Part 6

So we see that, prior to the visit of Erasmus to us at the end of the fifteenth century, there 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 revise 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 author'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 L{d.} Montjoy how he lik'd that of the first sort. 'Oh sir,' says he, 'I like it so well, that you have made me resolve to marry quickly.' 'Ay!' but says Erasmus, 'you have read only one side, stay and read the other.' 'No,' replies L{d.} 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 characters 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 biographer apprises us that he exhorted the physicians of his time to study that language as more necessary 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 employed 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 English scholars and prelates; but the time had not arrived for any general movement.

II. Knight, in his Life of Dean Colet, enumerates several of the schools which were founded shortly before the Reformation. "This noble 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 brother, Sir John Fitzjames, lord chief justice of England: a fourth at Cirencester in Gloucestershire, 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 Warwickshire, by Dr. Simon Harman (_alias_ Veysey), bishop of Exeter: an eighth at Farnworth in Lancashire, by Dr. William Smith, Bishop of 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 Dorsetshire, by Margaret, countess of Richmond: another at Wolverhampton in Staffordshire, by Sir Stephen Jennings, mayor of London: another at Macclesfield, by Sir John Percival, mayor of London: as also another by the lady Thomasine his wife at St. Mary Wike in Devonshire, where she was born: and another at Walthamstow 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 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.

"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 wryting 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 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? We all have pretty similar beginnings, as the _prima stamina_ of a man and any other vertebrate are said to be undistinguishable to a certain point; and as St. Jerome learned his accidence of Donatus, so Virgil got his rudiments. 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 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 strictness 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 opinions 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 prejudice, that "the new wine of Christ might be put into new bottles."

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 Chancellor of Paul's (as in all the ancient cathedral churches) was master of the schools (_magister scholarum_), having the direction and government 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 present 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 belonging to the school. This master of the grammar school was to be a sober, honest man, of 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-chancellors 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 bestowed on him the custody of the library of the church. A successor of this person had the monopoly of teaching school in London conferred 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 Franciscana_ shews that the site of Colet's original school, which perished in the Great Fire, had been in the 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, invariably joined with that of a printer, and I apprehend 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.

Besides the vendors of literature, however, the site soon became one of the places of settlement 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 successive 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, 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, nevertheless, 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 limits the advantages of consolidation and completeness. The prestige of Lily had grown considerable, 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 evidence in favour of such an hypothesis. But, at any rate, in 1529 Cardinal Wolsey gave his sanction, and wrote a preface, to an impression of Lily's _Rudiments_ with certain alterations, more especially for the use of his school at Ipswich, but also, as the terms of the title state, for the benefit of all other similar institutions in the country.

The Cardinal's preface is dated August 1, 1528. It is followed by the _Docendi Methodus_, the _Rules_, the _Articles of Faith_, _Precepts of Living_, _Apostles' Creed_, _Decalogue_, &c.; and the rest of the book is occupied by the _Introduction of the 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 Antwerp impressions of 1535 and 1536, designed for the English learners in Flanders; and Lily's _Rudiments_, with and without the other accessories, were periodically republished even later than the so-called Oxford Grammar of 1709.

Now, as St. Paul's was the more ancient foundation, 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 particularly 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 executed a Latin metrical version of the _Lord's Prayer_ and _Precepts of Good Living_ for the 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 fragmentary relics which survive or have been so far recovered.

The _Coleti æditio_, &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 considered to be the special requirements of his own institution. For he says in the Proem:--

"Al be it many have wryten, and have made certayne introducyons into Latyn speche, called _Donates_ and _Accidens_, in Latyn tongue and in Englysshe, in suche plenty that it shoulde seme to suffyse; yet never the lesse, for the love and zele that I have to the newe schole of Powles, 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 publication 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 unquestionably 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 Grammar in lieu of the archaic sectional series of Stanbridge and Whittinton.

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 prepared and published. In 1540 a volume in two parts appeared under the royal authority, without 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 _Eclaircissement_.

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 Institution of the whole Grammar_.

This bipartite manual formed, of course, an improvement on the system formerly in vogue, which must have been very puzzling to boys. But it seems very doubtful indeed if this Primer of 1540 was practically recognised, or whether the Government took any measures to enforce what purported to have been done under its immediate sanction.

Whoever they were who arranged for publication 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 Commandments, 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 the same time that the large book was inconvenient 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 circumstances 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 seventeen 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 phenomenon, if we reflect that, in addition to the public and private schools previously in existence, the Government of Edward had planted 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 Protestant _regime_ took steps to re-issue the book.