A SELECT LIST
OF
Works or Editions

BY

WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT
OF THE INNER TEMPLE

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED
1860-1888.

1. History of the Venetian Republic; Its Rise, its Greatness, and its Civilisation. With Maps and Illustrations. 4 vols. 8vo. Smith, Elder & Co. 1860.

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 Introductions and Notes. Facsimiles. 3 vols. 12mo. 1864.

3. Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England. With Introductions and Notes. 4 vols. 12mo. Woodcuts. 1864-66.

4. Handbook to the Early Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain. Demy 8vo. 1867. Pp. 714, in two columns.

5. Bibliographical Collections and Notes. 1867-76. Medium 8vo. 1876.

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

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 Collections and Notes (Quaritch) is the result of many years’ searches among rare books, tracts, ballads, and broadsides by a man whose specialty is bibliography, and who has thus produced a volume of high value. If any one 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,’ ‘Elizabeth,’ ‘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 acquaintances and friends. This 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 welcome 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 and Final Series. 1886. 8vo.

Uniform with the First and Second Series. This volume contains upwards of 3000 articles. All three are now on sale by Mr. Quaritch.

8. Memoirs of William Hazlitt. With Portions of his Correspondence. Portraits after miniatures by John Hazlitt. 2 vols. 8vo. 1867.

During the last twenty years the Author has been indefatigable in collecting additional information for the Life of Hazlitt, 1867, in correcting errors, and in securing all the unpublished letters which have come into the market, some of great interest, with a view to a new and improved 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. 1868-69.

11. Letters of Charles Lamb. With some Account of the Writer, his Friends and Correspondents, and Explanatory Notes. By the late Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, D.C.L., one of his Executors. An entirely new edition, carefully revised and greatly enlarged by W. Carew Hazlitt. 2 vols. 1886. Post 8vo.

11a. Mary and Charles Lamb. New Facts and Inedited Remains. 8vo. Woodcuts and Facsimiles. 1874.

The groundwork of this volume was an Essay by the writer in Macmillan’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 privately printed. 1870.

17. Warton’s History of English Poetry. An entirely new edition, with Notes by Sir F. Madden, T. Wright, F. J. Furnivall, R. Morris, and others, and by the Editor. 4 vols. Medium 8vo. 1871.

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

19. Prefaces, Dedications, and Epistles. Prefixed to Early English 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 rearranged. With a Glossary by Dr. Richard Morris. 15 vols. 8vo. 1874-76.

22. Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances. Illustrating Shakespear and other Early English Writers. 12mo. 1875.

23. Shakespear’s Library: A Collection of the Novels, Plays, and other Material supposed to have been used by Shakespear. An entirely new edition. 6 vols. 12mo. 1875.

24. Fugitive Tracts (written in verse) which illustrate the 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 preparation.

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 Illustrations. 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. 384.

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

30. Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. 12mo. 1886.

31. An Address to the Electors of Mid-Surrey, among whom I Live. In Rejoinder to Mr. Gladstone’s Manifesto. 1886. 8vo, pp. 32.

“Who would not grieve, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?”—Pope.

32. Gleanings in Old Garden Literature. 12mo. 1887.

33. Schools, School-books, and Schoolmasters. A Contribution to the History of Educational Development. 12mo. 1888.

34. Studies in Jocular and Anecdotal Literature. 12mo. In January next.

SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-BOOKS,
AND
SCHOOLMASTERS.

Schools
School-books
AND
Schoolmasters

A Contribution to the history of Educational
Development in Great Britain

BY
W. CAREW HAZLITT

LONDON
J. W. JARVIS & SON
KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND
1888

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 exhaustively 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 present a general view of the principles on which the groundwork of this system was laid. So 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 interesting.

The bias of the volume is literary, not bibliographical; 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 educational 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 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 elaborate and extended system of training, and for a circle of accomplishments, set in with the Stuarts, the appliances of every kind for gratifying 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 facilities for completing themselves in special departments of science, as well as in such exercises as were thought to belong to gentlemen. 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 Italian sympathies which the union of the crowns, after the death of the last of the Tudors, introduced 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 significant fact can there be, in proof of the conservative bigotry of those who so long exercised control in schoolroom and college, that a primer compiled in the first quarter of the sixteenth century was still substantially the standard authority less than a hundred years since?

When we regard a History of English Literature, 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 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 improvement 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 mischievous influence, did much valuable work toward the development and progress of literature and art, and was instrumental in preserving 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 important 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 mediæval scholastic curriculum, they taught music for the sake of keeping a constant succession 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.

Bishop Percy says that the system of instruction 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 original callings, and sought their fortune as minstrels 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 institutions which preceded the lay seminaries, and over which the bishop of the diocese presided ex officio. The pupils in these institutions were termed the scholastics of the diocese; and one of the latest survivals of the system was, perhaps, the old St. Paul’s, which Colet’s endowment eventually superseded. The preponderant element here was, of course, clerical; the boys were, as a rule, educated with a view to ecclesiastical 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, nevertheless, from the days of Alfred to the age of the Tudors.

But these cathedral schools themselves had grown out of the antecedent conventual establishments, 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 mediæval time almost every monastic house had its special 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 conventual. There seems, however, to have been one marked difference between the monastic or conventual 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 inducted 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 convents 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 comparative neglect, and a study of the living languages was still more remote from their design.

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 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 Waynflete, Brackley, and Oxford, where the Accidence and Syntax were taught on an improved plan. The last-named seminary was within the precincts of Magdalen College, and became by far the most important and most famous of the three, in consequence of its good fortune in having among its masters men like Anniquil and Stanbridge, who took a real interest in their profession, and bred scholars capable of diffusing and developing the love of acquiring knowledge and the art of communicating it.

As Knight observes, grammar was the main object; but then the method was a great advance 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 rather well-known Latin description of the University as reformed by the Republicans in 1648, 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 gradually conceded and accomplished. In all political 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.

We naturally encounter in much of the literary work of the seventeenth century advice and information in matters relating to scholastic 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, dedicated to our immediate subject, the anonymous 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 Rudiments, 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 Knowledge 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 indicate 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 treatises of a cognate character, is a tissue of dulness and inanity. It is characteristic of the whole that portraits of Jeremiah and Zedekiah are selected as appropriate graphic embellishments.

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 evidently 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 multiplied 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 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 Taylors’, 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 represented as spending the holy days (rather than holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and disputations.

In all the public schools, indeed, holidays were at first intimately associated with the recurrence of saints’ anniversaries and with festivals of the Church, and were restricted to them. The modern vacation was not understood; 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 substituted 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.

A quite recent report of one of the great schools in the United States—the West Point School—manifests a survival of the old-fashioned 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 schoolboy’s experiences. “I was born,” he tells us, “in the beautiful city of London; 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 Aristotelian philosophy than many of my contemporaries, and became very well acquainted with the Rhetoric of Cicero.” It is very interesting to 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 autobiography 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;
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 professional pale: for Lord Burleigh, as we learn from Ascham, was on the side of the disciplinarians.

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 wit, and good for nothing, but to get a schoolmaster 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 graphically 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 flagellation 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.

The régime 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 II. notions of what was salutary for youth in the shape of unguentum baculinum, or stick-ointment, had undergone very slight alteration since the previous century. 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 Cæsars. Smaller luminaries in the same sphere paid him homage in dedicatory epistles.

Everybody must remember the traditional anecdote of the visit of Charles II. to Westminster, 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 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 accident 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 playground; 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-grounds still pursues his favourite occupation on earth.

Charles Burney, one of a famous and accomplished family, kept school at one time at Greenwich. He subsequently removed to Chiswick. There are still persons living who recollect 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 civilisation have tended to liberate the schoolboy from the barbarous despotism of his teachers, the majority of whom were latter-day survivals 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 generally touched. But so early as 1669 a representation on the subject was actually laid before Parliament in a document called “The Children’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 stronghold 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, perhaps, from any persuasion that greater clemency 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 Neckam on utensils (twelfth century)—Works of Johannes de Garlandia—His Dictionary (thirteenth century) and its pleasant treatment—The Pictorial Vocabulary—Anglo-Gallic Dictionary of Walter de Biblesworth (late thirteenth century).

I. The origin and history of a class of documents which may be viewed as the basis and starting-point of our educational literature have first to be considered. I refer to the vocabularies, 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 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 Gardening by the present writer, he has, as a matter of course, called into requisition these early philological relics to illustrate both those subjects; and this fact testifies to the multiplicity of purposes for which such relics can be rendered serviceable. There is hardly, indeed, any aspect or line of mediæval 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 pupils. Some of these, which I shall presently describe a little more at large, were constructed on the interlinear 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 mechanical medium for conveying to the boys the lessons which they found set down in treatises prepared by persons of superior skill and erudition.

These primitive schoolbooks are, as a rule, easily susceptible of classification under the heads of Vocabularies, Dictionaries, Colloquies, and Narrative or descriptive texts, of which the two latter divisions are usually interlinear, either in part or throughout. Some of these terms, again, were formerly understood in acceptations different from our own; for a Vocabulary was what we should rather call a Dictionary, and a Dictionary was what we should rather call a Phrase-Book.

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 supposed 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 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 specialities 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 apparent order. The same is to be said of all the works of this class belonging to the mediæval era.

The Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Neckam De Utensilibus (twelfth century) is differently constructed from the Alfric Vocabulary, 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 remarkable body of information in our literature respecting the life and habits of the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans.

Johannes de Garlandia, whose work is common 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 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 probably 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 himself 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. 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 communicativeness which together have rendered his treatise a work of art and a cyclopædia 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. One only differs markedly from the rest in possessing graphic embellishments of a rude and quaint character; among the rest the portrait of a woe-begone gallant, and by his side an arrow-pierced heart. Some of the representations are, of course, happier than others; assuredly those of animals are pre-Landseerian. They are many degrees below the stamp of such artistic essays as one finds in the books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a rule, both in England and abroad. 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 student 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 language, apart from the spelling, is remarkable for its plentiful use of expressions which have fallen into desuetude, and some of which, as io for je, bespeak a Pyrenæan origin.

This production is intituled “Le treytyz ke moun sire Gauter de Bibelesworthe fist à ma dame Dyonisie de Mounchensy, pur aprise de langwage, ço est à 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 ço ke pent à 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.”

This didactic treatise is additionally interesting 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 professedly educational. Yet, after all deductions, the work is of singular curiosity and fascination, not only for its own sake, but as the best philological 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 Villâ Dei and his Doctrinale—The Doctrinale one of the earliest productions of the Dutch press—Ælius 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 instruction for Englishmen in scholastic and academical 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 multiplied by teachers for the use of their own pupils, the early Parisian printers supplied the market with the works, which it had been theretofore possible to procure only to a very limited extent, in transcripts executed by the authors themselves 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 Grammatical Rules first appeared, so far as I know, in 1486.[1]

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 very powerful and beneficial influence at, and long after, the period of their composition; and I am disposed to think that this was particularly the case with his Rudimenta Grammatices, 1476, and his Cornucopia Linguæ Latinæ, 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 groundwork 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 proceeded 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 which some were occasionally added or omitted at pleasure, or variously placed.

The edition of 1505 comprises the undermentioned pieces:—

Sulpitii Verulani examen de 8 partibus orationis.
De declinatione nominum.
De preteritis & supinis.
Carmen iuuenile de moribus mensæ.
Vocabulorum interpretatio.
Iod. Badii Ascensii De regimine dictionum.
Sulp. Verul. De regimine & constructione.
De componendis ordinandisq. epistolis.
De carminibus.

The title-leaf presents the woodcut, often employed 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 the London press, while others were imported from Paris.

The fasciculi in one of 1511 are as follow:—

Sulpitii Examen de octo partibus orationis.
Carmen Iuuenile.
De declinatione nominum orthoclitorum.
—————————— heteroclitorum.
De nominibus heteroclitis.
De generibus nominum.
De verbis defectiuis.
De præteritis 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 editio princeps of the Latin poem appeared in 1483, and that Caxton printed Lydgate’s English 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 comparison of the English text with that given in the work of Sulpicius shews considerable variations; 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 Vergilius as the name of the Latin poet is so far 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 contractions, 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 hampered by pedantic and ignorant instructors, it seems marvellous, not that the spread of education was so slow and partial, but that so many scholars should have emerged from such a process.

A more obscure and repellent series of grammatical dissertations can hardly be imagined; yet Sulpicius holds a high rank among the promoters of modern education, as the precursor of all those, such as Robert Whittinton, John Stanbridge, 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 naturally went beyond him; but Sulpicius was doubtless as much in advance of his forerunners 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 Gallus, or Alexander de Villâ 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 published abroad, but does not really seem to have ever gained a strong footing among ourselves, since three editions of it are all that 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 Ælius 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 became so great and was so widely diffused, that 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 Græcorum. 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, i.e. 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, traitè de grammaire.... Among Rawlinson’s MSS. at Oxford I have seen Donatus opitimus 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 mention made of ‘certayne introducyons into latyn speche called Donates, &c. ... Cotgrave ... quotes an old French proverb: ‘Les diables etoient encores a leur Donat’—The devils were but yet in their grammar.”

In common with Æsop, the Dialogus Creaturarum, 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 different 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 pueris, both published at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century.

The former has on the title-page a large woodcut, representing a schoolmaster in a sort of thronal chair, with the instrument of correction 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 uncovered, 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 remarkable, viz. N. Ego. G. mei vel mis. N. Tu. G. tui vel tis. N. Quis vel qui, que vel qua, Quod vel quid. Pl. 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 Parvulorum Institutio—Personal allusions in the examples given—John Stanbridge—Account of his works, with extracts of interesting passages—Robert Whittinton—His sectional series of Grammars.

I. The influence of Donatus was both widespread and of prolonged duration, and we must regard the ancient capital of the civilised world as the focus and cradle of all modern grammatical literature. Upon the great revival of culture, many Englishmen repaired to Rome to undergo a formal training for the scholastic profession under the masters who arose there, among whom were Sulpicius, author, as we have seen, of several educational tracts, which obtained considerable currency here, and Johannes Balbus, who compiled the famous Catholicon.

The Lexicon and Dictionary naturally followed the Primer; and our earliest productions of this kind were formed out of the Vocabularies 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 glossographical 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 College, 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. Annaquil, 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 Vulgaria of Terence annexed. This volume was printed at Oxford by Theodore Rood about 1484; and an edition of 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 recovered of this book exhibit variations from the later copies, into which subsequent editors purposely introduced improvements and corrections. There are some familiar allusions here, such as, had they been more numerous, might have rendered 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 London: 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 respective years of the impressions; as, Audito regem Doroberniam proficisci; Imperator [Maximilian] meruit sub rege, &c. There were likewise in that edition of Erasmus several examples referring to Dean Colet, as Vixit Romæ, 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 Winchester. 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 reimpressions or selections by his pupil Whittinton and others. The former category embraces: 1. Accidence; 2. Vocabula; 3. Vulgaria. In the latter I include: 1. Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Editione recognita limâ Roberti Whittintoni; 2. Parvulorum Institutio ex Stanbrigiana Collectione. The first of these productions, not strictly to be regarded as proceeding 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 Stanbridge 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 variations 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 (Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione) does not 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 Accidence from London presses, and a fourth in an abridged shape from an Antwerp one, presumably 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 introductions to our own language were executed here and reproduced abroad, but Latin authors were beginning to find competent native interpreters, among whom John Annaquil was perhaps 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 continued 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:—

De naui et eius pertinentibus.

This extract is highly edifying. In the concluding 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 before the Stones as antecedent to the gondola.

III. The remaining contribution of Stanbridge to this class of literature is his Vulgaria, 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, occiput, et coma, crinis.

········

········

Vulgaria quedā cū suis vernaculis compilata iuxta
consuetudinem ludi litterarij diui Pauli.

The abridgments of Stanbridge’s Accidence led, I presume, to the distinction of the original 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 Accidence 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:—

“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 nomynatyve 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 follows:—

IV. Robert Whittinton, whose name is probably more familiar to the ordinary student than that of the man from whom he derived his knowledge and tastes, was a native of Warwickshire, 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 decorated with the laurel wreath by the University 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 Protovates Angliæ, 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 himself is not so clear, nor do we know the circumstances or date of his decease.

I am going to do my best to lay before the 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 grammar, 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 Præterita 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.

These eleven fasciculi actually form altogether one system, and some of them have their order of succession in the author’s arrangement indicated; as, for instance, the Verborum Præterita 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 Primæ 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 originally in strict order of time.

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

We must now pass to the treatise De Syllabarum Quantitate, which, in a chronological respect, ranks first among Whittinton’s works, as there was an edition of it as early as 1513.

This tripartite volume, 1. On the Quantity of Syllables; 2. On Accent; and 3. On the Roman Magistrates, is noteworthy on two accounts. The second portion embraces the earliest specimen in any English book of the poems of Horace, and the concluding section is a kind of rudimentary Lemprière. Subjoined is a sample of the lines upon accents, from Dibdin:—

“Accentus tonus est per quē fit syllaba quevis
Cognita: quādo acui debet, vel qū gravari
Accentus triplex; fit acutus vel gravis, inde
Est circūflexus: qui nunc fit rarus in vsu.
Syllaba cum tendit sursum est accentus acutus
Est gravis accentus sed syllaba pressa deorsum
Fit circūflexus gravis in prima: sed in altum
Attollit mediam, postrema gravis reciditque.”

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 Lucubrations, 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 compiled:—

“Befe and motton 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, garnysshed 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 extracting, 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 Synonyms:—

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 Germany long kept our vernacular in the background, and retarded the study of English by Englishmen; but the uprise of a taste for the 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 Molière 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 Angliæ. In one place he speaks of being “primus in Angliâ lauri coronam gestans,” and elsewhere he professes to be magister grammatices. As Warton and others have speculated 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 regents 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 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, decorated in the arts of grammar and rhetoric, 4 July the same year.”

The biographer of Colet is undoubtedly correct in supposing that the ancient poet-laureatship was nothing more than an academical degree, and that in this sense, and in no other, Skelton bore that designation, as well as Bernardus 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 commenced his qualification for a schoolmaster as far back as 1499, which is reconcilable with the date assigned to his birth (1480).

V.

Educational tracts produced by other writers—Parvula—Holt’s Milk for Children—Horman’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 Parvula or Longe Parvula. It is a series of rules for translation and other exercises in the form of question and answer, thus:—

“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 ȳ 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 epigram 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 Parvulorum Institutio, to the latter of which I have already referred, Holt appears to me the most likely person to have compiled the tract called Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione, a small grammatical manual based on that of his predecessor 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 mediæval Nominale, has no other title than Os, Facies, mentum, and is a Latin poem descriptive of the human form, first printed in 1508, with an interlinear English gloss. It begins thus:—

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.

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, Tractatus 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 linguæ Latinæ 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 Gradus Comparationum of Johannes Bellomayus, and the Regulæ 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 supposed to be specially adapted to their requirements.

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 adiectyues welnere ȳ betoken a thynge that maye be made more or lesse: as fayre: fayrer: fayrest: black, blacker, blackest. How many degrees of comparacyon ben there? iij. the positiue ȳ comparatiue & the superlatyue. How knowe ye the posityue gēdre? For he is the groūde and the begynner of all other degrees of cōparyson. How knowe ye the comparatyue degre? for he passeth his posityue with this englysshe more, or his englysshe endeth 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 contents without exhausting the store, but I must content myself with such extracts as seem most entertaining and instructive:—

“Physicians, that be all sette to wynne money, bye and sylle our lyues: and so oftē tymes we bye deth with a great and a sore pryce. Animas nostras æruscatores medici negociantur, &c.

“Papyre fyrste was made of a certeyne stuffe like the pythe of a bulrushe in Ægypt: and syth it is made of lynnen clothe soked in water, stāpte or grūde pressed and smothed. Chartæ seu 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 artē, &c.

“Pryntynge hathe almooste vndone scryueners crafte. Chalcographia librariorū q̄stū pene exhavsit.

“Yf the prynters take more hede to the hastynge: than to the true settynge of theyr moldis: the warke is vtterly marred. Si qui libros, &c.”

The rest are given without the Latin equivalents, which have no particular interest.

“Scryueners write with blacke, redde, purple, gren, blewe, or byce: and suche other.

Parchement leues be wonte to be ruled: that there may be a comly margēt: also streyte lynes of equal distaunce be drawe withyn: that the wryttyng may shewe fayre.

Olde or doting chourles can not suffre yōge 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 saūple by the whiche other were lyghtly provoked and taughte to deuyse better.

There is come a scoolle of fysshe.

The tems 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 mōkis 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 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 cōuenyent that a man haue one seueral place in his house to hymselfe fro cōbrance of womē.

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 sūtyme bellis: sūtyme colers ful of prickkis for theyr defēce.

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 custume / that the Mayre of London with his bretherne shall offer at Poules certayne dayes in the yere.

In London be. lij. parysshe chyrches.

Two or. iij. neses be holsome: one is a shrowed tokē.”

These selected extracts will convey some notion of the unusual curiosity of the Vulgaria of Horman, 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 educational performances is also a curious philological relic, and a factor in the illustration of the imperfect 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 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.