Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters Part 9

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 a.s.sembling 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 b.u.t.ter, which hee shall have ready in the morning, with two fine gla.s.ses 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, aesop's _Fables_ in Greek, and read a pa.s.sage, 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 _Sententiae 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 s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.lenic grammar and letters.

Even when the present writer was at the school, Hebrew was by no means a.s.siduously 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 s.e.x. 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 cla.s.sic 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 ent.i.tled _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 inst.i.tution with which he was during so many years a.s.sociated. 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 a.s.signed 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 praecludor, Tibi pateo_."

The _Remonstrance_ did not please the Merchant Taylors, and in a second doc.u.ment, 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.

He had sold the press at the desire of the Company for 300 less than the cost; and this was by no means the full extent of his sacrifices and misfortunes. For he gives his princ.i.p.als to understand that he had grown lean by the observance of fast-days in accordance with their recent order; and, moreover, that during his nineteen years' term of office he had lost 800 by unpaid quarter wages, thus making it seem probable that he was directly responsible for the fees.

Altogether, nothing worse than indiscretion, perhaps, was chargeable to Dugard. "I bless G.o.d for it," he expressly says, "I know the Divel himself cannot justly accuse me of any notorious or scandalous Crime."

Probably not; but there are seasons when indiscretion is criminal, and besides his proclamation of his appointment at the time to the Commonwealth as their official printer, in 1657 there came from his press the reply of Milton to Salmasius, an anti-royalist manifesto not calculated to be palatable to the restored dynasty or to the civic feeling, and certainly, so far as one can form a judgment, an encroachment on the special objects and _raison d'etre_ of Dugard's collateral occupation.

X.

Successors of Lily--Thomas Robertson of York--Cultivation of the living languages--Numerous works published in England upon them--Their various uses--The Vocabularies for travellers and merchants--Rival authors of Grammars--Different text-books employed at schools--Milton's _Accidence_ (1669)--Old mode of advertising private establishments.

I. After the death of Lily his work was carried on and developed by other men, who gradually achieved the task of consolidating, or reducing into a more compact form, the rather perplexing series of elementary treatises edited by Whittinton. Among these followers of the Master of St. Paul's was a schoolmaster at Oxford, the Thomas Robertson of York whom I had lately occasion to name in connection with Ascensius, and who at all events produced in 1532 at Basle an edition of Lily's Grammar with a Preface and Notes.

Robertson applauds, in his dedication to Dr. Longlond, Bishop of Lincoln, himself a man of letters, the system of Lily, and testifies to the excellent way in which the boys at Oxford prospered under his educational _regimen_. But, nevertheless, he does not conceal his notion and expectation of improving on his master; and indeed there is no doubt that we have here the earliest clear approach to our modern grammar-book, although the whole is in Latin, except certain quotations and names in Greek, as he compares the practice of the Greek poets with that of the Romans, much as Robert Etienne a little later pointed out the conformity of the French with the Greek. Philological parallels had become fashionable.

In his section on _Derivatives_ Robertson has some matter, as to which the modern etymologist may form his own conclusions. This is a specimen:--

"Vox uocis, a voco. Iucundus a iuuo.

Lex legis, a lego. Iunior a iuuenis.

Rex regis, a rego. Mobilis a moueo.

Sedes a sedeo. Huma.n.u.s ab h.o.m.o.

Iumentum a iuuo. Vomer a uomo.

Fomes a foueo. Pedor a pede."

Of the miscellaneous labourers in this field Robertson was one of the most conspicuous; nor did his name and work die with him, for his tables of _Irregular Verbs and Nouns_ were printed with Lily's _Rules_ at least as late as the reign of James I.

It is out of my power to cross the boundary-line of conjecture when I offer the opinion that the Oxford employment of Robertson was on the old Magdalen staff.

II. But there was no lack of instruments for carrying out the scheme of education in England, whatever the imperfections of it might be. There were, besides the ordinary pedagogue, whose accomplishments did not, perhaps, extend beyond the language of his own country, writing, and arithmetic, professors for French, Italian, and Dutch, and men whose training at college qualified them more or less to give instruction in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The German, Spanish, and Portuguese do not seem to have been much cultivated down to a comparatively recent date, which is the more extraordinary since our intercourse with all those countries was constant from the earliest period.

There were certainly English versions of the Spanish grammars of Anthonio de Corro and Cesare Oudin made in the times of Elizabeth and her successor, as well as the original production by Lewis Owen, ent.i.tled, _The Key into the Spanish Tongue_. But these were a.s.suredly never used as ordinary school-books, and were rather designed as manuals for travellers and literary students; and the same is predicable, I apprehend, of the anonymous Portuguese Dictionary and Grammar of 1701, which is framed on a scale hardly adapted for the requirements of the young.

Yet at the same time these, and many more like the _Dutch Tutor_, the _Nether-Dutch Academy_, and so forth, were of eminent service in private tuition and select cla.s.ses, where a pupil was placed with a coach for some special object, or to complete the studies which were not included in the school programmes.

Moreover, it is not to be overlooked that in the polyglot vocabulary and phrase-book the student, either with or without the aid of a tutor, possessed in former times a very valuable machinery for gaining a knowledge of languages for conversational and commercial purposes; and these works sometimes comprised the German, as well as the more usual tongues employed in correspondence and intercourse. The t.i.tle-page of one of them, published at Antwerp in 1576, expressly intimates its utility to all merchants; and a second of rather earlier date (1548) is specified as a book highly necessary to everybody desirous of learning the languages embraced in it, which are English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Flemish, German, and Latin--a remarkable complement, as very few are more than hexaglot.

But these helps were of course outside the schoolroom, and were called into requisition chiefly by individuals whose vocations took them abroad, or rendered an acquaintance with foreign terms more or less imperative; and undoubtedly our extensive mercantile and diplomatic relations with all parts of the world made this cla.s.s of supplementary instruction a livelihood for a very numerous body of teachers.

Perhaps of all the philological undertakings of the kind, the most singular was that of Augustine Spalding, a merchant of London, who in 1614 published a translation of some dialogues in the Malay dialect, from a book compiled by Arthusius of Dantzic in Latin, Malayan, and Malaga.s.sy; and he informs us that his object was to serve those who might have occasion to travel to the East Indies.

II. Shakespear, in his conception of HOLOFERNES in "Love's Labour's Lost,"

is supposed to have taken hints from one of the foreigners who settled in London in his time as teachers of languages, the celebrated JOHN FLORIO, who is best known as the first English translator of Montaigne, but who produced a good deal of useful professional work, and became intimate with many of the literary men of his day. We cannot be absolutely sure that Florio sat for Holofernes; but at any rate the dramatist has depicted in that character in a most inimitable style the priggish mannerist, as he knew and saw him.

The City of London itself, with all its great industrial benefactions, abounded with private schools and with tutors for special objects. Some of them were authors, not only of school-books for the use of their own pupils, but of translations from the cla.s.sics and from foreign writers; and they had their quarters in localities long since abandoned to other occupations, such as Bow Lane, Mugwell or Monkwell Street, Lothbury Garden, and St. Paul's Churchyard, where accommodation was once readily procurable at rents commensurate with their resources. Some of these men had originally presided over similar establishments in the provinces, and had come up to town, no doubt, from ambitious motives.

Two of them, in Primers which they published in 1682 and 1688, when such distinctions were important, call their volumes the _Protestant School_ and the _Protestant Schoolmaster_, in order to rea.s.sure parents, who distrusted Papists and Jacobites. A few years before, Nathaniel Strong, dating from the Hand and Pen, in Red-Cross Alley, on Great Tower Hill, launched what he somewhat unguardedly christened _The Perfect Schoolmaster_. This part of the metropolis was at that time rather thickly sown with teachers of all kinds; as you drew nearer to Wapping, the schools of geography and navigation became more conspicuous. It was about the period when Mr. Secretary Pepys was residing in Hart Street.

In connection with these private schools on the east side of London, for the special advantage of those who desired to embark on a sea-faring, naval, military, or other technical career, there is a very characteristic and suggestive advertis.e.m.e.nt by one John Holwell at the end of an astrological tract published by him in 1683, where he states that he professes and teaches at his house on the east side of Spitalfields, opposite Dorset Street, next door to a glazier's, not merely such matters as arithmetic, geography, trigonometry, navigation, astronomy, dialling, gauging, surveying, fortification, and gunnery, but ASTROLOGY _in all its parts_; which appears to be an uncustomary combination, and to bespeak a separate cla.s.s or department.

Astrology, which was a sort of outgrowth and development from the judicial astronomy of the early Oxford schoolmen, had been a source of controversy since the time of Elizabeth, but had gained a footing in the following century through the exertions of several indefatigable advocates and writers, of whom William Lilly, John Partridge, and John Gadbury were the most eminent and influential. Lilly, during the Civil War, is said to have been consulted by both political parties; and he published a small library of pamphlets professing to see into futurity.

III. There was a host of rival authors, some bringing general treatises in their hand, others special branches of the subject handled in a new fashion, from all parts of the kingdom to the London publishing firms. Dr.

Walker, head-master of King Edward the Sixth's Grammar School at Louth in Lincolnshire, completed his monograph on Particles in 1655; it is the only work by which he is at present remembered; and it occasioned the joke that his epitaph should be: _Here lie Walker's Particles_.