Part 7

This was in 1567. In the Preface very just stress is laid on the mischief proceeding from what is termed "a diversity of Grammars," and from different schoolmasters adopting different methods and books. The proclamation attached expresses at large the objects and advantages of the publication, while it certainly seems to claim for the Queen's father more credit than, looking at the circumstances, he deserved. For the Primer of 1540 had been preceded by those of Linacre and Wolsey, just as the _Short Introduction_ of 1548 and 1567 was, in the main, a reproduction of Henry's book. But the same unqualified encomium is pronounced on Henry by John Palsgrave, the celebrated lexicographer and teacher of languages, in the prolix and fulsome dedication to his English _Acolastus_, 1540, which must have been written and in type when the copies of the Primer had scarcely left the binder's hands. Palsgrave does not intimate here any personal concern in the undertaking.

The Preface of 1567 is followed by the Latin letters, the vowels and consonants, and the Greek letters; after which comes a prayer, "O Almighty God and merciful Father," which is still retained at some of our public schools. The _Introduction of the Eight Parts of Speech_ constitutes the body and remainder of the English part.

There are six forms of grace before meat, and six others of grace after meat.

The Latin section opens with the Greek alphabet, and proceeds to the parts of grammar, concluding with Erasmus's _De Ratione_. But, as I have stated more than once, this later text-book does not substantially vary from that of 1548. The royal proclamation granted the monopoly of printing to Reginald Wolfe, and forbad the employment of any other Grammar throughout her Highness's dominions. The document declares that Henry VIII., in the midst of weighty affairs belonging to his office, had not forgotten nor neglected the tender youth of his realm, but had, from a fervent zeal for the godly bringing up of the said youth, and a special desire that they might learn the Latin tongue more easily, instituted a new uniform Grammar; which was so far really the case, inasmuch as the 1540 volume was the first official one, and also at the date of its promulgation the most complete and satisfactory.

V. But in examining this general Grammar for all England and the dominions annexed, one at once misses the graphic and amusing illustrations which present themselves in many of the earlier books which we have been studying. The examples, instead of being drawn from the occupations and various phases of everyday life, are almost without exception purely technical and commonplace. There is no allusion which one would welcome as casting an incidental light on contemporary history or manners. It is mostly a dead level. The learned men have done this! It makes us cheerful, amid the habitual dearth of something to leaven the text, to stumble upon a few of the little touches in the older books retained as an exception, such as: "Vivo in Anglia. Veni per Galliam in Italiam," or "Vixit Londini: Studuit Oxoniæ."

How differently Horman in his _Vulgaria_, 1519, handled his subject, and his pages were intended for schoolboys and students too!

The frequency with which the Primer was henceforth reprinted, contrasted with the very limited call for copies from 1540 to 1566, seems to furnish an indication that the book and the system were at last gaining ground, and beginning to meet with more general acceptance.

But the irreconcilable diversity of opinions, which has always prevailed, respecting etymology, syntax, pronunciation, and other cardinal points, militated against the success on any very grand scale of an official Primer; and the Tudors, arbitrary and absolute as they were in all questions of political significance, were not prompted by the feeling of the time to resort in such a case as this to penal and peremptory legislation. The eighteenth century saw Lily's Grammar still more or less in vogue under the name of the original author, not to speak of the obligations of its successors to it; but the Tudor book, constructed in some measure out of it, and ushered into existence under the most auspicious and powerful patronage, sank after a not very robust or influential life of six decades (1540-1600) into complete oblivion.

Our great Elizabeth has been dead near three hundred years, and no genuine popular demand for mental improvement has yet come from the people. In the sixteenth century--in the Queen's time and in her father's--the spirit which promoted education was based either on political or commercial motives.

The universities and schools reared a succession of preceptors who deserted the monastic traditions, and to whom learning was a mere vocation. One large class of the English community sought to acquire the accomplishments which might be serviceable in the Government and at court; another limited its ambition to those which would enable them to prosper in trade or in the wars.

V. A class of school-book destined for special use, besides those enumerated in another place, presents itself in the shape of grammatical works dedicated by their authors, not to particular institutions, but to particular localities or parts of the Empire. Edward Buries, who kept school at East Acton in Cromwell's day, accommodated his plan to the requirements of adults, but at the same time announces that it is printed for the advantage of the schools in the counties of Middlesex and Hertford, which strikes us as at once a curious limitation and a sanguine proposal, unless Buries was a Hertfordshire man. This was in 1652.

A later writer was more catholic and ambitious in his flight; for in 1712 John Brightland projected a Grammar of the English tongue "for the use of the schools of Great Britain _and Ireland_,"--a fact more particularly noticeable, because it is the first hint of any scheme comprehending the Emerald Isle. I allude elsewhere to the early Accidence drawn up for Scotland by Alexander Hume; and in 1647 the interests of the rising generation in Wales were specially considered by the unnamed introducer of a simplified Latin Primer _in usum juventutis Cambro-Britannicæ_, which aimed at a monopoly of the Principality without prejudice to persons beyond the border.

Besides the Grammar itself, certain Manuals purported to be, not for general educational purposes, but for a given school, and even for a specified class in it. Such was the _English Introduction to the Latin Tongue_ for the use of the lower forms in Westminster School; and at Magdalen School, Oxford, they had, at least as far back as 1623, a small text-book on the declensions and conjugations. I take another opportunity to speak of a Latin phrase-book designed for Manchester in 1660, and of the printed examination papers, exhibiting the lines laid down at Merchant Taylors' about the same time. In a few cases a more elaborate compilation was framed, at all events originally, with the same restricted scope, like the _Roman Antiquities_ of Prideaux, in 1614, for Abingdon.

Perhaps, however, the most conspicuous example of this localisation was the _Outlines of Rhetoric_ for St. Paul's, of which we meet with a third edition in 1659; and which must have been in connection with some new and temporary effort to enlarge the range of studies during the Protectorate, partly under the stimulus of the promoters of the famous _Musæum Minervæ_ and the commencing taste for a more complex platform. For such subjects do not seem to have made part of the ordinary course of training anywhere since the mediæval period, when the Aristotelian system was paramount at our Universities; although, at the same time, among more advanced students philosophical treatises never ceased to possess interest and attract perusers. But the relevance of the handbook for St Paul's lies in its professed destination for the young.

It is questionable whether, outside the Universities and the establishments affiliated upon them, the sciences were acquirable as part of the normal routine. At Oxford, in the reign of Henry VIII., they taught what was then termed Judicial Astronomy, which was a mere burlesque on the true study of the planetary bodies; and Logic was on the list of accomplishments within the reach of boys, who were sent up either to college or to school; for in _A Hundred Merry Tales_, 1526, the son of the rich franklin comes back home for the holidays, and declares, as the fruit of the time and money expended on his education at Oxford school, whither his indulgent father had sent him for two or three years, his conversance with subtleties and ability to prove the two chickens on the supper-table to be sophistically three.

IX.

Merchant Taylors' School founded in 1561--Its limited scope and stationary condition during two centuries and a half--The writer's recollections of it from 1842 to 1850--William Dugard and his troubles.

I. I cannot enter very well, in a general view of the subject, into the history of all the civic foundations which rose up one by one subsequently to St. Paul's, such as the City of London School, the Mercers' and the Skinners', beyond the incidental notices which I have taken occasion to introduce of such institutions, as well as of the system of public grammar schools endowed by Edward VI. But I may be allowed to speak of one with which I enjoyed personal associations between the years 1842 and 1850, and to mention that in the third chapter of his _Autobiography_ Leigh Hunt sheds some interesting light on the condition of Christ's Hospital when Lamb, Coleridge, and himself were there in the last years of the last century.

Christ's Hospital has produced some very eminent men, but whether by virtue of its system or in spite of it, I hardly venture to say. The biographer of the author of _Elia_ tells us what books his distinguished friend read at school; how little he learned, Lamb himself seems to suggest in that paper on "The Old and the New Schoolmaster."

The origin of Merchant Taylors' School is thus described by Wilson:--

"Towards the close of the year 1560, or early in the following spring, the Merchant Taylors' Company conceived the laudable design of founding a grammar school; and part of the manor of the Rose, in the parish of St. Lawrence-Pountney (a mansion which had successively belonged to the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of Exeter, and the Earls of Sussex), seeming eligible for the purpose, Mr. Richard Hills, a leading member of the court, generously contributed the sum of five hundred pounds towards the purchase of it; but the institution was not thoroughly organised till the 24th September 1561, on which day the statutes were framed and a schoolmaster chosen."

With the statutes I have no farther concern than with the clause which directs that the two hundred and fifty scholars, to which the school was limited, were "to be taught in manner & forme as is afore devised & appointed. But first see that they can the catechisme in English or Latyn, & that every of the said two hundred & fifty schollers can read perfectly & write competently, or els lett them not be admitted in no wise."

It is rather curious that the hours of attendance were originally from seven till eleven A.M. and from one till five P.M., and that in winter the boys were to bring no candles of tallow, but candles of wax. This was following the statutes of Dean Colet. Thrice in the day there were prayers; but instead of one of the sixth form saying them for the rest, as was subsequently customary, each boy seems at first to have prayed for himself.

The printed form usually employed was brief enough, and not, like the Manual prepared by Bishop Ken for Winchester, adapted for the use of "all other devout Christians."

The staff consisted at the outset of a head-master and three ushers, whose united emoluments were forty pounds a year, and the first chief teacher of the school was Richard Mulcaster. It appears that the earliest Probation-Day, as it was termed, was in November 1564, when Dean Nowell and others examined the ushers and the boys with a very gratifying result. These appositions were renewed in 1565, and probably still continue from year to year. They commenced in 1564 at eight o'clock in the morning, and so they did in my time. The practice of visitation by the Court on this day seems to have ceased in 1606.

Alderman Sir Thomas White, some time subsequently to the foundation of the school by the Company, augmented the endowment, so as to enable the institution to develop itself, and enlarge its sphere of utility in connection with Oxford University and in other ways. White was a member of the Court when the scheme was adopted, but he was not, strictly speaking, as he has been usually termed and considered, the founder of Merchant Taylors'.

We do not arrive, meanwhile, at any clear or complete notion of the books which were used at the school, but it is to be inferred that Lily's Grammar was the Latin text-book. In the rules made for Probation-Day in 1606-7, I find Æsop's _Fables_ in Greek, Tully's _Epistles_, and the _Dialogues_ of Corderius named as works in which the boys were to be tested. The subjects taken on this day were Greek, Latin, and dictation, writing being necessarily included. Neither Hebrew, nor arithmetic, nor the mathematics are enumerated; there are the six forms, but no monitors or prompters.

The _School's Probation_ presents itself for the first time as a printed production, or at least as something compiled in book form, under the date of 1608. It is printed entire by Wilson; but he does not state, nor do I know, what original, whether printed or not, he employed.

II. Probation-Day still continued in my time to be an important event--a sort of red-letter day in our calendar. The hour for assembling was eight o'clock, instead of nine; it had been half-past six while the school was exclusively composed of residents within a limited radius; but the enlarged time was a sore trial in the winter where one had to travel from a suburb, as I did from Old Brompton. They supplied breakfast at the place, not gratuitously, but at a fixed tariff. It would not have been much for a wealthy Company to provide an entertainment once or twice a year for two or three hundred lads at a shilling or so a head; but the Merchant Taylors, I think, have always been notorious for parsimony. Very little was accomplished before the meal, and after its completion we had to set to work, the old room upstairs being as ill-adapted for the purpose of an examination as can well be imagined, the boys having to use the forms as desks and to kneel in front of them. We were a very short distance from the Middle Ages. Matters were not much changed since the time of the original establishment of the charity. Indeed, it appears from Dugard's _School's Probation_, 1652, that in the seventeenth century the Company paid for some kind of collation:--

"There shall be paid unto the Master of the School, for beer, ale, and new manchet-bread, with a dish of sweet butter, which hee shall have ready in the morning, with two fine glasses set upon the Table, and covered with two fair napkins, and two fine trenchers, with a knife laid upon each trencher, to the end that such as please may take part, to staie their stomachs until the end of the examination ... ijs."

The number of boys was in 1652 comparatively limited; but of course without a revival of the ancient miracle two shillings' worth of victuals would not have gone far in allaying the hunger of a far smaller gathering, and this allowance must have simply been for such as had missed their meal at home, or desired additional refreshment.

The old examination itself presents numerous points of curiosity, as we look at it through the present medium. Considerable stress seems to have been laid on dictation. The master opened, on the sudden, Cicero, the Greek Testament, Æsop's _Fables_ in Greek, and read a passage, which the boys of a particular form had to take down, and then turn into some other language, or into verse, or make verses upon it--a pretty piece of trifling, much like the nonsense-verses which we used to have to compose in my day, and as profitable.

Some of the English sentences to be turned into Latin are odd enough: "Bacchus and Apollo send for Homer;" "I went to Colchester to eat oysters;" "My Uncle went to Oxford to buie gloves;" "The Atheist went to Amsterdam to chuse his religion." Others might have been autobiographical: "Marie was my sister, she dwelt at London;" "Elisabeth was my Aunt, she dwelt at York;" "Anna was my Grandmother, she dwelt at Worcester."

In another place, under _Sententiæ Varietas_, there are five-and-twenty ways of describing in a sentence the great qualities of Cicero.

Greek was certainly studied with a good deal of attention here in the early time, judging from the space which is devoted to it in the scheme of Dugard, in whose small volume the questions and theses in that language occupy twenty pages. Erasmus had, doubtless, had a large share in popularising among us the cultivation of Hellenic grammar and letters.

Even when the present writer was at the school, Hebrew was by no means assiduously or scientifically followed, nor do I believe that on the staff of masters there was any one who properly understood the language. But it was part of the programme, and the late Sir Moses Montefiore, who usually attended on Speech and Prize Day, was the annual donor of a Hebrew medal.

Speech-Day at Merchant Taylors' was the sole occasion on which the large schoolroom in Suffolk Lane was ever honoured by the presence of the fair sex. The lower end of the room was converted into an extempore stage, and the monitors and prompters took part in some recitation, or select scene from the Latin or Greek dramatists. At a later period French themes were introduced.

As far back as the reign of Charles I., the large contribution which the ladies and other friends of the scholars made to the audience, and their imperfect acquaintance with the dead languages, rendered it a subject of regret and complaint that the entertainment was not given in the vernacular, and the writer of a small volume called _Ludus Ludi Litterarii_, 1672, purporting to report a series of speeches delivered at various breakings-up, states that the majority of them were in English on this very account. As early as the time of Henry VIII., the practice of exhibiting some dramatic performance at the close of the term, and usually at Christmas, was in vogue; but these spectacles were, it is to be suspected, almost uniformly in the original language of the classic author, or in the scholastic Latin of the period.

A feeling in favour of a reform in these arrangements had, as has been mentioned, arisen when Hawkins wrote for the free school at Hadleigh in Suffolk his play entitled _Apollo Shroving_, 1627, where one of the characters desires the Prologue to speak what he has to say in honest English, for all their sakes, and describes the predilection for employing Latin as more appropriate to the University.

Occasionally, instead of plays, there were musical entertainments; and the custom of signalising the termination of the school-work seems to have been followed by the private academies.

But the antipathy to change and the temptation to a display of erudition have always proved too strong an obstacle to improvement; and when the writer was last present at this anniversary, the ancient precedent was still in force, and the Court of the Merchant Taylors and general company listened in respectful silence to interlocutions or monologues as mysterious to them as the Writing on the Wall.

III. William Dugard, head-master from 1646 to 1660, so far as his light and information were capable of carrying him, did, no doubt, good service to the Company and institution with which he was during so many years associated. But, on the ground of misconduct and negligence, his employers thought proper, on the 27th December 1660, to discharge him from the place of chief schoolmaster, giving him, however, till the following Midsummer to find another appointment.

Dugard states in _An humble Remonstrance Presented to the Right Worshipfull Company of Merchant-Tailors, Maii 15, 1661_, that the Company assigned no cause for their proceeding; but he says at the same time: "It is alleged in your Order, _That many Complaints have been frequently from time to time made to the Master and Wardens of the Company, and to the Court, by the parents and friends of the young Scholars, of the neglect of the chief-Master's dutie in that School, and of the breach of the Companie's Orders and Ordinances thereof_."

To this Dugard replies that he had never heard of any complaints in all the seventeen years he had filled the post, and he declared his readiness to submit in silence if any parent could prove aught against him. He had been in the profession, he said, thirty-three years, and "in all places wherever I came, I have had ample testimonials of my faithfulness and diligence, and my scholars' proficiency."

The writer attributes his fall to the presence among the members of the Court of persons unjustly hostile to him, who had represented that the school was suffering from his administration, and would go down unless some timely remedy was adopted.

But Dugard averred that the decline of the school and the shrinkage of its numbers were due to the Company's order of March 16, 1659, which forbad him to admit any scholar who had not a warrant from the Master and Wardens, and the consequence was that parents, not caring to go to the Court, took their sons elsewhere. As many as sixty boys had been lost in this way within a twelvemonth, he maintains. "True it is," he pleads, "that an hundred years ago, when it was an hard matter to get a Scholar to read Greek, there was such an Order made, that no Scholar should be taught in the School, unless first admitted by the Company. But afterward there was found a necessity to dispense with that Order, and so it was with my Predecessors; which I can prove for above threescore years bygone. They (and my self too from them, untill the last year) had such an indulgence that did not limit or restrain them to admit quarterly-Scholars, who did not immediately depend on the Charity of the Company: and the Motto engraven on the School speaks as much; _Nulli præcludor, Tibi pateo_."

The _Remonstrance_ did not please the Merchant Taylors, and in a second document, dated June 12, 1661, Dugard tried to soften what he had said; for his language, it must be allowed, was rather energetic, considering that he was in the hands of those who had the power to act as they judged fit.

Whatever the precise result was, there are two or three curious points brought out in the course of the head-master's vindication, and one can hardly avoid a conclusion that the main cause of the discontent of the Court was not even so much the application of a portion of his time to literary pursuits, as the abuse of the permission to set up a printing-press by employing the machinery, intended only for the production of school text-books, for political publications of a republican stamp. This fact does not transpire in the tract itself, but is ascertained from the imprints to books; and moreover, in 1650, at the end of a periodical publication, he had announced himself as _Printer to the Council of State_; so that altogether the Merchant Taylors might be naturally afraid of incurring the displeasure of the new masters of England by retaining the holder of opinions hostile to the Stuarts.