facts and Inedited Re-
mains. 8vo. Woodcuts and Facsimiles. 1874.

The groundwork of this volume was an Essay by the writer
iu JUacmiUan's Magazine.

12. English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases. Arranged

alphabetically and annotated. Medium 8vo. 1869. Second
Edition, corrected and greatly enlarged, crown 8vo. 1882.

13. Narrative of the Journey of an Irish Gentleman

through England 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.

With Notes and Facsimiles. 50 copies pi ivately printed. 1870.

17. Warton's History of English Poetry. An entirely new

edition, with Notes by Sir F. Madden, T. Wright, F. J. Furni-
vall, R. Morris, and others, and by the Editor. 4 vols. Medium
8vo. 1871.

IS. The Feudal Period. Illustrated by a Series of Tales (from
Le Grand). 12mo. 1874.

19. Prefaces, Dedications, and Epistles. Prefixed to Early

En-lish Books. 1540-1701. 8vo. 1874.
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 1679. An entirely new and greatly enlarged edition
by W. Carew Hazlitt, of that Ilk. Medium 8vo. 1874.

21. Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays. A new

edition, greatly enlarged, corrected throughout, and entirely re-
arranged. With a Glossary by L»r. Richard Morris. 15 vols.
8vo. 1874-76.

22. Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances. Illustrating

Shakespear and othtr Early English Writers. 12mo. 1875.

( 4 )

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 Condition 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 pre-
paration.

26. The Baron's Daughter. A Ballad. 75 copies printed.

4to. 1877.

27. The Essays of Montaigne. Translated by C. Cotton. An

entirely new edition, collated with the best French text. With
a Memoir, and all the extant Letters. Portrait and Illustra-
tions. 3 vols. 8vo. 1877.
The only library edition.

28. Catalogue of the Huth Library. [English portion.] 5

vols. Large 8vo. 1880. 200 copies printed.

29. Offspring of Thought in Solitude. Modern Essays.

1884. 8vo, pp. 334.

Some of these Papers were originally contributed to All the
Tear Round, &c.

30. Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. 12-mo.

1886.

31. An Address to the Electors of Mid-Surrey, among

whom I Live. In Rejoinder to Mr. Gladstone's Manifesto. 18S6.
8vo, pp. 32.

" Who would not grieve, if such a man there be ?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he ? "— POPE.

32. Gleanings hi Old Garden Literature. I2mo. 1887.

33. Schools, School-books, and Schoolmasters. A Con-

tribution to the History of Educational Development. 12mo.
1888.

34. Studies in Jocular and Anecdotal Literature. I2mo.

In January next.

SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS,

AND

SCHOOLMASTERS.

SCHOOLS
SCHOOL-BOOKS

AND

SCHOOLMASTERS

Contribution to t£e $>i0torg of (EEUucational
Development in <&reat Britain

BY

W. CAREW HAZLITT

LONDON
J. W. JARVIS & SON

KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND
1888

THE

fUHIVBESITT]

SI LJ-l+'S'

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

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.

SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS,

AND

SCHOOLMASTERS.

SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS,

AND

SCHOOLMASTERS.

I.

Introductory survey of 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

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 best 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 ?J

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 boy 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 development and progress of litera-

6 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. 7

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 the
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 all
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 qfficio. 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
warping course 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 a 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.

io 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
Constantinus, 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. 1 1

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 Accidence
and Syntax were taught on an improved plan.
The last-named seminary was within the pre-
cincts 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.

As 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,
a Buckinghamshire man, and author of that

12 Schools, School-Books,

ID.

/;

rather well-known Latin description of the
University as reformed by the Republicans in
16^48, was head-master of Magdalen School.

In the English Ship of Fools, 1509, which is
a good deal more than a translation, Barclay
ridicules the archaic system of teaching, and
Skelton does the same in his poetical satires.
It was by the indefatigable exposure of the
inefficiency and unsoundness of the prevailing
modes of instruction that reforms were gradu-
ally conceded and accomplished. In all poli-
tical and social movements the caricaturist plays
his part.

It is not surprising to find Ascham in his
turn, fifty years later on, taking exception to
the school-teaching and teachers which had
educated, and more or less satisfied, so many
anterior generations, f

We naturally encounter in much of the
literary work of the seventeenth century advice
and information in matters relating to scho-
lastic and academical culture wholly unhelpful
to an inquiry into the training of the middle
class. In the section of a well-known book,
entitled The Gentleman's Calling, 8vo, 1660,

and Schoolmasters. 1 3

dedicated to our immediate subject, the ano-
nymous author observes : " Scarce any that
owns the name of a Gentleman, but will commit
his Son to the care of some Tutor, either at
home or abroad, who at first instils those Rudi-
ments, proper to their tenderer years, and as Age
matures their parts, so advances his Lectures,
till he have led them into those spacious fields
of learning, which will afford them both Exercise
and Delight. This is that Tree of Knowkdge
upon which there is no interdict. . . ."

The preceding extract points to a sphere of
life which was wont to conclude its preparatory
stage with the Grand Tour and an initiation
into the profligacy of all the capitals of Europe ;
but we see that it deals with a case in which a
tutor took a youth almost, as it were, from his
nurse's apron-strings, and does not merely indi-
cate a finishing course. The volume from
which the passage comes has a promising title,
and might have been intensely interesting and
truly important ; but it was written by some
dry and pedantic scribbler, and, like Osborne's
Advice to a Son, 1656, and many other trea-
tises of a cognate character, is a tissue of dul-

J.X1

/

14 Schools, School-Books,

ness and inanity. It is characteristic of the
whole that portraits of Jeremiah and Zedekiah
are selected as appropriate graphic embellish-
ments.

From a woodcut on the back of the title-
page of a Grammatica Initialis, or Elementary
Grammar, 1509, we form a conclusion as to
the ancient Continental method of instruction.
This engraving portrays the interior of a school,
apparently situated in a crypt ; the master is
seated at his desk with a book open before
him, and above it a double inkstand and a pen,
both of primitive fabric. The teacher is evi-
dently reading aloud to his four scholars, who
sit in front of him, a passage from the volume,
and they repeat after him, parson-and-clerk-
wise. They learn by rote. They have no books
before them. They represent a stage in the
teaching process before the science of reading
from print or MS. had been acquired by the
scholar, and copies of school-books were multi-
plied by the press. There was no preparation
of work. The quarter wage included no charge
for books supplied. The teaching was purely
oral. / So it was probably throughout. It was

and Schoolmasters. 1 5

thus that Stanbridge, Whittinton, Lily, and their
followers conducted their schools, long after the
cradle at Magdalen had been reinforced by other
seminaries all over the country.

There is no written record of this fashion of
communicating information from the master to
the pupil, so diametrically opposed to modern
ideas, but conformable to an era of general
illiteracy ; it is a sister-art, which lends us a
helping hand in this case by admitting us to
what may be viewed as an interior coeval with
Erasmus and More.

The modern school-holidays appear to have
been formerly unknown. In the rules for the
management of St. Paul's and Merchant Tay-
lors', for instance, where a vacation is called a
remedy, no such indulgence was permitted save
in cases of illness; and it is curious that in
the account which Fitzstephen gives of the
three seminaries already established in London
in the reign of Henry II. the boys are repre-
sented as spending the holy days (rather than
holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and
disputations.

In all the public schools, indeed, holidays

1 6 Schools, School-Books,

were at first intimately associated with the re-
currence of saints' anniversaries and with fes-
tivals of the Church, and were restricted to
them. The modern vacation was not under-
stood ; and the first step toward it, and the
earliest symptom of a revolt against the absence
of any such intervals for diversion from studies
and attendance at special services, was an appeal
made in 1644 to the Court of the Company by
the scholars of Merchant Taylors " for play-
days instead of holy-days."

The object of this petition was to procure a
truce with work and an opportunity for exercise
and sport, in lieu of a system under which the
boys, from their point of view, merely substi-
tuted one kind of task for another; but the
time had not yet arrived for reform in this
matter; our elders clang tenaciously to the
stern and monotonous routine which they found
established, and in which they had been bred ;
and the feeling in favour of relaxing the tension
by regular intervals of complete repose is an
incidence of modern thought, which betrays
a tendency at the present moment to gravitate
too far to the opposite extreme.

and Schoolmasters. 1 7

A quite recent report of one of the great
schools in the United States— the West Point
School — manifests a survival of the old-fash-
ioned ideas upon this subject, carried out by the
Pilgrim Fathers to the American Plantations;
and whereas in the mother country the original
release from work in order to attend religious
services has resolved itself into the latter-day
vacation or holiday, the modern educational
system beyond the Atlantic seems to withdraw
the boys from the church, not in favour of the
playground or the country, but as a means of
lengthening the hours of study.

IV. Ingulphus, who lived in the reign of
Edward the Confessor (A.D. 1041-66), furnishes
us with the earliest actual testimony of a school-
boy's experiences. " I was born," he tells us,
" in the beautiful city of London j educated in
my tender years at Westminster : from whence
I was afterwards sent to the Study of Oxford,
where I made greater progress in the Aristo-
telian philosophy than many of my contempo-
raries, and became very well acquainted with the

Rhetoric of Cicero." It is very interesting to

B

1 8 Schools, School-Books,

learn further that, when he was at school at
Westminster, and used to visit his father at the
Court of Edward, he was often examined, both
on the Latin language and on logic, by the
Queen herself.

Insights of this kind at so early a period are
naturally rare, and indeed we have to cross
over to the Tudor time and the infancy of
Eton before we meet with another such personal
trait on English ground.

Thomas Tusser, author of the Points of Good
Husbandry^ admits us in his metrical autobio-
graphy to an acquaintance with the severity of
treatment which awaited pupils in his time at
public schools, and which, in fact, lingered, as
part of the gross and ignorant system, down to
within the last generation. We have all heard
of the renowned Dr. Busby ; but that celebrated
character was merely a type which has happened
from special circumstances to be selected for
commemoration. Tusser, describing his course
of training, says : —

From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,

To learn straightways the Latin phrase ;

and Schoolmasters. 19

Where fifty-three stripes given to me

At once I had.

For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pass that beat I was :
See, Udall, see the mercy of thee

To me, poor lad ! "

But this kind of experience was too common ;
and it had its advocates even outside the pro-
fessional pale : for Lord Burleigh, as we learn
from Ascham, was on the side of the discip-
linarians.

Sir Richard Sackville, Ascham's particular
friend, on the contrary, bitterly deplored the
hindrance and injury which he had suffered
as a boy from the harshness of his teacher;
and Udall himself carried his oppression so
far as to offend his employers and procure his
dismissal.

Nash, in Summer's Last Will and Testament,
1600, makes Summer say: — "Here, before all
this company, I profess myself an open enemy
to ink and paper. I'll make it good upon the
accidence, body of me ! that in speech is the
devil's paternoster. Nouns and pronouns, I
pronounce you as traitors to boys' buttocks;
syntaxis and prosodia, you are tormentors of

2O Schools, School-Books,

wit, and good for nothing, but to get a school-
master twopence a week ! "

In a French sculpture of the end of the
fourteenth century we have probably as early a
glimpse as we are likely to get anywhere graphi-
cally of a scene in a school, where a mistress is
administering castigation to one of her pupils
laid across her knees, the others looking on.
But it soon became a favourite subject for the
illustrator and caricaturist.

The strictness of scholastic discipline existed
in an aggravated form, no doubt, in early days,
and formed part of a more barbarous system of
retribution for wrong done or suffered. The
principle of wholesale and indiscriminate flagel-
lation for offences against the laws of the school
or for neglect of studies marched hand in hand
with the vindictive legislation of bygone days ;
and doubtless, from the first, the rod often
supplied a vent for the temper or caprice of the
pedagogue.

At Merchant Taylors' in my time the cane
was freely used, and the forms of chastisement
were the cut on the hand and the bender, for
which the culprit had to stoop.

and Schoolmasters. 2 1

The regime of the once redoubtable Dr.
Busby at Westminster was a kind of survival of
the Draconic rule of Udall at Eton when poor
Tusser was there ; and it is exceedingly probable
that in the time of Charles IL notions of what
was salutary for youth in the shape of unguentum
baculinum, or stick-ointment, had undergone
very slight alteration since the previous cen-
tury. Busby, of whom there is a strange-
looking portrait in Nichols' Anecdotes^ was
the most sublime of coxcombical Dons, and
within his own pale an autocrat second to
none of the Caesars. Smaller luminaries in
the same sphere paid him homage in dedica-
tory epistles.

Everybody must remember the traditional
anecdote of the visit of Charles II. to West-
minster, and of the King, with his hat under
his arm, walking complacently behind Busby
through the school, the latter covered ; and of
the head-master, when his Majesty and himself
(Ego et rex meus over again) were beyond
observation, bowing respectfully to Charles,
trencher-cap in hand, and explaining that if the
boys had any idea that there was a greater man

22 Schools, School-Books,

in England than him, his authority would be at
an end.

But there is a second story of Busby and a
luckless Frenchman who threw a stone by acci-
dent through one of the windows while the
lessons were in progress and the principal was
hearing a class. Busby sent for the offender,
thinking it was one of the boys in the play-
ground ; but when the stranger was introduced, it
was " Take him up," and a flogging was inflicted
before the whole assembly. The Frenchman
went away in a fury, and at once sent a challenge
to Busby by a messenger. The Doctor reads
the cartel, and cries, "Take him up," and the
envoy shares the fate of his employer. He,
too, enraged at the treatment, returns, and
demands compensation from Monsieur; but
the latter shrugs his shoulders, and can only
say, " Ah, me ! he be the vipping man ; he vip
me, he vip you, he vip all the world."

It was of Busby that some one said how
fortunate it was for the Seraphim and Cherubim
that they had no nether extremities, or when
he joined them, he would have "taken them
up," as the Red Indian in his happy hunting-

and Schoolmasters. 23

grounds still pursues his favourite occupation
on earth.

Charles Burney, one of a famous and ac-
complished family, kept school at one time at
Greenwich. He subsequently removed to Chis-
wick. There are still persons living who recol-
lect him and his oddities. He was a great
martinet — a miniature Busby; but a singular
point about him was his habit of inserting in
the quarterly accounts sent to the parents a
charge for the birch-rods bought in the course
of the term, and applied for the benefit of
his pupils. This was a novel and ingenious
method, a treatment of the question from a
financier's point of view ; and if black draughts
and blue pills were recognised as legitimate
items in the school-bill, why not the materials
for external application ?

The condition of the schoolmaster himself,
on the other hand, and of his allies, the tutor
and the usher, was as far removed from our
present ideas as the code which he enforced
and the books which he expounded. The freer
diffusion of knowledge and an advanced civili-
sation have tended to liberate the schoolboy

24 Schools, School-Books,

from the barbarous despotism of his teachers,
the majority of whom were latter-day survi-
vals of a decadent type, and to raise the latter
in the social scale. The rod is broken, and
Busbyism is extinct. But the successors of that
renowned personage enjoy a higher rank and
enlarged opportunities, and may maintain both
if they keep pace with the progress of thought
and opinion.

The schoolmaster has set his house in order
at the eleventh hour, in obedience to external
pressure, coming from men who have revolted
against the associations and prejudices of early
days, and inaugurated a new educational Hegira ;
and the evolutions of this modern platform are
by no means fully manifest.

The propensity of the class to adhere to
ancient traditions in regard to the application
of corporal punishment was, of course, to be
checked only by the force of public opinion.
Had it not been that the latter was gradually
directed against the evil, the probability is that
this would have ranked among those popular
antiquities which time has not seriously or gene-
rally touched. But so early as 1669 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-discipline
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
may be 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 Nominalia
— Their manifold utility— Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric
(tenth century) — Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander
Neckara on utensils (twelfth century) — Works of
Johannes de Garlandia — His Dictionary (thirteenth cen-
tury) and its pleasant treatment — The Pictorial Vocabu-
lary—Anglo-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
in this country from the Middle Ages to the
invention of printing.

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 were advisedly thrown, as far
as possible, into an interlocutory form — the
form most apt to impress circumstances and
names on the memories of pupilSy/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 trea-
tises 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 rather call a
Phrase-Book. /

3O 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 Saxon gloss. It is significant
of the harsh discipline which prevailed in those
days that one of the foremost points of 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

and Schoolmasters. 3 1

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 was
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," says
he, "dicitur libellus iste a dictionibus magis

and Schoolmasters. 33

necessariis, quas tenetur quilibet scolaris, non
tantum in scrinio de linguis facto, sed in cordis
armariolo firmiter retinere, ut ad faciliorem
oracionis constructionem perveniat. Primo
igitur sciat vulgaria nominare. Placet igitur
a membris humani corporis incoare. . . ."

This phrase or word book, which was pro-
bably composed about 1220, enters into the most
minute particulars under all the heads 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 domiciled him-
self in France, chiefly at Paris, where he gives
us an account of his house and garden, 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 Columbus, it might
have supplied a note and a point to Mr.

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 Augustus, as 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 communicative-
ness 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 !

III. Passing from him, his pleasant book, and
its pleasant associations with cordial regret, I
just notice the other and latter-day word-books,
which 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
ritk) both in England and abroad. Criticism
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/.?, bespeak a Pyrenaean origin.

This production is intituled " Le treytyz
ke moun sire Gauter de Bibelesworthe fist a
ma dame Dyonisie de Mounchensy, pur aprise
de langwage, 90 est a saver, du primer temps
ke homme 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 unt la peel,
De morte beste quyr jo apel.
Le clerk soune le dreyne'apel,
Le prestre fat a Roume apel.
Ore avet 90 ke pent a cors,
Dedens ausy et deors.

Vestet vos dras, me chers enfauns,
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 deductions,
the work is of singular curiosity and fascination,
not only for its own sake, but as the best philo-
logical standard which we seem to have to put
side by side with its successors in the same
important direction.

III.

Earliest printed works of instruction — Publications of Bishop
Perottus — His Grammatical Rules — Johannes Sulpicius
and his Opus Grammaticum — Some account of the
book — Importance and influence of these foreign
Manuals in England — The Carmen Juvenile or Stans
Puer ad Mensam — Alexander Gallus or De Villa. Dei
and his Doctrinale — The Doctrinale one of the earliest
productions of the Dutch press — ^Elius Donatus — His
immense popularity and weight both at home and
abroad — Selections or abridgments of his Grammar
used in English schools.

I. THE most ancient published books of in-
struction for Englishmen in scholastic and aca-
demical culture emanated from a foreign country
and press. When the Vocabularies, Grammars,
and other Manuals ceased to circulate in a
manuscript form, or to be written and multi-
plied by teachers for the use of their own pupils,
the early Parisian printers supplied the market
with the works, which it had been theretofore

Schools and Schoolmasters. 39

possible to procure only to a very limited extent,
in transcripts executed by the authors them-
selves or by professional copyists.

The educational writings of some of the men,
whose influence for good in this direction had
of course been greatly circumscribed by the
ignorance of typography, found their way into
print. But one of the foremost persons who
addressed himself to the task of diffusing a
knowledge of elementary learning and of
teaching English by Latin was NICHOLAUS
PEROTTUS, BISHOP OF SIPONTUM, whose Gram-
matical Ruhs first appeared, so far as I know,
in 1486.*

The examples of fifteenth-century English,
which make in our eyes its chief value, were
of course introduced as casual illustrations.

The lexicographical and grammatical works
of this noted prelate undoubtedly exercised a

* There is some sort of evidence that the Grammar of
Perottus was in demand here in England as a work of
reference and instruction ; for I find it in the interesting
account-book of John Dorne of Oxford for 1520. It is
bracketed with the Vulgaria ofWhittinton and the Vocabula
and Accidence of Stanbridge as having fetched, the four
together, 35. It is described as being in leather binding, in
quarto.

40 Schools, School-Books,

very powerful and beneficial influence at, and
long after, the period of their composition ; and
I am disposed to think that this was particu-
larly the case with his Rudimenta Grammatices,
1476, and his Cornucopia Linguae. Latina, 1490.
The former was not only imported into this
country for sale, but was reprinted here in 1512,
and the Cornucopia forms part of the ground-
work of our own Ortus Vocabulorum, 1500.

II. Next in succession to Bishop Perrot,
whose publications, however, cannot be said to
belong to the present category in more than
an incidental degree, was JOHANNES SULPICIUS
VERULANUS, who is perhaps to be viewed as
the leader of the movement for spreading, not
only in France, but in England, a fuller and
more scholarly acquaintance with the laws of
grammar. Nearly the first book which pro-
ceeded from the press of Richard Pynson was
his Opus Grammaticum, 4to, 1494.

Almost every successive impression seems to
differ in the contents or their distribution, owing,
as I apprehend, to the circumstance that the
volume was compounded of separate tracts, of

and Schoolmasters. 4 1

which some were occasionally added or omitted
at pleasure, or variously placed.

The edition of 1505 comprises the under-
mentioned pieces : —

Sulpitii Verulani examen de 8 partibus orationis.

De declinatione nominum.

De preteritis & supinis.

Carmen iuuenile de moribus mensse.

Vocabulorum interpretatio.

lod. Badii Ascensii De regimine dictionum.

Sulp. Verul. De regimine & constructione.

De componendis ordinandisq. epistolis.

De carminibus.

The title-leaf presents the woodcut, often em-
ployed by Pynson in his later performances, of
a person, probably a schoolmaster, seated at a
plutus or reading-desk, holding a paper in one
hand, and reading from a book which lies
open before him.

Whatever may now be thought of them, the
philological labours of Sulpicius, which were
subsequently edited and glossed by Badius
Ascensius, were long extremely popular and
successful, and a very large number of copies
must have been in English hands during the
reigns of Henry the Seventh and his son. Of
these, as I have said, some proceeded from

42 Schools, School-Books,

the London press, while others were imported
from Paris.

The fasciculi in one of 1511 are as fol-
low:—

Sulpitii Examen de octo partibus orationis.

Carmen luuenile.

De declinatione nominum orthoclitorum

heteroclitorum.

De nominibus heteroclitis.
De generibus nominum.
De verbis defectiuis.
De praeteritis verborum.

De supinis

De regimine et constructione dictionum Libellus.

De componendis ornandisq; epistolis.

De Carminibus.

De quantitate syllabarum.

De A, E, &c. in primis syllabis.

mediis

De ultimis syllabis.

De Carminibus decoro [sic] &c.

Donati de figuris opusculum.

De latinarum dictionum recta scriptura.

De grecarum dictionum orthographia.

De ratione dipthongangi.

Ascensii de orthographia carmina.

Vocabulorum interpretatio.

The Carmen Juvenile, inserted here and in
the antecedent issues, is the poem better known
as Stans Puer ad Mensam^ and in its English
dress by Lydgate. Mr. Blades tells us that the

and Schoolmasters. 43

editio princeps of the Latin poem appeared in
1483, and that Caxton printed Lydgate's Eng-
lish one at an anterior date. Lydgate, however,
had been dead many years when his production
saw the light in type, and as he could scarcely
have translated the piece from Sulpicius, the
probability seems to be that both resorted to
a pre-existent original, which the Englishman
rendered into his own tongue, and the foreign
grammarian adopted or modernised. A com-
parison of the English text with that given in
the work of Sulpicius shews considerable varia-
tions ; the latter version is here and there more
outspoken and blunt in its language than the
paraphrase of the good Monk of Bury St.
Edmunds. It is accompanied by a running
gloss by the learned Ascensius ; and although
the book was ostensibly designed for the use
of students, the contractions are unusually
troublesome, and many of the proper names are
exhibited in an orthography at any rate rather
peculiar. The god whose special province was
the management of the solar orb is introduced
as formosus appollo. His substitution of Ver-
gilius as the name of the Latin poet is so far

44 Schools, School-Books,

not remarkable, inasmuch as Polydore Vergil of
Urbino appears always to have spelled his name
so, and in the edition of Virgil by Aldus, 1501,
the author is called Vergilius. I am afraid that
if I were to furnish a specimen of the contrac-
tions, a modern typographer would be puzzled
to reproduce it with the desirable exactitude.

III. When one turns over the leaves of a
volume of this kind, and sees the way in which
the avenue to learning and knowledge was ham-
pered by pedantic and ignorant instructors, it
seems marvellous, not that the spread of educa-
tion was so slow and partial, but that so many
scholars should have emerged from such a
process.

A more obscure and repellent series of gram-
matical dissertations can hardly be imagined ;
yet Sulpicius holds a high rank among the pro-
moters of modern education, as the precursor of
all those, such as Robert Whittinton, John Stan-
bridge, and William Lily, who, after the revival
of learning and the institution of the printing-
press, prepared the way for improved methods
and more enlightened preceptors. His followers

and Schoolmasters. 45

naturally went beyond him ; but Sulpicius was
doubtless as much in advance of his forerun-
ners as Richard Morris is in advance of Lindley
Murray.

After the restoration of letters, Sulpicius
seems to have been the pioneer in re-erecting
grammar into a science, and formulating its
rules and principles on a systematic basis.

In enumerating the aids to learning which
the English received from the Continent, we
must not overlook Alexander Callus, or Alexan-
der de Villi Dei, a French Minorite and school-
teacher of the thirteenth century, who reduced
the system of Priscian to a new metrical plan,
doubtless for the use of his own pupils, as well
as his personal convenience and satisfaction.

The Doctrinale of Alexander, which is in
leonine verse, circulated more or less in MS.
during his life, and was one of the earliest
books committed to the press, as a fragment
on vellum with the types of Laurence Coster
of Haarlem establishes. It was repeatedly pub-
lished abroad, but does not really seem to
have ever gained a strong footing among our-
selves, since three editions of it are all that

46 Schools, School-Books,

I can trace as having come from London
presses, and of these the first was in 1503.
It did not, in fact, command attention till we
were on the eve of a great reform in our school-
books; and while in France, if not elsewhere
abroad, it preserved its popularity during two
or three centuries, till it was supplanted by the
Grammar and Syntax of Despauterius about
1515, here in a dozen years it had run its course,
and scarcely left even the marks of its influence
behind.

IV. But the prototype of all the grammatical
writers and teachers of early times in this as
well as other countries was ^Euus DONATUS,
a Roman professor of the fourth century, who
probably acquired his experience from Priscian
and the other works published under the Empire
upon his favourite science, and who had the
honour to number Saint Jerome among his
disciples.

Donatus is the author of a System of Grammar
in three parts, and of a series of Prefaces and
Scholia to Terence; and his reputation be-
came so great and was so widely diffused, that

and Schoolmasters. 47

a Donatus or Donet was a well-understood
synonym for a Primer, and John of Basing
even christens his Greek Grammar, compiled
about 1240, Donatus Grcecorum. Langland,
in his Vision concerning Piers Ploughman,
written a century later, says —

" Thaune drowe I me amonges draperes my donet
to lerne ; "

and the Testament of Love alludes to the work
in similar terms. ' " In the statutes of Winchester
College [written about 1386]," says Warton, "a
grammar is called Antiquus Donatus, Le. the
Old Donat, or the name of a system of grammar
at that time in vogue, and long before. The
French have a book entitled * Le Donnet, traite
de grammaire. . . . Among Rawlinson's MSS.
at Oxford I have seen Donatus optimus noviter
compilatus, a manuscript on vellum, given to
Saint Albans by John Stoke, Abbot in 1450.
In the introduction, or lytell Proheme, to Dean
Colet's Grammatices Rudimenta, we find men-
tion made of ' certayne introducyons into latyn
speche called Donates, &c. . . . Cotgrave . . .
quotes an old French proverb : ' Les diables

48 Schools, School-Books,

etoient encores a leur Donat ' — The devils were
but yet in their grammar."

In common with JEsop, the Dialogus Crea-
turarum, and other peculiarly popular works,
Donatus lent his name to productions which
really had no connection with his own, and we
find such titles as Donatus Moralizatus^ Donatus
Christianatus, adopted by writers of a diffe-
rent class in order to attract attention and gain
acceptance.

In England, however, the works of Donatus
do not appear to have obtained the same broad
footing which they probably did in Italy. The
modern edition by Lindemann, taken from a
manuscript at Berlin, exhibits the entire system
divided into three sections or books. But all
that we know to have passed the press, at all
events in this country, are two pieces evidently
prepared for petty schools — the Donatus Minor
and the Donatus pro piteris, both published at
the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the
sixteenth century.

The former has on the title-page a large wood-
cut, representing a schoolmaster in a sort of
thronal chair, with the instrument of correction

and Schoolmasters. 49

in his hand, and three pupils kneeling in front
of him. Both the teacher and his scholars wear
the long hair of the period and plain close caps.
It is curious that the pupils should not be un-
covered, but the engraving could not, perhaps,
be altered.

" The work begins with the title ' De Nomine.'
Almost every page has a distinct running title
descriptive of the subject below treated of.
Herbert properly adds : ' In this book the
declension of some of the pronouns is very
rerrarkable, viz. N. Ego. G. mei vel mis. N.
Tu. G. tui vel tis. N. Quis vel qui, que vel
qua, Quod vel quid. PI. D. & Ab. quis vel
quibus. Also Nostras and Vestras are declined
throughout without the neuter gender.' "

IV.

Rise of native teachers — Magdalen College School, Oxford
— John Annaquil, its first master, and his grammatical
handbooks — The Compendium Grammatices with the
Vulgaria of Terence annexed — The Paruulorum Insti-
tutio — Personal allusions in the examples given — JOHN
STANBRIDGE — Account of his works, with extracts of
interesting passages — ROBERT WHITTINTON — His sec-
tional series of Grammars.

I. THE influence of Donatus was both wide-
spread and of prolonged duration, and we must
regard the ancient capital of the civilised world
as the focus and cradle of all modern gramma-
tical literature. Upon the great revival of cul-
ture, many Englishmen repaired to Rome to
undergo a formal training for the scholastic pro-
fession under the masters who arose there, among
whom were Sulpicius, author, as we have seen,
of several educational tracts, which obtained con-
siderable currency here, and Johannes Balbus,
who compiled the famous Catholicon.

Schools and Schoolmasters. 5 1

The LEXICON and DICTIONARY naturally fol-
lowed the Primer ; and our earliest productions
of this kind were formed out of the Vocabu-
laries composed and printed abroad — not in
Italy, but in Germany, as a rule. But while in
many instances we are made acquainted with the
writers or editors of the smaller treatises, the
names of those laborious men who undertook
the compilation of the first type of glossographi-
cal Manual are scarcely known.

But the time soon arrived when a native
school of tuition was formed in England, and
its original seat seems to have been at the Free
School immediately adjacent to Magdalen Col-
lege, Oxford.

We find John Annaquil mentioned as the
master of this seminary in the time of Henry
the Seventh, and it is the most ancient record
of it that has been apparently recovered. Anna-
quil, of whom our knowledge is extremely scanty,
wrote, for the use more immediately of his own
pupils, Compendium Grammatices, with an Anglo-
Latin version of the Vulgar ta of Terence an-
nexed. This volume was printed at Oxford by
Theodore Rood about 1484; and an edition of

52 Schools, School-Books,

the work entitled Parvulorum Institutio^ ascribed
to the same press, was doubtless prepared by
Annaquil, or under his direction, for the benefit
of his school. Such fragments as have been re-
covered of this book exhibit variations from the
later copies, into which subsequent editors pur-
posely introduced improvements and corrections.
There are some familiar allusions here, such as,
had they been more numerous, might have ren-
dered these ancient educational tracts more
attractive and precious even than they are. I
mean such entries as, " I go to Oxford : Eo
Oxonium or Ad Oxonium" " I shall go to Lon-
don : Ibo Londinum"

Knight explains these references in his Life
of Dean Colet : " It may not be amiss to remark
that many of the examples in the Latin Grammar
pointed to the then juncture of public affairs ;
viz., the prosecution of Empson and Dudley in
the beginning of Henry VIII.'s reign : as Regum
est tueri leges : Refert omnium animadverti in
malos. And this humour was the reason why,
in the following editions of the Syntax, there
were examples accommodated to the respec-
tive years of the impressions ; as, Audito regem

and Schoolmasters. 5 3

Doroberniam profidsci ; Imperator [Maximilian]
meruit sub rege, &c. There were likewise in
that edition of Erasmus several examples re-
ferring to Dean Colet, as Vixit Roma, studuit
Oxonii, natus est Londini, discessit Londini^ &c."
Annaquil is supposed to have died about
1488, and was succeeded in his work by John
Stanbridge, who is much better known as a
grammarian than his predecessor. Stanbridge
was a native of Northamptonshire, according to
Wood, and received his education at Winches-
ter. In 1481 he was admitted to New College,
Oxford, after two years' probation, and remained
there five years, at the end of which he was
appointed first usher under Annaquil of the
Free School aforesaid, and after his principal's
death took his place. The exact period of his
death is not determined ; but he probably lived
into the reign of Henry the Eighth.

II. The writings of Stanbridge are divisible
into two sections — those which he published
in his own lifetime, and those which appeared
after his death in the form either of reim-
pressions or selections by his pupil Whittinton
and others. The former category embraces :

54 Schools, School-Books,

i. ACCIDENCE; 2. VOCABULA; 3. VULGARIA.
In the latter I include : i. ACCIDENTIA EX STAN-
BRIGIANA EDITION E RECOGNITA lima Roberti
Whittintoni; 2. PARVULORUM INSTITUTIO EX
STANBRIGIANA COLLECTIONS. The first of these
productions, not strictly to be regarded as pro-
ceeding from the pen of Stanbridge, bears the
name of Whittinton ; the second I merely
apprehend to have been his. But the line of
distinction between the publications of Stan-
bridge himself and posthumous, or at any rate
not personally superintended reprints, is one
which ought to be drawn.

There is an edition of Stanbridge's Accidence,
printed at the end of the sixteenth century by
Caxton's successor at Westminster. The varia-
tions between it and the collections which were
modelled upon it, probably by John Holt,
whom I shall again mention, are thus explained
and stated by the author of the Typographical
Antiquities : —

" This treats of the eight parts of reason ; but
they differ in several respects as to the manner
of treating of them ; this treating largely of the
degrees of comparison, which the other (Acci-
dentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione) does not

and Schoolmasters. 5 5

so much as mention. That gives the moods
and tenses of the 4. conjugations at large, both
active and passive, whereas this gives only a
few short rules to know them by. Again, this
shews the concords of grammar, which the
other has not."

There are at least three issues of the Acci-
dence from London presses, and a fourth in an
abridged shape from an Antwerp one, presum-
ably for the convenience of English residents
in the Low Countries. The tide had by this
time begun to a certain extent to flow in an
opposite direction, as it were, and not only in-
troductions to our own language were executed
here and reproduced abroad, but Latin authors
were beginning to find competent native inter-
preters, among whom John Annaquil was per-
haps the foremost.

Next to the Accidence of Stanbridge I shall
consider briefly his Vocabula, which was, on the
whole, the most popular of his works, and con-
tinued for the greatest length of time in vogue,
as I record editions of it as late as the period
of the Civil War (1647). I have not, on the
other hand, met with any anterior to 1510.
Annexed is a specimen : —

56

Schools, School-Books,

fllll^-tt^l

Illliiiii

£•£ 2 r g ^

«- m, «

O nr? ~

and Schoolmasters. 57

This extract is highly edifying. In the con-
cluding line ponto, a ferry-barge, is the modern
punt) and lynter, a cock-boat, is the early
Venetian lintra^ to which I refer in Venice be-
fore the Stones as antecedent to the gondola.

III. The remaining contribution of Stan-
bridge to this class of literature is his Fu/garia,
which I take to be the least known. Dibdin
describes it somewhat at large, and it may be
worth while to transfer a specimen hither : —

" Sinciput^ et vertex, caput, octipuf, et coma, crinis.

1)OC sinciput, 10, the fore parte of the heed

fjtc fcettcx, tis, for the crowne of the heed

J)OC caput, is, for a heed

fjoc occiput, is, the hynder parte of the heed

tfC coma, t, for a brisshe

tic crinis, nts, for a heer

A garment a clothe idem apparayle

f^tc indumentum bestts fcestitus amtctus

idem idem idem

©rnatuss simul apparatus amtculus toem

a cappe agat : e idem

Esta caput gcstat apci caltptra galerus
a cappe idem an hood idem

Birctum piltus cuculus capittumq ;

58 Schools, School-Books,

Vulgaria quedd cu suis vernaculis compilata iuxta
consuetudinem ludi Utterarij diui Pauli.

Good morowe. "Bonu tttri ^juiujS Btei git prtmoruiB.
Good nyght. TBottatto£,trattquinan0j:,optata requte^&c.
Scolers must lyue hardly at Oxford.
<§>cola$!tic0$ ©]contt parce towere opomt,
My fader hath had a greate losse on the see.
Pater metus magna p ttauftagtu iactura Ijaftutt.

Wysshers and wolders be small housholders.

ntuittas montca Tjosspttalitate ofcsseruant,"

The abridgments of Stanbridge's Accidence
led, I presume, to the distinction of the ori-
ginal text as the Long Accidence^ although I have
not personally met with more than a single
edition of the work under such a title. Dibdin,
however, has a story that John Bagford had
heard of one printed at Tavistock, for which
the said John " would have stuck at no price."

The chief of these adaptations of the Ac-
cidence is the Parvulorum Institutio, which I
have described as probably emanating, in the
first place, from the earliest press for the use
of the earliest known school at Oxford. But
it was reprinted with alterations by Stanbridge,
and perhaps by John Holt. In Dibdin's account
of one of these recensions he observes : —

and Schoolmasters.

59

"The work begins immediately on sign.
A ij : — ' What is to be done whan an englysshe
is gyuen to be made in latyn ? Fyrst the
verbe must be loked out, and yf there be
moo verbes than one in a reason, I must
loke out the pryncypall verbe and aske this
questyon who or what, and that word that
answereth to the questyon shall be the no-
mynatyve case to the verbe. Except it be a
verbe Impersonell the whiche wyll haue no
nomynative case.'

" On the last leaf but one we have as fol-
lows : —

Cice. qqhecau-
ditu acerba sunt.

Tere. turpe
dictu.

Qui. multa
dictu visuq; mir-
anda.

Teretius. quid-
naincepturus es.

Tere. uxor tibi
ducenda est pa-
phyle Te oro vt
nuptie quefuerant
future fiant.

llrirug iucutttiug abjSurDug turpe
galttber.

^irantjujs minus puUTjrum $ftt
periculogujs.

ttjere comet!) a feerbe after
ssum eg frit tottfjout a telatpbe
or a contunccpott pf it be of tlje
actpue sfpgnpfjcac^on it ss^aH i>e
put in a partpcppte of fTje fprjst
Siutertenss pf $e be of tTje pajssipue
gjmjjfacott Ije jsTjaU be put in tlje
part^cppte of tbe latter jstttertenjs,
except ejcuTo, tapulo, beneo, fio.

60 Schools, School-Books,

IV. Robert Whittinton, whose name is pro-
bably more familiar to the ordinary student
than that of the man from whom he derived
his knowledge and tastes, was a native of War-
wickshire, and was born at Lichfield about
1480 — perhaps a little before. He received
his education, as I have stated, at the Free
School at Oxford, and is supposed to have
gained admission to one of the colleges ; but
of this there is no certainty. He subsequently
acquired, however, the distinction of being de-
corated with the laurel wreath by the Univer-
sity of Oxford for his proficiency in grammar
and rhetoric, with leave to read publicly any
of the logical writings of Aristotle; and he
assumed the title of Protavates Anglise, and
the credit of having been the first Englishman
who was laureated.

It is certain that Whittinton became a teacher
like his master Stanbridge, and among his
scholars he counted William Lily, the eminent
grammarian ; but where he so established him-
self is not so clear, nor do we know the cir-
cumstances or date of his decease.

I am going to do my best to lay before the

and Schoolmasters. 6 1

reader of these pages a clear bibliographical
outline of Whittinton's literary performances ;
and it seems to amount to this, that he has left
to us, apart from a few miscellaneous effusions,
eleven distinct treatises on the parts of gram-
mar, all doubtless more or less based on the
researches and consonant with the doctrines of
his immediate master Anniquil and the foreign
professors of the same art, whose works had
found their way into England, and had even, as
in the case of Sulpicius and Perottus, been
adopted by the English press.

I will first give the titles of the several pieces
succinctly, and then proceed to furnish a slight
description of each : —

1. De Nominum Generibis.

2. Declinationes Nominum.

3. De Syllabarum Quantitate, &c.

4. Verborum Praeterita et Supina.

6. De Octo Partibus Orationis.

7. De Heteroclitis Nominibus.

8. De Concinnitate Grammatices et Constructione.

9. Syntaxis. [ A recension of No. 8.]

10. Vulgaria.

11. Lucubrationes.

62 Schools, School-Books,

These eleven fasciculi actually form altogether
one system, and some of them have their order
of succession in the author's arrangement in-
dicated; as, for instance, the Verborum Prcete-
rita et Supina^ which is called the Fifth Book
of the First Part; but others are deficient in
this clue, so that if one classes them, it must
be in one's own way.

V. The treatise on the Kinds of Nouns > in
one of the numerous editions of it at least, is
designated Primes Partis Liber Primus^ which
seems an inducement to yield it the foremost
place in the series. But it will be presently
observed that, although the collection in a
complete state is susceptible of a consecutive
arrangement, the pieces composing it did not,
so far as we can tell, follow each other origin-
ally in strict order of time.

Of the tract on the Declensions of Nouns^
which stands second in order, Dibdin supplies
us with a specimen : —

and Schoolmasters. 63

De nt5 singu- 'Encfjise ti'Bt* (JTapts filtus ©utfmgit eiegan*
lari prime necis filius, ts, xit &n= tta carmtna, a,
d e c 1 i n a- as,ut Aeneas cfjtses. ut pocta.

tionis. Rectus as, es, a ; simul am dat flexio prima.

ut fjutus fjut'c

musae muscr

De gto et dt5 Ac dat dipthongum genitiuus sic que datiuus
singularibus fjt poete 0 poete

etnt5etvcto Singularis, sic pluralis primus quoque quintus
plural ibu. famine rt aulai pro aulae

bt fjutus ^uic

familtas pictat pro pictae.

Olim rectus in a, genito dedit as simul ai.
bt f)tc JluHas, fjuws Sulre, bel 5ulia
Ex Judas Juda aut Judae dat pagina sacra

bt ^tc 'EUatn* fjutus $toam. fjutc ^Uam, &c.
Barbara in am propria aut a recto non
variantur."

We must now pass to the treatise De Sylla-
barum Qtiantitate^ which, in a chronological re-
spect, ranks first among Whittinton's works, as
there was an edition of it as early as 1513.

This tripartite volume, i. On the Quantity
of Syllables ; 2. On Accent ; and 3. On the
Roman Magistrates, is noteworthy on two ac-
counts. The second portion embraces the
earliest specimen in any English book of the

64 Schools, School-Books,

poems of Horace, and the concluding section
is a kind of rudimentary Lempriere. Subjoined
is a sample of the lines upon accents, from
Dibdin :—

" &ccentus tontts est per quF fit sgllafca quebis
Cognita : quaUo acut fcebet, bel qu grabari
gccentus triplex ; fit acuttis bei grabis, tntte
C?st circuflcius : qtti ntinc fit rarus in bsu.
.Sgllafea cum tenftit sursum est accentus acutus
!Est grauis accmtus srU sgllaba prcssa ftcorsum
jfit circtlflents grabts in prtma : set in altum
^ttollit mefciam, postrema grauis rtciljitque,"

This metrical exposition, which will not be
mistaken for the language of Horace, is followed
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
Laws of Grammatical Construction, of which the
last is the first cast of the Syntax.

There remain the Vulgaria 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

" Befe and motion is so dere, that a peny
worth of meet wyll scant suffyse 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 was holde at 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 : —

66

Schools, School-Books,

1 ' To arraye or

to dyght.
Orno
Vestio
Amicio
Induo
Como
Colo

An alyen or
outlandysshe.

Alienagena

Peregrinus

Aduena

Alienus

Exterus

Externus

Barbaras

Extraneus

To backbyte. The goute.

Detraho

Detracto

Obtrecto

Maledico

Carpo

&c. &c. &c.

Toflaye the
brothell.
Scortari
Prostitui
Fornicari
Merere
Struprari
Adulterari
Cohire
Concumbere
&c. &c.

Arthesis
Arthtica passio
Morbus articularis
Chiragra
Podagra

To be wode.
Seuio
Furio
Insanio
Excandeseor
Bacchor

Wodnesse or
madnesse.
Insania
Seviciae
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
Anglitz. In one place he speaks of being
"primus in Anglia lauri coronam gestans,"
and elsewhere he professes to be magtster gram-
mattces. 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 : —

"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 is, 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 — Parvula —
Holt's Milk for Children — Herman's Vulgaria and its
singular curiosity and value — The author's literary
quarrel with Whittinton — The contemporary foreign
teachers — Specimen of the Grammar of Guarini of
Verona (1470) — Vestiges of the literature current at
Oxford in the beginning of the sixteenth century — The
printed works of Johannes 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 : —

7O Schools, School-Books,

" Q. What shall thou do whan thou hast an
englysshe to make in latyn ?

"A. I shal reherse myne englysshe ones,
twyes, or thryes, and loke out my pryncypal,
& aske f 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 inserted by him with the heading which
occurs before it, where the future Chancellor is
termed "disertus adolescentulus."

A decided singularity of this volume is the
quaint device of the author for 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 Insiitutio, to the latter of which I have

and Schoolmasters. 7 1

already referred, Holt appears to me the most
likely person to have compiled the tract called
Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Colledione, 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 where 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-
nale, has no other title than Ost Fades, mentum,
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 fades mentu dens guttur lingua

a berde a browe abrye a forhede teples a lype

Barba supercilium ciliu frons tepora labru

roffe of the mouth

palatum.

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 de octo orationis partibus, and Brief Rules of
the Regiment or construction of the Eight Parts
of Speech^ in English and Latin, 1537.

The Introductorium lingua Latince by W. H.
may perhaps be ascribed to William Horman,
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 Regula Informationis 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 Horman, 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 survived 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 nownes make comparyson ? All ad-

74 Schools, School- Books,

iectyues welnere f betoken a thynge that maye
be made more or lesse : as fayre : fayrer : fay-
rest : black, blacker, blackest. How many
degrees of comparacyon ben there? iij. the
positiue f comparatiue & the superlatyue.
How knowe ye the posityue gedre ? For he is
the groude and the begynner of all other de-
grees of coparyson. How knowe ye the com-
paratyue degre ? for he passeth his posityue
with this englysshe more, or his englysshe end-
eth in r, as more wyse 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."

III. The Vulgaria 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 fill 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
bye deth with a great and a sore pryce. Animas
nostras aruscatores medici negociantur, &°<r.

" Papyre fyrste was made of a certeyne stuffe
like the pythe of a bulrushe in ^Egypt : and
syth it is made of lynnen clothe soked in water,
stapte or grude pressed and smothed. Charter
sen papyri, &c.

" The greattest and hyest of pryce : is papyre
imperyall. Augustissimum papyrum, &*c.

" The prynters haue founde a crafte to make
bokis by brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame.
Calcographi arte, &c.

"Pryntynge hathe almooste vndone scry-
ueners crafte. Chalcographia librarioru qstu
pene exhavsit.

" 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,
STY."

The rest are given without the Latin equiva-
lents, which have no particular interest.

" 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 a comly marget : also streyte lynes
of equal distaunce be drawe withyn : that the
wryttyng may shewe fayre.

Olde or doting chourles can not suffre yoge
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.

Vitelars thryue : by getherynge of good felowes
that haue swete mouthes.

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 vrinall 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 cobrance 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 lyppis 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.

I haue layde many gynnys, pottis, and other :
for to take fisshe.

Some fisshe scatre at the nette.

Poules 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 Mayre of London with his

78 Schools, School-Books ,

bretherne shall offer at Poules certayne dayes
in the yere.

In London be . lij. parysshe chyrches.

Two or . iij. neses be noisome: 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 and 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 also a curious philological
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 : —

" Of the craft of poynting.

" Therbe fiue 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 / parethesis /
playne poynt / and interrogatifc A virgil is a
scleder stryke : lenynge forwarde thiswyse / be
tokynynge a lytyl / short rest without any per-
fetnes yet of sentens : as betwene the fiue poyntis
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 comynly can 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-

So 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 I5ge 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 axside . 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. IT 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 Ascensian

and Schoolmasters. 8 1

Declensions. Many Englishmen resident in
Paris, Antwerp, and Germany might have edited
such a book. The orthography 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 j 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 Vulgaria, Horman involved himself in a
literary controversy with Whittinton in conse-
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-

82 Schools, School-Books,

ment for reforming or remodelling the current
educational literature, and Herman himself was
a man of superior character and literary training,
as we are able to judge from the way in which
he acquitted himself of his own contribution 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 between Sir John Cheke and Bishop
Gardiner on the pronunciation of Greek. Both
these matters have to be added to a new edition
of Disraeli'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 com-
menced.

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 in MS. till of recent years, like the
college text-books, which are yet sometimes left
unprinted from choice ; and after the introduc-
tion 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 Synonymy 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 effectual 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 — Anniquil; 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 trie period when the school at Magdalen
was established by Bishop Waynflete, 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 English use ; and indeed in
the case of the grammatical system of Sulpicius
an 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 to
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 Donatus.

Such an one was Guarini of Verona, whose
Regulcz 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 describing

and Schoolmasters. 87

the parts of speech, then takes 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

Moror ris per aspectare e p eere aspectato

Osculor 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 Boy? Primer; the
productions, with which we are already fami-
liar, of Whittinton, Stanbridge, Erasmus, Cicero,
Terence, and 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 of 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 j
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.

VI.

Auxiliary books — Bulgaria of Terence — His Comedies
printed in 1497 — Some of them popular in schools —
HORACE — CICERO — His Offices and Old Age translated
by Whittinton— VIRGIL— OVID— Specimens of Whit-
tinton's Cicero — The school Cato — Notices of other
works designed or employed for educational purposes.

I. 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 Vulgaria of Terence. As far
back as the reign of Edward IV., I find it
annexed to the Compendium Grammatica of

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 allone this ij dayes

T5iiwus Tjic mancnnii ejst miTjt soli.

Though I may not touch it yet I may see
&i non tangenni copta e fuoenui ta etit.

The dede selfe scheweth or telleth
&e* tpaa inuicat.

If I had tarayed a lytill while I hadd not found
hym at home

at cestfastfe cu Domi no

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 Bolster^ 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 Schools, School-Books,

principal of one at Rotherham in Yorkshire.
We last hear of him as carrying on the same
business in Goldsmith'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. For 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
Roman 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 probably 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
sEneid 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 Art of Love appeared in 1513;
perhaps the whole was deemed too fescennine
for the juvenile peruser.

I shall add Caesar, 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 Caesar, in fact, occupies an analogous
position to the English editions of Cicero and
the prose paraphase of the ^Eneid 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
Offices:—

and Schoolmasters.

97

De Officiis Servandis in eos qui

intulerunt nobis iniuriam.
Svnt autem quaedam officia
etiam aduersus eos seruada a
quibus iniuriam acceperis. Est
enim ulciscendi & puniendi
modus. Atq ; baud scio an satis
sit eum, qui lacessierit, iniuriae
suae poenitere, ut & ipse ne quid
tale posthac committat, & cseteri
sint ad iniuriam tardiores.

Of offyces to be obserued agayne
suche as haue done vs wronge
There be also certayne offyces
to be kepte agayne suche / of
whom a ma hath taken wrong.
For there is a maner of re-
uengynge and punysshyng, and
I can not tell whether it be suffy-
cient for hym that hath done
wronge to be sory of his wronge /
and that he offende no more so
after that. Also other shall be
the more lothe to do wronge.

There are few English renderings of ancient
literature which it is possible to regard as com-
pletely satisfactory ; and it must be recollected,
on the behalf of Whittinton, that he was among
the pioneers in this laborious field. Let me
conclude with a sample of his essay on the De
Senectute — a chef d'ceuvre, which it is a sin to
read in any idiom but its own.

Sequitur tertia vituperatio se-
nectutis, quod earn carere dicunt
voluptatibus. O praeclarum mu-
nus aetatis, siquidem id aufert
nobis, quod est in adolescentia
vitiosissimum. Accipite suim
optimi adolescentes, ueterem
orationem Archytae Tarentini,
magni in primis, et praeclari viri,
quae mihi tradita est cum essem
adolescens Tarenti cum Q. Max-
imo. Nulla caphaliore peste
quam corporis uoluptate homi-
nibus dicebat a natura data. . . .

The thyrde accusacion of olde
age foloweth. By cause it must
forgo pleasures. O that excel-
lent benefyte of olde age : yf it
take away from vs that thynge /
whiche in youth is moost vicious.
Therfore ye gentyll yonge men
heare the olde sentence of Ar-
chytas a Tarentyne / a great and
a famous man amonges all other
/ which was taught vnto me whan
I was a yonge man in the citye
of Tarentu with Quintus Maxi-
mus. He sayd that there was
not a more deedly poyson gyuen
to man by nature / than sensuall
pleasure of body. . . .
G

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 this
island a better tone and to place it on an
improved footing, would be ungracious and
improper. The introduction of the Roman
writers in prose and verse into our schools and
universities was an important step in the right
direction, and tended to 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 of Cato, the Cat o for
Boys, the Eclogues of Mantuan, of which Bale
speaks as popular in his day, and which Holo-

and Schoolmasters. 99

femes mentions in Love's Labours Lost ; various
abridgments of the Colloquia of Erasmus and
his Little Book of Good Manners for Children
(another monument of the industry and 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 the Kings' Names
that have reigned in England^ 1530. With
these I should perhaps couple the Latin sEsop
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

IOO 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 of
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 first 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.

VII.

Influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More — Visits of
the former to this country — His 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 without
studying very sedulously the Lives of Erasmus
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, "he
became very intimate with all those who were
of any Note for Learning; accounting them

IO2 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 comes 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 epistolis^
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, upon
the emptiness of Franciscus Niger, and Marius
Phalelfus,* whose Books 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 Epistolce of Franciscus Philelphus,
printed at Milan in 1471.

IO4 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 an
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 analogous
tracts by various writers.

A story which Knight relates about his au-
thor's 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 Ldt
Montjoy how he lik'd that of the first sort.
' Oh sir,' says he, c I like it so well, that you have
made me resolve to marry quickly.' ' Ay !' but
says Erasmus, ' you have read only one side,
stay and read the other.' ' No/ replies Ld<
Montjoy, ' that side pleases me ; take you the
other ! ' " 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 was 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 Colet, 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
hundred 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 Cirencester in Gloucester-
shire, by Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham : a
fifth at Roulston in Staffordshire, by Dr. Robert
Sherborne, 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, Bishop
of Ely : a seventh at Sutton Colfield in War-
wickshire, by Dr. Simon Harman (alias Veysey),
bishop of Exeter : an eighth at Farnworth 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, where she was born : and another at Wal-
thamstow 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

io8 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, then he shal be
admitted into the schole for a scholar.

" If youre chylde, after reasonable _reason
proved, be founde here unapte and unable to
lernynge, than ye warned therof shal take hym
awaye, that he occupye not oure rowme in vayne.

"If he be apt to lerne, ye shal be contente
that he continue here tyl he have competent
literature.

and Schoolmasters. 109

"If he absente vi dayes, and in that mean
seeson ye shew 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 admyssion 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 paye 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 convenyent bokes to
his lernynge.

" If the offerer be content with 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

no 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,
Lactantius, 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,
whom 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 tyme of Tully and Salust, and Virgill, and
Terence, was usid," — which is so far reasonable
from his standard; but he adds incongruously
enough : " whiche also sainte Jerome, and sainte
Ambrose, and saint Austen, and many holy
doctors lernid in theyre tymes." Whereby we
are left at liberty to infer that these holy doctors
were on a par with 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. in

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 in a public school, where
the real object was to instil a 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 the present era,
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

H2 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 the world, and inuring them to hardship. But
Erasmus was not on the side of the martinets.
For he explicitly condemns an undeserving strict-
ness of discipline, 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 begun to find favour both in
his own country and with us.

It is 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. 1 1 3

IV. There can be no desire to deprive Colet
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
Colet'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
scholarum\ 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 Colet
doubtless gradually extinguished, lay to the south
of his, and appears curiously enough not to have
occupied the basement, but to have been, as we
should say, on the first floor, four shops being
beneath it. It was close to Watling Street. A
passage in the Monumenta Frandscana shews
that the site of Colet's original school, which
perished in the Great Fire, had been in the

and Schoolmasters. 1 1 5

possession of bookbinders, and in the immediate
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
the volume on sale in a more public thoroughfare.

St. Paul's Churchyard, in the days of Colet
and in the infancy of his valuable endowment,
was 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.

u6 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.

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 Colet informs his readers
that the production of Linacre was translated
into Latin by George Buchanan for Gilbert,

u8 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 it did not compete successfully
with the editions of Lily, as they received from
time to time improvements at the hands of
professional 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 Colet 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 i, 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

I2O Schools f 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 was 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 Christiani 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 which survive or have been so far
recovered.

The Coleti (zditio, &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 wry ten, 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 lieu 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 authority, 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 Eclairdssement.

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 formerly in vogue,
which must have been very puzzling to boys.
Blit 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-Anglicum 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, which lies
outside 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 Primer of 1540 had been preceded by those
of Linacre 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
copies of the Primer had 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,
" O 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 : " Vivo in Anglia. Veni per Galliam
in Italiam," or " Vixit Londini : Studuit Oxo-
niae."

How differently Horman 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

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 tne 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 juventutis Cambro-
Britanniciz, which aimed at a monopoly of the
Principality without prejudice 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 Roman 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 Museum Minerva 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 mediaeval 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

1 34 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.

( 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 CANNOT 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, were "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 " 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
OEsop's Fables in Greek, Tully'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, writing being necessarily 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 it§elf 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,
^Esop's Fables in Greek, 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 Sententice Varietas^
there are five-and-twenty ways 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 among us 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
Hadleigh 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
when 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, Man 15, 1661, that the Com-
pany assigned no cause for their proceeding;
but he 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 dutie in that

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, I 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
unjustly hostile to him, who had represented
that the school was suffering from his administra-
tion, 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. " 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 ; Nulli
pradudor, Tibi pateo."

The Remonstrance did not please the Merchant
Taylors, and in a second document, dated June
12, 1 66 1, 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-Books,

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. 14.9

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 Crime."

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 came from 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.

X.

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 for travellers and merchants— Rival authors of
Grammars — 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 of elementary treatises edited by Whittin-
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 £ iuuo. Vomer a uomo.

Fomes a foueo. Pedor & 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 Rules 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 offer 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
Cesare 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. The title-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 embraced
in it, which are English, French, Spanish, Portu-
guese, Flemish, German, and Latin — a remark-
able 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 Labour'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-Books,

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, no 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 Schoolmasters. 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
Dorset Street, 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 Commend d 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
Jonson and Milton, unless they possessed some
adventitious interest or appealed to popular
sentiment.

A Little Book 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 Catnach 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 new 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

1 62 Schoo/s, 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 at Leominster, 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 Syms, in his
Introduction to the Art of Teaching the 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 own 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 Thz

164 Schools, School-Books,

Wellspring 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 announcing his 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 Humfry Baker ; dwell-
ing on the North side of the Royall Exchange,
next adjoyning to the signe 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. 165

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 Writing 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, " 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 )

CHAPTER XI.

Proposed University of London in 1647 — The Museum
Minerva at Bethnal Green — Its catholic character and
liberal programme— Calligraphy — Shorthand — Bright's
system patented in 1588 — Education in the provinces —
The old school at Manchester— Shakespear's Sir Hugh
Evans and Holofemes — 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 pamphleteer, who may
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. I* purports to

Schools and 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

1 68 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 was 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 we 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 of such a plan, this un-
named " true Lover of his Nation " 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.

I/O Schools, School-Books,

II. The Musaum Minerva, 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, inasmuch 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 VERTUE : 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 Low 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
and Experimentall Philosophy, the Mathematicks,
Arithmetick, and the keeping Bookes of Accounts
by Creditor and Debitor. All excellent Hand-
writing, Geometric, Cosmography, Geography,
Perspective, Architecture, Secret Motions of Scenes,
Fortifications, the besieging 6- Defending of Places,
Fire- Works, Marches of Armies, Ordering of
Battailes, Fencing, Vaulting, Riding the Great
Horse, Mustek, Playing on all sorts of Instru-
ments, Dancing, Drawing, Painting, Limning,
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 and
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-Books,

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 Musaum 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 Musceum, 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 foundations.
They comprised Heraldry, Conveyancing, Com-
mon Law, Antiquities (including Numismatics),
Agriculture, Arithmetic, Architecture, Fortifica-
tion, Geography, Languages, and Elocution, 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 "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 Musceum Minerrcz, 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 modem 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 betoken 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
Musceum Minervce 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. 175

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 Cocker, 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," 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 the 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 Facon 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 : —

" 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 Malhematicks.
Grammar, Writing and Arithmetick.
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 furnish'd 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 centuries ago.

IV. In all the great provincial centres there
were, of course, educational institutes supported

i8o 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 Latin 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. 1 8 1

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 a later period is illustrated
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,

1 82 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 exercises. 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
private 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', 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.

XII.

Educational condition of SCOTLAND — Beneficial influence
of Knox and his supporters — Buchanan 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 we 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 may be 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

1 86 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 Vaus, 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.

Vaus 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. 1 87

At a later period, the eminent Scotsman
Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody,
and two others of his countrymen, Andrew
Symson and James Carmichael, 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

1 88 Schools, School-Books,

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. But, 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. 1 89

tioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece
of authorship.

But, notwithstanding the useful labours of
Ruddiman, 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 afforded 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-Books,

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 the
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 in
London and other great centres by private
munificence, suffered a common paralysis.

The alliance between the Church and the
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,
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
called "An Ordinance for the Ejection of
Scandalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Minis-
ters and Schoolmasters," and was 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

1 92 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 was 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 schoolmaster
was judged incompetent, for the support of his
family.

Samuel Harmar, in his Vox Populi, or Glou-
cestershire's Desire, 1642, represents the want
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

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 Harmar'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 !

( '95 )

CHAPTER XIII.

Female education — Women of quality taught at home —
General illiteracy of the sex — Strong clerical control
• — Ignorance of the rudiments of knowledge among
girls — Shakespear's daughters — Goldsmith's Poems
for Young Ladies — Rise of the Ladies' School — Poli-
tical 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 cul-
tivation and training of girls of all ranks ; and
the daughter of a citizen may acquire accom-
plishments 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 revival
of learning, the only persons capable of con-
ducting 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 principia of knowledge,
and on the fallow state of the intellectual facul-
ties which these evidences establish. The Pas-

198 Schools, School-Books,

ton and Plumpton 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 the 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 j 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 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

2OO 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 Civil 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 i;th 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.

" 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,

2O2 Schools, School-Books,

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 Quineys 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
narrow. 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 ', "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 Collins'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 for
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 judg-
ment 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, Swift, 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 Henry VIII. and his coadjutors, and their

2O4 Schools, School-Books,

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 be taught ; and the scheme was assuredly
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-
mels.

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, it has 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 old 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

2o8 Schools and Schoolmasters.

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-books— Anecdotes of the A. B. C. — Propria qua
Maribus and Johnny qucs 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 interior display
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,

2io Schools, School-Books,

the scene depicts a later stage in the educational
course.

In the Jests of Scogin, 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." 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. C. Scogin did give him a lesson
of nine of the first letters of A. B. C, and he
was nine days in learning of them ; and when
he had learned the nine Christ-cross-row letters,
the good scholar said, ' 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 Cross. The time con-
sumed in this particular instance in the acquisi-

and Schoolmasters. 2 1 1

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 substan-
tially disappear from use in petty schools till the
present century. Its shape and functions, how-
ever, 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 resembled a slate
in form and dimensions, consisting of a small
oblong wooden frame fitted with rows of balls
of wood or bone strung on transverse wires.
To those who, like the present writer, saw this
apparatus in common use to induct the young
into the art of counting, its pedigree was natur-
ally 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-Books,

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. C. 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. C.'s of all sorts ; as, for in-
stance, " an a. b. c. for children, with syllables,
I558 ;" " an a- b. c. in Latin," 1559 ; "the battle
of A. B. C," 1586; "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. C," the "Virgin's A. B. C," and "the
young man's A. B. C."

Subsequently to the A. B. C. 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. 2 1 3

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 w for
the u. He then presents us with the Lord's
Prayer, the Creed, 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 who-
soever 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 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. C. 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 specimen
of it :—

kacb, kech, kich, koch, kuch,
kash, kesh, kish, kosh, kush,
kath, keth, kith, koth, kuth.

and Schoolmasters. 2 1 5

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 Ed-
mund's Hall, Oxford, in the days of Charles II.,
published a Horn-book or A. B. C. 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
stchoti^ a 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 qua Maribus and
As in Prasenti, to which 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 qua Genus.

But an early authority * claims for Lily him-
self the honour of having written the Propria
qua Maribus and As in Prcesenti^ 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. C. 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. 2 1 7

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 we 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 Riga 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 cen-
tury, several generations before such a system
was adopted in England.

In the Preface to his New English Grammar^

2i8 Schools, School-Books,

1 8 1 o, 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 obsolete to
petrifaction, sixty issues were exhausted between
1795 and 1859, aimed not only at popular in-
struction, 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, but with a feeling of amazement
that such a heresy in opinion and taste should
have lived so long, and have been so lately dis-
sipated.

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 earliest
Anglo-Latin Dictionary— Ocland's Anglorum Prcelia.

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 ', 1570, 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 learn inge, 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

lie, 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. But 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 previ-
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. ••- -

'

tr

j

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 as COOPER'S
THESAURUS. Elyot, the first compiler, tells us,
in the dedication to Henry VIII. prefixed to
the editio princess, 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 he
could have torn the MS. to pieces, " had not
the beames of your royal maiestie entred
into my harte, by remembraunce of the com-
forte whiche I of your grace had lately re-
ceyued."

In the epistle to Henry just referred to, the

and Schoolmasters. 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-
tinued in Elyot's day to bear a meaning which
subsequently grew obsolete; as, for instance,
in the case of Aviarium^ "a thycke wodde

228 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 Edaircissement de la langue Fran$oise,
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
he -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 the 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 Promp-
tuarium Parvulorum^ and closes with Elisha
Coles, embracing a period of nearly two cen-
turies.

III. The Latin Lexicon was an indispensable
vade-mecum where boys had to translate the
classics of that language into English ; and 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 English
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 Prcelia in
all grammar-schools in England and Wales in
lieu of the books of less 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,

Quae pace et vera religione nites,
Quae vitse meritis, morum & candore coruscans,
Zenobiam 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 Pralia
was launched on its proud career, the imbe-
cility 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, " 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 j 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 Vowels ;
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 /, 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. ..."

" C 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 "g 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
u after her, but exprest

quail, \ (kuail,

Vuest: I by lkuest-'

quick, f 7 1 kuick,

quill, ) \kuill"

In other words, Jonson, discarding c and q,
was with those who nowadays ask us to say
Kikero, Kelt, Kcesar ; and he seems also 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 ought 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 Jonson'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 Kebeck for 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 would necessarily in-
volve the dispensation with certain letters which
at present form part of the English A. B. C.

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 di, do, dum, 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-Books,

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-
matices Latincz 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 1647 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
we 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 Archeology, 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 fair
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-
bridge—Notices 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 Graculus iste ; 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 day, 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,

Logicalia (as they called them), the old axioms
of Aristotle, and the questions of John Scotus."

Erasmus himself was for some time Greek
Reader at Cambridge, and was contemporary
there with Richard Croke, of King's College,
who did valuable service in promoting the cause
of classical learning at that University, and pub-
lished several tracts relating to the Greek lite-
rature and tongue, including Introductions ad
Linguam Grcecam and Elementa Grammaticce
Grcecce — the earliest attempts to place before
students in a handy form the alphabet of the
subject.

At Oxford it was an Italian, Cornelius Vitel-
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 at that

and Schoolmasters. 245

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 De 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 Cokt
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 schoolmen
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 poor 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 to be 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 Caius; 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 Phanissa
of Euripides 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 olli for
/'///, queis for quibus, mareito for marito, maxunie
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, Thesews, and Ulussews. The
author likewise refers to the employment of the
aspirate in orthography, as in hydropisis, thermce,
Bathonia, and Hybernia, which used to be read
ydropisis, termce, 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 their speech was
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 a prima facie
argument are on his side; and when we find
that he gives to the long E or »?ra the force of
A, and to the diphthong 01 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 Graccz Lingua 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 Uni-
versa 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. Stock wood 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 profession,
delivered at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, an oration
on the origin and progress 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 exhi-
bited the survival of some languid interest 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
Cheke, 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
Georgics of Hesiod and the Neo-Greek Hero 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 approached
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 cer-
tain 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 preten-
sion, the critical study and genuine appreciation
of it have always been confined to a narrow
circle of scholars ; and nowadays there is a grow-
ing tendency to prefer the living languages, as
they are called, to the dead.

( 255 )

XVIII.

Ancient French school-books for English learners — Their 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 speke french.
Vecy ung bon lievre a apprendre 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-Books,

Et du saint esprit ie veuel comenchier.

To lerne to speke frenche.

A apprendre a parler franchoys."

After this exordium follow the numbers, the
names of precious stones, articles of merchandise,
fruits, wines, &c. Wine of rochell is rendered
vin de rosele. What we know as Beaune is 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 tenez 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 dites). 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 j per-

and Schoolmasters. 257

haps the writer was thinking of the skilling, with
which our coin has no more than a nominal
affinity.

The Eclaircissement de la langue Franfoise,
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 Linacre'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

258 Schools, School-Books,

and Dewes was Pierre du Ploiche, who in the
time of Henry published a very curious little
volume of more general scope, called A Treatise
in English and 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,
the 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. C. 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 May nerd,
Lisez Maynart" to which the other rejoins :
" Where shall I reade ? " and the first answers :
11 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, as where "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
com you?

I come from Bulloigne.

From Englande, from Ger-
many.

What newes?

I know none but good.

I harde say

That the Englishe men

haue kylled many frenche
men.

And where?

Before Bulloigne.

When came the newes ?

This morninge by a post."

" Etvous seigneur, cCou venez

vous?

le viens de Boulongne.
D'Engleterre, d Allemaigne.

Quelle nouuelles ?

le ne Sfay rien que bien.

i' ay ouy dire

que les anglois

ont occis beaucoup de Fran-

fois.
Etou?

Deuant Boulongne.
Quant vinrent tez nouuelle ?
A ce matin par vng paste. "

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 marked
stimulus and development to this class of literary
enterprise.

II. Claude Desainliens, who transformed him-
self into Claudius Holy-Band or Hollyband, 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 dictionaries, 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 1575 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 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 : Remaine 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 gloss was secondary, and that the
bizarre style and texture of this class of book arose
from the aim at enabling the learner to be pre-
pared 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 inter-
views 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 was fivepence a foot; and
in the section Per maritarsi = To be married,
Hollyband starts by rendering O bella giovane

264 Schools, School- Books,

" Ho fair maiden." He urges her to be
prompt in her decision by citing the proverb,
" Ladie, whilest 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.

' ' O 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.

I cannot daunce after the Italian fashion.
We shall daunce after the high Dutch.
Go 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.
We 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 j 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 Jtalian 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 Desainliens was
entirely superseded by that of Randle 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 editions of his predecessor Desainliens,
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 Le Jar din de 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 " La memoire du prodigue 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 are absent from
the French text itself ; as, for instance : —

" Of making Stop.

" Hola, ho there, prou well, well, so so ; assez enough,
enough ; demeure, arreste, stay, stay, budge not."

" Of feeling 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
that his plan was the exactest possible for attain-
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."

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 Howell 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 ancient prejudices. 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. Caius, who speaks broken English, but
hardly a Frenchman's broken English. The
Duke de Jarmany 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 Caius is sui generis; he
" 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 Caius 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 Eng-
lish is given, the solecisms are sometimes ludi-
crous 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 who arrived at the Camp of
the Confederated Army, 1743, where beneath
the first of a series of plates occurs this 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 Netheriandes which
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 profile / 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 hun 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.

Z>. Doth hee ? it is very well done. John / can you well
speake French ?

/. Not very well coosen, but I learne.

D. Wher go you too schoole?

/. In the Lumbeardes streat.

D. Have you gon long too schoole ?

/. 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 j 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 loue, 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 withdrawe 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 the louingly
sailes \voilles amoureuses 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. 28 1

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 and 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 of wall for
whole was not an unusual type of orthography and pro-
nunciation in early English. Thus, in the Interlude of the
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 wall business. "

282 Schools, School-Books,

Derendel, who was doubtless connected with
Pierre Erondelle, a well-known preceptor in
London at a somewhat later date.

The verses which 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 case to 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, mai not
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

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 sEneid> pub-
lished at Leyden in 1582, renders the opening
lines of Book the Second thus : —

' ' With tentive list'ning each wight was setled in hardening;
Then father ^Eneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie.
You me bid, O Princesse, too scarrifie a festered old soare,
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 of Phonography — William Bullokar the
earliest regular advocate of it — Charles Butler — Dr.
Jones and his theory 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 or less, for educational purposes.

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 orthographical abortion,
out of harmony with the usual style of the
author, and surpassing in foolishness the wildest
suggestions of the professed adherents and sup-
porters of the doctrine.

Bullokar published his large Grammar in
1580, and his Brief one in 1586; and he also
put forth in 1585 aversion of ./Esop's Fables,

and Schoolmasters. 287

the title of which is a curiosity : — " ^Esopz
Fablz in Tru Ortography with Grammar-Notz.
Her-vntoo ar also iooined the Short Sentencz
of the Wyz Cato : 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,
baut (bought), Mair^ Dixnary, pats (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. C., 88, 209-15, 234-7.
Abingdon School, 132, 183.
Absence from school severely

treated, 108-9.
Academies, private, 143-4, I7°~4>

178-83.
Accomplishments taught at the

Musaunt MinerT.>ce, 170-4.
at a private academy in

1676, 178-9.
Acolastus, 127, 257.
Addison's Letter from Italy, 203.
jEsop, 48, 99, 139, 141, 287.
Ainsworth, Robert, 229-30.
Aldus, 76.
Ale, 140.
Alexander de Villa Dei, 45-6,

243-4-
Alfric, Archbishop, his Colloquy,

3°-

Allibone, John, 12.
Alphabet, Jonson's remarks on

our, 234-6.
Alphabetum Latino- Anglicmn,

1543. I24-
America, 33-4.
American Plantations, 17, 84.

Am well, 51-3, 200.
Andreas, Bernardus, 63, 102.
Andrew of Wyntown, 184.
Anglo-Gallic dictionary, 35.

vocabulary, 255.

Anglo-Latin literature, 72.
Anniquil, John, schoolmaster and

grammarian, u, 51-3, 91.
Apollo Shroving, 1627, 144.
Apothecaries, early, ignorance of,

105.

Appleby, 107.
Appositions, 138.
Aristotle, 244.
Arithmetic, 163-4.
Arthur, Prince, son of Henry

VII., 68, 102.
Arthusius, Gotardus, 155.
Ascensius, Jod. Badius, 78-80.
Ascham, Roger, 12, 19, 196, 220-3.
As inpreesenti, 216.
Astrology, 157-8.
Astronomy, judicial, 133, 157.
Aufield, W., 268-9.
Aurelio and Isabel, History of,

1556, 279-81.
Aviariutn, 227-8.
Aylesbury, 160.

Index.

BACON, Francis 177-

Baker, Humphrey, 163-4.

Bailey, Old, 165.

Balbus, Johannes, 50, 225.

Bale, Bishop, 98.

Bales, Peter, 165. • »

Barchby, John, 73.

Barclay, Alexander, 12.

Beaune, 256.

Bebelius of Basle, 81.

Beer, 140,

Bellarmine's (Cardinal) Cate-
chism, 284.

Bellomayus, Johannes, 73.

Bellot, Jacques, 267-8, 271-2.

Bellnnt Grammaticale, 82.

Berkshire, 160.

Bethnal Green, 133, 170-1.

Bible, the, in schools, 205-8.

Black Eagle in St. Paul's Church-
yard, 115.

Blue Coat School, 253.

Board Schools, wise policy of the,
207.

Bodley, Sir Thomas, 10-11.

Bodmin, 161.

Bookbinders, 114-15, 264.

Borde, Andrew, 210-11.

Boulogne, 260.

Bow Lane, 156.

Boy-bishop at St. Paul's, 109.

Bracebridge, Thomas, 180.

Brackley, Waynflete's school at,
ii.

Bread, manchet, 140.

Bnght, Timothy, 177.

Brightland, John, 131.

Browne, Alexander, 175.

Buchanan, George, 117, 196.

Buckinghamshire, 160.

Bullokar, William, 286-7.

Buries, Edward, 131.

Burney, Charles, 23.

Busby, Dr., 18, 21-3.
Buskins, 265.
Butler, Charles, 286-7.
Butter, sweet, in 1652,- 140.

CAIUS, or Kay, John, 247-8,

273-4-

Calligraphy, 165, 175-6.
Cambridge, 243-4.
Canterbury, 241.
Carmichael, James, 187.
Carving, 171.

Cassilis, Gilbert, Earl of, 117-18.
Catechism, the, 207-8, 216.
Cathedral schools, 7-9, 113.
Catherine of Aragon, 118.
Cato, Dionysius, 98, 287.
Caxton, W., his prose ^Eneii/,

Q5-6-

Cecil, W., Lord Burleigh, 19, 220.

Chancellor of St. Paul's, 113.

Chapman, George, 252.

Charactery, 177.

Charles II. and Dr. Busby, 21.

Charterhouse, 76.

Chaucer, 223.

Cheke, Sir John, 82, 221, 247-8.

Chichester, 106.

Childermass, 109.

Christ's Hospital, 126, 135-6, 253 - 4.

Christ-cross-row, 210-11.

Church, salutary influence of the
early, 5 et seq.

Churchyard, Thomas, 286.

Cicero, 18,94, gdetseq., no, 139,
141-2.

Ciceronian Academy, 219.

Cirencester, 108.

City of London School, 135, 204.

Civil War in Great Britain, in-
fluence of the, 190, 200.

Classic authors read in England
in 1520, 88.

Index.

293

Classic authors in 1563, 221.

used at St. Paul's, no.

at Merchant Taylors', &c.,

25 *> 253-4-
at a provincial school in

1788, 181.

by ladies, 199, 203.

attempt to supersede, in

1582, 231-2.
Clerical control over education,

3, 5~7> i9°-2» 195-208.
Cocker, Edward, 175-6.
Coleridge, S. T., 136.
Colet, Dean, 8, 103, 108-14, 120-2.
Collation at Merchant Taylors'

on Probation Day, 140.
College education in Scotland,

former cost of, 189.
Collins, W., 281.
Collins's Oriental Eclogues^ 203.
Columbus, C., 33.
Comparative study of Latin and

English, 72.

Conventual schools, 6-7.
Cooper's Thesaurus, 226, 228-9.
Corderius, M., 139.
Cornwall, 161.
Corporal punishment in schools,

18-26, 30.
petitions to Parliament

against it, 25.
Coster, Laurence, 54.
Cox, Leonard, 123.
Croft, Richard, 194.
Croke, Richard, 244.
Cromwell, Oliver, 191-2.
Thomas, Earl of Essex,

227, 257.

DAME-SCHOOLS, 196-7, 202, 206.

Dancing, 171, 178.

Davies's Welsh Grammar, 233.

Decalogue, 120-1.

De Conscribendis Epistolis, by

Erasmus, 103-4.
an anecdote about

the

book, 104.

De Corro, Anthonio, 153.
De Flores, Juan, 279-81.
Delamothe, G., 266.
Denny, Sir Anthony, 226.
Derendel, Peter, 281.
Desainliens, Claude, 261-6.
Despauterius, 46.
Dialogues of Lucian translated

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 et seq.,

225-30.

Dictionary, definition of a, 32.
of Johannes de Garlandia,

32-4-
Discipline, seventy of early, 17-

26, 108-12.
Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa

Dei, 45-6, 1 86.
Donatus, ^Elius, 46-9, 50, 86, 121,

184.

Dorchester, 183.
Dome, John, 39, 87-9.
Dorset Street, Spitalfields, 157.
D'Ouvilly, Sir Balthazar Gerbier,

170-4.

Drawing, 171, 175.
Dugard, William, 140, 145-9.
Duncan, Dr., 219.
Du Ploiche, Pierre, 258-61.
Dutch language, 153, 171, 173.
Du Wes or Dewes, Giles, 117,

257.
Dyonisie de Mountchensy, 36.

294

Index.

EAST INDIES, 155.
Edward the Confessor, 17.

I., 35-

VI., 123-6, 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.
Erondelle, Pierre, 266-7, 281-2.
Eton, 18-19, 21.

Grammar, 160.

Etymology, 151.
Euripides, 248, 254.
Evans, Sir Hugh, 180-1.
Exchange, Royal, 164.

FARRIERY, 263.

Faversham, 161.

Feckenham, 1941

Female influence, 206-8.

Festeau, Paul, 269-70.

Fish, 76-7.

Fisher, Bishop, 242-3.

Fitzjames, Bishop, 106.

Lord Chief Justice, 106.

Fitzstephen, W., 15.

Flageolet, 175.

Flanders, 273.

Florence, 245.

Florio, John, 155.

Foreign influence, 3, 38 et seg.,
66, 170-4.

ignorance of English, 273-

84.

Founders of schools at the Refor-
mation, 106.

Fox, John, 125.

Free school at Oxford, 60.

Free school at Feckenham, 194.
French dame-schools, 197.
influence, 3, 257-62, 266-

Introductory, by G. Du

Wes, 117.
knowledge of English,

274, 280 et seq,
language, 153, 254 et seq.,

270.

orthography, 35-6.

school in St. Paul's Church-
yard, 1 1 6.

Frobenius, 76.

Frorne = frozen, 76.

GADBURY, John, 158.

Gardiner, Bishop, 82, 247-8.

Gascoigne, George, 248.

Gemma Vocabulorum, 225.

Geneva, English residents at,
10.

Gentleman's Calling, 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.

Golden Ball in St. Paul's Church-
yard, 262.

Goldsmith's Alley, 94.

Goldsmith's Poems for Young
Ladies, 202-3.

Gradus comparationnm, 73.

Grammar schools, endowed, 126.

Grammatica Initialis, 1509, 14.

Grant, Edward, 251.

Grantham, Lincolnshire, 252.

Grantham, Thomas, 253.

Gray's Inn, 248.

Greek language, 241-54.

Index.

295

Greek language, study of the, at

Oxford, 101-5, 244.
taught at Cambridge by

Erasmus, 100, 243-5.
taught at public schools,

141-2, 161, 251, 253-4.
taught by private tutors,

153-

Greeting, Thomas, 175.
Grey, Lady Jane, 222.
Grocyn, W., 102, 244-5.
Guarini of Verona, 86-7.
Guarna, Andrea, 82.

HADLEIGH, Suffolk, 144.
Hall, Arthur, of Grantham, 252.
Harmar, Samuel, 193-4.
Hart Street, 157.
Hawkins, William, 144.
Hayne, Thomas, 216, 238-9.
Hazlitt, William, 181-2.

Mr. Registrar, 281, note.

Hebrew, 142, 153, 168.

Henry VII., 68,245.

VIII., 68, 123-4 126, 128,

133, 143. 198, 205, 226-7, 246-7,

257-8.
Hereditary succession of teachers,

84.

Herefordshire, 162.
Hero and Leander of Musaeus,

253-

Herodotus, 253.
Hertfordshire, 131.
Highgate, 200.
Highlanders, 276.
Hills, Richard, 136.
Holidays, ancient school, 15-17.
Holofernes, Shakespear's, 99, 155.
Holt, John, 70-1.
Holwell, John, 157.
Homer, 250, 252-4.
Hoole, Charles, 93-4.

Hooper, Bishop, 276.

Horace, 64, 94.

Herman, William. 73-8, 129, 222.

his literary quarrel with

Lily and others, 81-2.

extracts from his Vul-

garia, 74-8.

Horn-book, 211, 212.

Hours of the Virgin, 1514, 115-

Howell, James, 233.

Hume, Alexander, 131, 187.

Hundred Merry Tales, 133-4.

Hunt, Leigh, 135.

ILLUSTRATED children's books,

159-

Indian abacus, 215.
Inglis, Esther, 176.
Ingulphus, 17-18.
Ink, 76.
Instruction, mediaeval method of,

!4> 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, i$-zetseq ,261-6.

hand, 177.

JEROME, St., 46, no-n.

Jesus College, Cambridge, n-

12.

Johnny Qua Genus, 216.
Johannes de Garlandia, 32-4, 83.
Johnson, Thomas, 212.
Jones, Dr., 287-9.
Jonson, Benjamin, 177, 233-6.
Julius Caesar, 95-6.

KEN, Bishop, 137.

Kent, 161.

Kinaston, Sir Francis, 173, 233.

296

Index.

Kingston-upon-Hull, 106.

Thames, 252.

Kinwelmersh, Francis, 248.
Knox, John, 185, 194.
Kyffin, Maurice, 92.

LADIES, 175.

colleges for, 200 et seq.

Ladies' lapdogs, 77.

Lamb, Charles, 136, 200, 253-4.

Mary, 200.

Lancashire, 106.

Lane, A., 162-3.

Languages, living, taught in Eng-
land, 152 et seq., 168, 171, 173.

Latimer, Bishop, 221.

W., 102.

Latin language, 72, 152, 155,
162-3, 229-30.

authors used at St. Paul's,

109-10.

- barbarous or low, 228.
Laureateship, ancient, 67.
Lawrence Pountney, St., 136.
Leghorn, English at, 278-9.
Lempriere, Dr., 182.
Leominster, 162.
Letter-writing, 103.
Levins, Peter, 228.
Lexicons, 225-30.

Libraries, parochial, proposed in
Scotland, 185-6.

Lichfield, 60.

Life, mediaeval, illustrated by an-
cient school-books, 31-2, 75-8.

English, of the i6th and

i7th centuries illustrated, 259
et seq.

Lilly, William, the astrologer, 158.

Lily, George, 107.

William, 44, 60, 81, 84-5,

118-22, 124, 139, 150-2, 161,
186, 216, 242, 245, 247.

Linacre, Thomas, 102, 117-18,

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, 164-5,

258-9, 261-2, 278.
proposed University of, in

1647-8, 166-9.
Longlond, Dr., Bishop of Lincoln,

151-

Lord's Prayer, 120-1.
Lothbury Garden, 93, 156.
Louth, Lincolnshire, 158.
Lucian, 101, 254.

Ludus Ludi Litter arii, 1672, 144.
Lydgate, John, 37, 42-3, 99.

MAGDALEN College School, Ox-
ford, ii-i2, 51, 70, 84-5, 132,
152, 204.

Makins, Bathsua, 200.

Malagasy language, 155.

Malayan language, 155.

Malmesbury, 241.

Manchester, 106, 132, 180.

Manchet bread, 140,

Mantuan, Eclogues of, 98.

Mary, Princess, afterwards Queen,
117, 125, 257.

Mauger, Claudius, 269-70.

Maupas, Charles, 268-9.

May-Flower, the, 84.

Maypoles, 192.

Mayor of London, 77.

Meals, graces at, 259.

reading at, 259.

Medulla Gramwatices, 225 '

Mercers' School, 135.

Merchant Taylors' School, 16, 21,
132, 136-42, 144-9, 223-4-

Index.

297

Middlesex, 131.

Mile- End Green, 162.

Military science, 171.

Milk for Children, 70.

Milton, John, 158-9.

Miracle of the fishes, 108.

Monastic or conventual schools,

6-7.

Montefiore, Sir Moses, 143.
Monuntenta Franciscana quoted,

114.
More, Sir Thomas, 65, 70, 112,

246.

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

Mulcaster, Richard, 138, 223-4.
Mules, 265.

Murray, Lindley, 45, 218-19.
Musczutn Minervae at Bctimal

Green, 133, 170-4.
Musaeus, 253.
Music taught in the conventual

schools, 7.

to ladies by private mas-
ters, 175.

NASH, Thomas, quoted, 19-20.
Neckam, Alexander, 32.
Neo-Hellenic, 249, 253.
Netherlands, 273, 279.
Newman, Thomas, 92.
Niger, Franciscus, 103.
Nominate, the, 27 et seq-
Nonsense-verses, 141.
Norths of Kirtling, the, 199.
Nowell, Alexander, Dean of St.
Paul's, 138.

OCLAND, Christopher, 230-2.
Old Brompton, 140.
Oral instruction, 14.
Ortus Vocabuloruin, 225, 228.
Oudin, Cesare, 153.
Ovid, 95.

Owen, Lewis, 153.
Oxford, Waynflete's school at, n,
12, 51, 60, 68.

ancient educational machi-
nery at, 17, 133-4. 151-

Grammar of, 1709, 120.

PACE, Richard, 102, 247.

Padua, 245.

Painting, 171.

Pal-grave, John, 123, 127, 228.

Pantofles, 265.

Paper, manufacture of, 75.

different sizes of, 75.

royal, 264.

blotting, 264.

Paris under Philip Augustus,

33-4-
Parish churches in London, 78.

schools in England, 194.

in Scotland, 185.

libraries proposed in Scot-
land, 185.

Partridge, John, 158.
Parvula, 69-70.
Parvulorttm Insfttutio, 52.
Pentcn, Stephen, 215.
Pepys, S., 157, 175.

Mrs., 175.

Percy, Bishop, 7.

Perottus, Nicolaus, 39-40, 225.

Pes (foot) derived from the Greek,

33-

Ph&nissce of Euripides, 248.
Philelphus, Franciscus, 103.
Phonography, 237, 285-9.
Pictorial vocabulary, 35.

298

Index.

Play-days v. holy-days, 16.
Pleunus, Henry, 278-9.
Poggius (Poggio Bracciolini), 99.
Polyglot vocabularies, 153-4, 276-

80.

Pope, Alexander, 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 et

Salisbury, 121.

for children, 211, 214.

Primrose, Dr. , Goldsmith's, 8 1, 205.
Printing, notices relative to, 75.
Printing-press, private, attached

to Merchant Taylors' School,

148-9.

Probation-Day, 139-42.
Professors of foreign languages,

153-

Promptorius Parwulorum, 225.
Pronunciation of Greek and Latin,

248-51.

Propria. qucp. maribus, 276.
Proprietary schools, 162, 195-6,

202, 206.
Protestant refugees at Geneva, 10.

A. B. C, first, 1553, 212.

Provincial schools, 132, 160, 179-

183.

culture, 201-2.

Pumps, 265.

Punctuation, early, 79-80.
Putney, 200.

QuARTER-wages, 148-9.
Quiney, Mrs., 202.

RABBARDS, R., 165.

Rabelais, 104.
Reading, 160.

Reference, early books of, 239-40.
Religious character of early teach-
ing, 6-8.

Remedies or holy-days, 15-17.
Reynell, Sir Richard, 162.

Sir Thomas, i6a.

Rhetoric, 132.
Rhodes, 242, 245.

Richmond and Derby, Margaret,

Countess of, 217.
Riding the Great Horse, 171.
Riga, 107.

Rightwise, John, 216.
Ripley's Compound of Alchemy,

165.
Robertson, Thomas, of York, 81,

150-2.

Rochelle, 256.
Roman Antiquities of Prideaux,

132.

of Adams, 240

coins, weights, and mea-

sures, 230.
Rome, 245.
Rood, Theodore, 51.
Roper, Margaret, 199.
Rose, Manor of the, 136.

sign of the, 258-9.

Roulston, Staffordshire, 106.
Ruddiman, Thomas, 187-9.
Russian abacus, 215.

SACKViLLE,Sir Richard, 19, 220-2.
— — — Mr. Robert, 221

Salaries of schoolmasters in 1561,

138-
School children (parish) in 1642,

194.

School of fish, 76.
Schools, monastic or conventual,

6-7.

Index.

299

Schools, cathedral, 7-9, 113.
-—^— established in England,

1502-15, 105-8, 210.

by Ed ward VI. , 1 26.

Schoolmaster, the old and new,

23-6.

of Old St. Paul's, 113-14.

Schoolmasters under the Com-
monwealth, 191-2.
Scogin, Jests of, 210-11.
Scot, Alexander, 251.
Scotland, 131, 184-9, 195, 197,

205, 279.

Scotus, Joh., 244.
Scrooby, Lincolnshire, 84.
Secularisation of teaching, 204-8.
Shakespear,W.,99, 155, 177,180-1,

201-2, 281.
his Dr. Cains and Duke

de Jarmany, 273-4.
Ship of Fools, 12.
Shirley, James, 237-8.
Shoemaker, dialogue with a, in

1597. 2(55-
Short Introduction of Grammar,

by Lily, 84.
Shropshire, 173, 181-2.
Shropshire school in 1788, 181-2.
Skinners' school at Tonbridge,

i3S» 251.

Smith, Sir Thomas, 247.
Smith's series of dictionaries, &c. ,

240.

Sneezing, folklore of, 78.
Somersetshire, 106.
Somerville, Mrs., 199.
Spalding, Augustine, 155.
Spanish language, 153.
Speech-Day at Merchant Taylors',

143-

Speeches at breaking-up, 143-5.
Spelling A. B. C. ,1590, 212.
Spitalfields, 157.

Staffordshire, 106-7.
Stage-plays in 1654, 192.
Stanbridge, John, n, 39, 44, 53-9,

71, 122.

Standish, John, 242.
Stans puer ad mensam, 42-3.
Stanyhurst's Virgil, 284.
Sterne's Sentimental Journey,

267.

St. Martin's-le-Grand, 114.
St. Mary-le-Bow, 114.
St. Mary Wike, Devonshire, 107.
St. Paul's Church, 77.

Churchyard, 115-16, 156,

261-2.

School (old), 8, 113.

(Colet's), looetseq,

120-2, 132-3, 204, 216, 223, 242.
Stockwood, John, 251.
Stratford-on-Avon, 181, 194.
Strong, Nathaniel, 156.
Studies at the Mustzum Minerva,

171-2.

Sturmius, Johannes, 221.
Subjects taught in mediaeval

schools, 9-10.
at St. Paul's and Merchant

Taylors', 109-10, 137, 139, 141-2.

at provincial schools,i8i-2.

Sulpicius, Johannes, 40-4, 50.
Surrey, 200.

Lord, 223.

Survival of early English system
of holidays in the United States,
17-

Sutton Colfield, 106.

Syms, Christopher, 163.

TABLES of Grammar, by John

Fox, 125.

Teachers, foreign, 5, 66. —
Terence, 46, 51, 90-4.
Testament, Greek, 141.

300

Index.

Theology in schools, 205-8.

Thucydides, 252.

Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester,

96.

Tom Thumb's Alphabet, 159.
Tonbridge, Skinners' School at,

135, 251.

Tree of Knowledge, the, 13.
Trinity Lane, 258-9.
Tumbler, a dog, 77.
Tunstall, Bishop, 102.
Turner, Dr., 105.
Tusser, Thomas, 18-19.
Tutors, 161-3.

UDALL, Nicolas, 19, 21.

Union, educational results of the, 3.

United States, system of holidays

in the, 17.
University of London, proposed,

in 1647-8, 166-9.

VACATION, modern, not formerly

understood, 16.
Valpy's Greek Grammar, 161.
Vaus, John, 186.
Vergil, Polydoie, 44.
Vimont, M., 236.
Virgil, 43-4, 94-5, no-n, 284.
Vitelliu>, Cornelius, 244.
Vives, Ludovicus, 118.
Vocabularies, 27 et seq.
polyglot, 153-4-

WAKES, 192.
Wales, 131, 233.
Walker, William, 158.
Walter de Biblesworth, 35.
Wapping, 156.

Warwickshire, 60, 194.

Watling Street, 114.

Wax candles taken by boys tc

school, 109, 137.
Waynflete, early school at, n.

Bishop, n, 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, 192.

Whittinton, Robert, 39, 44, 60-8,

81-2, 94, 96-9, 122, 1 86, 222.

his series of grammatical

treatises described, 60-6.

Winchester School, 137.

Wines, 256.

Withals, John, 228-9.

Witton School, near Chester, 183.

Wolfe, Reginald, 127.

Wolsey, Cardinal, 107, 119-20.

Wolverhampton, 107.

Women, education of, 4, 195-208.

notices of, 77.

Word-books, 27 et seq.

Writing, 175-7.

books, abundance of, 175.

XENOPHON, 254.

ZENOBIA, Queen Elizabeth pre-
ferred to, 231.

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