Part 9

"To all Fathers of NOBLE FAMILIES and Lovers of VERTUE: Sir Balthazar Gerbier desires once more that the Publique may be pleased to take notice of his great labours and indeavours by the Erection of an Academy on Bednall Green without Aldgate. To teach _Hebrew_, _Greek_, _Latine_, _French_, _Italian_, _Spanish_, _High Dutch_, and _Low Dutch_, both Ancient and Modern _Histories_, joyntly with the Constitutions and Governments of the most famous _Empires_ and _Dominions_ in the World, the true Naturall and Experimentall _Philosophy_, the _Mathematicks_, _Arithmetick_, and the keeping _Bookes of Accounts_ by _Creditor_ and _Debitor_. All excellent _Handwriting, Geometrie, Cosmography, Geography, Perspective, Architecture, Secret Motions of Scenes, Fortifications, the besieging & Defending of Places, Fire-Works, Marches of Armies, Ordering of Battailes, Fencing, Vaulting, Riding the Great Horse, Musick, Playing on all sorts of Instruments, Dancing, Drawing, Painting, Limning, and Carving, &c._"

It is at once apparent that the programme of the Bethnal Green Academy was too ambitious and expensive to suit moderate careers and limited resources. Perhaps if it had been so fortunate as to outlive the Restoration it might have proved a success, as the range was sufficiently capacious to accommodate those who contented themselves with ordinary school or college routine; those who preferred a study of the sciences and arts; and, again, such as desired a special professional training.

The establishment of the _Musæum_ in 1635 had been inaugurated by a dramatic performance, which the Court honoured with its presence; and in the following year the _Constitutions_, as they are called, were printed.

These give, but of course with more detail, the particulars which present themselves in the advertisement just noticed; and they also shew that there was a preparatory school attached to the _Musæum_, from which the pupils might be drafted into the higher one.

The subjects taught exhibit a diversity of character and a width of sympathy which are powerfully at variance with the meagre programmes of the old-fashioned public foundations. They comprised Heraldry, Conveyancing, Common Law, Antiquities (including Numismatics), Agriculture, Arithmetic, Architecture, Fortification, Geography, Languages, and Elocution, with many more matters.

It is worth remarking that now for the first time the German tongue was included in the list of those which were recommended and set down for study, while the Dutch also occurs in the list. Elocution or "the art of well-speaking," as it is termed, was also a novel feature; and, in point of fact, Gerbier, who had travelled much abroad and observed the superior educational systems of foreign countries, sought to introduce here the same catholic and liberal spirit, instead of the imperfect and cramped course of studies with which Englishmen were forced to be contented, and which had scarcely emerged from mediæval simplicity and crudity.

The _Musæum Minervæ_, of which a Shropshire gentleman, Sir Francis Kinaston, of Oteley, was the first Regent, collapsed about 1650; but its example and influence survived, and it was the forerunner of a broader and more enlightened educational policy and of the modern type of training colleges, into which even those ancient endowed schools which remain have been compelled by the force of public opinion, one by one, to resolve themselves.

These Academies present a very powerful contrast to the archaic school in the multiplicity of acquirements, and in the breadth or variety of culture which they afforded and encouraged. They betoken a development of social wants and refinements, and the force of influences received from surrounding countries. It was a supply which responded to a demand; and it helped to create or extend a field of literary industry in the form of technical publications dealing with the principal subjects, which the _Musæum Minervæ_ and other analogous institutions included in their scheme. To the treatises on Riding, Swimming, Drawing, Writing, and a few other arts were added Manuals for the use of those who studied, at the College or under private instructors, the sciences of Fencing, Vaulting, Small Sword Exercise, Fortification, and the accomplishments specified in the programme of the Minerva Museum. A constant succession of text-books for pupils in nearly all these branches of a polite education kept the makers and the vendors of them busy from the age of Elizabeth downward; and long lists might be furnished of contributions to every department, both by professional experts and by amateurs of practical experience.

Ladies, who desired to learn anything special in excess of the narrow educational routine then deemed sufficient for the call of their sex, depended on private tutors, who usually waited upon them at their own homes. Thomas Greeting taught Mrs. Pepys the flageolet, for example, and the same lady had lessons in drawing from Alexander Browne, who made the diarist angry at first, because he was asked by Mrs. Pepys to stay dinner sometimes, and to sit at table with her husband.

The importance of calligraphy was recognised long before the date of any literary monuments of its development. The earliest professor of the art who appeared in print among us was a Frenchman, Jean de Beauchesne, who resided in Blackfriars, and published in 1570 his writing-book, in which he affords specimens of all the usual hands, English and French secretary, Italian, Chancery, and Court. Even the extant productions of this class, including those of the immortal Cocker, would fill a considerable space in a bookcase; and many belonged to the calling without the parade of authorship, while of such fugitive performances the remains are apt to be incomplete, and to present us with a list of names far from exhaustive.

In his "Pen's Triumph," 1660, Cocker, who is better remembered as an author on arithmetic, perhaps for no farther reason than the force of the adage, but who was also a lexicographer and a voluminous producer of writing-books, instructs his pupils and the public not merely in all the hands at that time employed for various objects, but how "to write with gold," which was, of course, no novelty, but had been more in vogue on the Continent than here.

Entire works were executed in autograph MS. by experts, both in England and abroad, for the purpose of presentation to noble or royal personages; and Ballard gives a copious account of a lady, named Esther Inglis, who, in the early portion of the seventeenth century, signalised her talent and ingenuity in this way. Her work was remarkable for the minuteness and exquisite delicacy of its characters; but nearly all the professional writing-masters introduced into their copybooks bold and intricate designs, and figures of animals, for the sake of rendering the volumes more attractive, and illustrating the capabilities of the goose-quill.

Among our foremost literary celebrities, Shakespear wrote the Court hand, judging from his signature, and Bacon and Ben Jonson the Italian.

Charactery, or the art of shorthand, was introduced into the Nonconformist schools as a taught subject for the sake of enabling youths or others to take notes of sermons and lectures; and some of the discourses from the pulpit in the time of Elizabeth purport to have been printed from shorthand notes. Dr. Bright, who was the writer of a work on Melancholy long antecedent to Burton's, procured an exclusive right in 1588 to publish a system which he had invented for this purpose, and which we find described by him as "an art of short, swift, and secret writing." He set in motion an idea which met with such numerous imitators and improvers, that a catalogue of the publications on Tachygraphy down to the present date forms a volume of respectable dimensions. Bright was nearly a century before the more celebrated Rich, who flourished about the Restoration of the Stuarts, and whose cypher was adopted by Pepys in the composition of his diary.

III. The public schools were not the first in emulating and continuing the policy which Gerbier had laboured so hard and so long to establish. On a less expensive and ostentatious scale certain private academies adopted the idea of supplementing the subjects taught in the great foundations by some, at least, of the manly or elegant arts which had figured in the old Bethnal Green prospectus.

At the end of a Musical Entertainment, prepared in 1676 for recitation by some school-boys in the presence of certain persons of quality, the master favours us with some particulars of the subjects which pupils might take up in his establishment, and it is also inferable that the hours of study extended to at least five o'clock in the evening. He says in a kind of postscript to the printed tract:--

"The Arts and Sciences taught and practis'd in the Academy are these.

_All sorts of Instruments, Singing and Dancing. French and Italian. The Mathematicks. Grammar, Writing and Arithmetick. Painting and Drawing. Fencing, Vaulting and Wrastling._"

This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Academy was evidently one designed more particularly for the children of noble or wealthy people. He adds:--

"Or any young Gentleman design'd for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language.

"Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish'd by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment."

This is altogether worth attention. It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the name or locality of the college where all these advantages and temptations (in the way of buying your Songs of the King's own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centuries ago.

IV. In all the great provincial centres there were, of course, educational institutes supported by local or royal endowment; and in all these the method of teaching and general policy followed that pursued in the metropolis, except that, as we shall presently see, some of the establishments in the country trod in the footsteps of the Academy just described more promptly and more cordially than St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', which modified their constitutions only to save themselves from ruin.

Of the seventeenth-century school at Manchester we gain an accidental glimpse and notion from the _Delectus of Latin Phrases_ which was prepared for use there by a former scholar, Thomas Bracebridge. It is a MS. volume of no interest or moment, unless it is locally and personally regarded; but one is apt to cherish every added fraction of light as to the state of education in the Midlands in former days; and this _Delectus_ carries us back precisely to the Restoration, so far as its mere date is concerned, but furnishes a fair idea of the sort of phrase-book which a Manchester teacher of 1660 thought suitable for the boys of his old school.

In Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster, Shakespear has not improbably preserved to us some fragmentary reminiscences of his own school-days at Stratford. The probation through which William Page is put by Sir Hugh at his mother's instance might very well be a literal or close transcript from actual experience. With what mingled feelings the poet must have contemplated a class of men to whom such minds as his have ever owed so little!

Both Sir Hugh and the Reverend Doctor Primrose may be accepted as provincial types of the clerical preceptor, as they seemed to two excellent observers in their respective centuries. We easily remark the difference between them and such a creation as Holofernes.

The course of studies followed in the rural districts of England at a later period is illustrated by a letter from Hazlitt, the essayist, to his elder brother, the miniature-painter, when the former was attending a school at Wem in Shropshire in 1788. He was at that time ten years old. After stating that he had been learning to draw, he proceeds:--"Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ and Eutropius.... I began to cypher a fortnight after Christmas, and shall go into the rule of three next week.... I shall go through the whole cyphering book this summer, and then I am to learn Euclid. We go to school at nine every morning. Three boys begin by reading the Bible. Then I and two others show our exercises. We then read the Speaker [by Enfield]. Then we all set about our lessons.... At eleven we write and cypher. In the afternoon we stand for places at spelling, and I am almost always first.... I shall go to dancing this month."

The glimpse which we here obtain of a small private seminary in a Shropshire village a hundred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education. From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr. Lempriére, whose name the lad transformed into Dolounghpryée, was a visitor at the school; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792. It was still in use at Merchant Taylors' in 1850.

The proprietary establishments for boys, which spread themselves by degrees over the land, formed a valuable succedaneum to the Edward and other endowed schools, and useful nurseries for pupils who aimed at more than elementary learning. But they at the same time proved a source of emulation and material improvement; and during the last fifty years the distance between the two systems has sensibly decreased.

The great charities and other ancient foundations like St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Eton, Harrow, have only maintained their relative superiority by reforming and extending their prospectus; and there is scarcely a country town at the present moment without one or more private seminaries, where a better education is given than was within the reach of our grandfathers at any of the large public schools of the metropolis.

Even in the time of Carlisle, who wrote in 1818, some of the principal institutions in the provinces were treading closely on the heels of Christ's Hospital and other endowments, and one or two, as at Dorchester, at Abingdon, and at Witton near Chester, seem to have been on a more liberal and enlightened footing.

XII.

Educational condition of SCOTLAND--Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters--Buchanan and other early writers on grammar--Thomas Ruddiman and his important contribution to the spread of elementary teaching--Decline of culture during the Civil War.

I. When we turn to Scotland, we find the compendium of the Grammar of Ælius Donatus, of which I have already furnished some account, in use there from time almost immemorial. It appears that the Scotish seminaries adopted this favourite class-book in common with those of England at least as far back as the time of Andrew of Wyntown, who was nearly contemporary with Langland and Chaucer. In his _Original Chronicle of Scotland_ he speaks of the Barnys (bairns) lering Donate at their beginning of Grammar; which is a very interesting and important piece of testimony in its way, since there is so little to enable us to form an opinion of the rise and growth of elementary learning in North Britain, although there may be just sufficient light cast incidentally or indirectly on the subject to lead us to judge that Scotland, if not indeed the North generally, was in this respect, as in others, far behind the Southern English.

In Scotland, the influence of Knox and his supporters favoured the early institution of parochial schools throughout the country, where a class and range of instruction prevailed which, combined with native religious tendencies, had the effect of increasing, in comparison with England, the average of educated intelligence without developing much breadth of thought or much intellectual refinement.

The aims of the parish schools are humble, and beyond its limited possibilities there are its impediments and its snares. In addition to schools, the friends of education in the North, as early as the reign of William III., commenced an agitation for the establishment of parochial libraries even in the Highlands. The movement was set on foot by certain ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and its basis and scope would have been narrow enough if the idea had been realised. But nothing beyond a discussion and some correspondence seems to have resulted at the moment.

Nor do we, even as time goes on, find much information obtainable on this part of the subject. But both the systems and the books employed were for some centuries of foreign origin; and the grammatical publications of an Aberdeen man, John Vaus, whose name seems to be the earliest on the roll of native authors, were, so far as we at present know, without exception published, as well as written, in France, to which Scotland perhaps owed, among other matters, her adoption of the Continental law of Latin pronunciation.

Vaus grounded his _Rudiments_, printed at Paris repeatedly about 1520, on the old _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus, which bespeaks a backwardness of information, since at this date Lily's Grammar was already in use in the South, and even the systems of Whittinton and the other disciples of the Magdalen School method had been almost completely discarded there, except, perhaps, as occasional auxiliaries.

At a later period, the eminent Scotsman Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody, and two others of his countrymen, Andrew Symson and James Carmichael, reduced to a simpler plan the principles of elementary learning and the outlines of etymology.

The first explicit attempt to produce a grammar in Scotland for the special use of that country is due, however, to Alexander Hume, who is known to us not only as an educational reformer, but as a philological student. His _New Grammar for the Use of the Scotish Youth_, 1612, was a popular compendium founded on Lily; it seems to have met with limited and brief acceptance, and his tract on the _Orthography and Congruity of the British Tongue_, which was a literary essay intended rather for the closet (to use the old-fashioned parlance), remained till lately in MS.

II. But books of instruction and for employment in schools continued, down to the days of THOMAS RUDDIMAN, to be at once scarce and unsatisfactory, insomuch that, side by side with these and other unrecovered productions, it was found possible and convenient to keep in print the old text-books of Stanbridge, of which editions continued to be issued at intervals both here and in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century.

Ruddiman may be considered as the apostle of scholastic education and literature in Scotland; and as he was not born till 1674, this amounts to a proposition that his country was at least two centuries behind England in knowledge and culture. Even Ruddiman was brought up at the parish school, and was, moreover, for some time a parochial teacher. But, partly by force of character and partly by good fortune, he extricated himself from his early associations, and became the Lily of the North. His _Rudiments of Grammar_ were published in 1714, when he was already in middle life; they were little more than the St. Paul's Primer calculated for the meridian of Edinburgh; but they proved eminently successful, and encouraged him to proceed with that more important philological enterprise the _Institutions of Latin Grammar_, which, like the disquisition of Alexander Hume recently mentioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece of authorship.

But, notwithstanding the useful labours of Ruddiman, his country, from political and other agencies, remained yet for a considerable length of time in a very stagnant condition, nor had any sensible improvement been achieved in the educational machinery of that portion of the empire within the recollection of those still living. Mental training and culture, as they are now understood, are the growth of the last half century. But the cost of such accomplishments as were taught at Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews was lower than in England, and the standard higher than in Ireland; and from both countries pupils were often sent in former days to complete their education, where their parents could not have afforded the means to maintain them at Oxford or Cambridge. From a hundred to a hundred and thirty years since, the fees at Glasgow University did not exceed £20 a year, and a frugal lad found seven or eight shillings a week sufficient for his board and lodging.

III. Many causes contributed, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, to favour the disorganisation and decay of scholastic learning; but, above all, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the consequent disorder, depression, and inquietude, seem to have reduced the educational standard, and to have thrown the task of instruction, in a great number of cases, into the hands of the clergy, from the want of funds or the lack of inclination to support the former lay-teachers. The acute political crisis, which lasted without interruption from 1640 to the commencement of the Protectorate in 1653, affected even the ancient academical and civic endowments; and the two Universities, the noble foundations of Edward VI., and the public seminaries instituted in London and other great centres by private munificence, suffered a common paralysis.

The alliance between the Church and the schools was one formed or developed at a period of exceptional difficulty and pressure; but even when the immediate necessity for such a bond existed no longer, and affairs in England had returned to their normal state, the clergy saw too clearly the importance of the hold which they had gained on the national training and thought to allow education to pass back, farther than was avoidable, under lay control.

In the time of the Commonwealth, and when Cromwell assumed the supreme authority, there were all over the country, throughout England and Wales, men in holy orders and in the enjoyment of benefices who combined with their sacerdotal functions, as many do still, the duties of schoolmasters and lecturers. Doubtless, among them there were some fairly qualified for the trust which they received and undertook; but the majority is alleged, in an authentic official document before me of 1654, to have been far otherwise. This State-paper is called "An Ordinance for the Ejection of Scandalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters," and was published in the autumn of the year above named.

Two singular features it unquestionably possesses: the intimate association between the parson and the pedagogue, and the striking picture which it presents to our view of the lax and profligate condition of the class which Cromwell and his advisers saw thus clothed with the twofold responsibility of mental and spiritual tuition.

The points on which the Commissioners of the Protectoral Government were authorised to inform themselves, and to exercise the discretion vested in them by the ordinance, reveal a very unsatisfactory and corrupt state of things, and the existence of abuses for which neither the Civil War nor the Republican administration can be thought to have been answerable. There is scarcely a vice or irregularity which is not named or implied in the instructions delivered to the Commission; and the encouragement of "Whitson-ales, Wakes, Morris-Dances, Maypoles, Stage-plays, or such like licentious practices," strikes one as relatively a very venial offence against good morals and professional decorum. But the antipathy to sports and dramatic exhibitions was an inheritance from the more rigid Puritans, and the Articles of Inquiry in the archidiaconal visitations of this period never forgot such profane infringements of clerical morality.