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._
"Therbe fiue maner poyntys / and diuisios most vside with cunnyng men:
the whiche if they be wel vsid: make the sentens very light / and esy to
vnderstod both to the reder & the herer. & they be these: virgil / come
/ parethesis / playne poynt / and interrogatif. A virgil is a
scleder stryke: lenynge forwarde thiswyse / be tokynynge a lytyl /
short rest without any perfetnes yet of sentens: as betwene the fiue
poyntis a fore rehersid. A come is with tway titils thiswyse: betokynyng a
lenger rest: and the setens yet ether is vnperfet: or els if it be
perfet: ther cumith more after / logyng to it: the which more
comynly can not be perfect by itself without at the lest sumat of it:
that gothe a fore. A parenthesis is with tway crokyd virgils: as an olde
mone / & a neu bely to bely: the whiche be set theron afore the begynyng /
and thetother after the latyr ende of a clause: comyng within an other
clause: that may be perfet: thof the clause / so comyng betwene: wer
awey and therfore it is sowndyde comynly a note lower: than the vtter
clause. yf the setens cannot be perfet without the ynner clause: then
stede of the first crokyde virgil a streght virgil wol do very wel: and
stede of the latyr must nedis be a come. A playne point is with won tittil
thiswyse. & it cumith after the ende of al the whole setens
betokinyng a loge rest. An iterrogatif is with tway titils: the
vppir rysyng this wyse? & it cumith after the ende of a whole reason:
wheryn ther is sum question axside. the whiche ende of the reson / tariyng
as it were for an answare: risyth vpwarde. we haue made these rulis in
englisshe: by cause they be as profitable / and necessary to be kepte in
euery moder tuge / as i latin. ¶ Sethyn we (as we wolde to god: euery
precher [? techer] wolde do) haue kepte owre rulis bothe in owre englisshe
/ and latyn: what nede we / sethyn owre own be sufficient ynogh: to put
any other exemplis."
VI. It is perhaps fruitless to offer any vague conjecture as to the
authorship of the _Ascensian Declensions_. Many Englishmen resident in
Paris, Antwerp, and Germany might have edited such a book. The orthography
and punctuation are alike peculiar, and suspiciously redolent, it may be
considered, of a foreign parentage; but one of our countrymen who had long
resided abroad, or who had even been educated out of England, might very
well have been guilty of such slips as we find here. A Thomas Robertson of
York, of whom I shall have more presently to say, was a few years later in
communication with the printers and publishers of Switzerland, and became
the editor of a text of Lily the grammarian. Robertson, as a Northern man,
was apt, in writing English, to introduce certain provincialisms; and I
put it, though merely as a guess, that he might have executed this
commission, as he did the other, for Bebelius of Basle.
Two years subsequently to the appearance of his _Vulgaria_, Horman
involved himself in a literary controversy with Whittinton in consequence
of an attack which he had made on the laureate's grammatical productions
in a printed Epistle to Lily; it was the beginning of a movement for
reforming or remodelling the current educational literature, and Horman
himself was a man of superior character and literary training, as we are
able to judge from the way in which he acquitted himself of his own
contribution to this class of work.
A curious and very interesting account of the dispute between Lily and
Horman, in which Robert Whittinton and a fourth grammarian named Aldrich
became involved, is given by Maitland in his Notices of the Lambeth Palace
Library. I elsewhere refer to the warm altercation between Sir John Cheke
and Bishop Gardiner on the pronunciation of Greek. Both these matters have
to be added to a new edition of Disraeli's _Quarrels of Authors_.
The Salernitan gentleman (Andrea Guarna) who set the Noun and the Verb
together by the ears in his _Grammar War_, acted, no doubt, more
discreetly, since he reserved to himself the power to terminate the fray
which he had commenced.
VII. Generally speaking, it is the case that the men who compiled the
curious and highly valuable Manuals of Instruction during the Middle Ages
were superseded and effaced by others following in their track and
profiting by their experience. The bulk of these more ancient treatises,
such as I have described, still remained in MS. till of recent years, like
the college text-books, which are yet sometimes left unprinted from
choice; and after the introduction of typography the teaching and learning
public accorded a preference to those scholars who constructed their
system on more modern lines, and whose method was at once more
intelligible and more efficient.
Of all the names with which we have become familiar, the only one which
seems to have survived is Johannes de Garlandia; and it is remarkable,
again, that the two works from his pen which passed the London press, the
_Verborum Explicatio_ and the _Synonyma_, are by no means comparable in
merit or in interest to the Dictionary already noticed. Subsequently to
the rise of the English Grammatical School the reputation and popularity
of Garlandia evidently suffered a permanent decline, and we hear _and
feel_ no more of him.
A new generation, trained in foreign schools or under foreign tutors, set
themselves the task of forming educational centres, and of introducing the
people of England to a conversance with the foundations of learning and
culture by more expeditious and effectual methods; and as from Scrooby in
Lincolnshire a small knot of resolute men went forth in the _May Flower_
to lay the first stone of that immense constitutional edifice, the United
States of America, so from an humble school at Oxford sprang the pioneers
of all English grammatical lore--Anniquil; his usher, Stanbridge;
Stanbridge's pupil, Whittinton; and Whittinton's pupil, Lily.
It is not too much to say that during three hundred years all our great
men, all our nobility, all our princes, owed to this hereditary dynasty,
as it were, the elementary portion of their scholastic and academical
breeding, and that no section of our literature can boast of so long a
celebrity and utility as the Grammatical Summary which is best known as
Lily's _Short Introduction_, and which in most of its essentials
corresponds with the system employed by those who preceded him and those
who followed him almost within the recollection of our grandfathers. It
was reserved for scholars of a very different temper and type to overthrow
his ancient empire, and establish one of their own; and this is a
revolution which dates from yesterday.
At the period when the school at Magdalen was established by Bishop
Waynflete, the teachers in our own country and on the Continent were
working on nearly parallel lines, just as the religious service-books
printed at Paris and Rouen were made, by a few subsidiary alterations, to
answer the English use; and indeed in the case of the grammatical system
of Sulpicius an impression was executed at Paris in 1511 for Wynkyn de
Worde, and imported hither for sale, without any differences or variations
from the text employed in the Parisian gymnasium and elsewhere through the
French dominions. It was not till the English element in these books
gained the ascendancy, having been introduced by furtive degrees and by
way of occasional or incidental illustration, that a marked native
character was stamped on our school-books. Ultimately, as we know, the
Latin proportion sensibly diminished, and even a preponderant share of
space was accorded to the vernacular.
I have spoken of Ælius Donatus as an author whose Grammar enjoyed a long
celebrity and an enormously wide acceptance, down from his own age to the
date of the revival of learning. It was used throughout the Continent, in
England, and in Scotland.
But prior to our earliest race of native grammarians and philologists,
there were several labourers in this great and fruitful field, who began,
towards the latter end of the fifteenth century, to cast off the trammels
of the Roman professor, and to set up little systems of their own, of
course more or less built upon Donatus.
Such an one was Guarini of Verona, whose _Regulæ Grammaticales_ were
originally published at Venice in 1470, and are regarded as one of the
earliest specimens of her prolific press. These rules were frequently
reissued, and I have before me an edition of 1494.
The book, which consists only of twenty-two leaves or forty-four pages,
begins with describing the parts of speech, then takes the various sorts
of verbs, and follows with the adverbs, participles, and so forth. There
is a set of verses on the irregular nouns, and a second headed _Versus
differentiales_ or synonyms; and some of the illustrations are given in
Italian. The section on diphthongs forms an Appendix.
I merely adduce a cursory notice of Guarini to keep the student in mind of
the collateral progress of this class of learning abroad, while our own
men were developing it among us with the occasional assistance of
foreigners. Perhaps I may just copy out the following small specimen,
where the glosses are in the writer's vernacular:--
"Largior ris per donare e p essere donato
Experior ris per puare e per essere puato
Ueneror ris per honorare e p essere honorato
Moror ris per aspectare e p eere aspectato
Osculor ris per basare e p essere basiato."
In connection with Magdalen School, we see in the account-book of John
Dorne, Oxford bookseller, for 1520, the class and range of literature
which a dealer in those days found saleable. Among the strictly
grammatical books occur the _A. B. C._ and the _Boys' Primer_; the
productions, with which we are already familiar, of Whittinton,
Stanbridge, Erasmus, Cicero, Terence, and Lucian, interspersed with some
of the Fathers, service-books of the Church, classical authors of a less
popular type, such as Lucan, Cornelius Nepos, and Pomponius Mela; and more
or less abstruse treatises on logic, rhetoric, and theology. On the other
hand, we have prognostications in English, almanacs, _Robin Hood_, the
_Nutbrown Maid_, the _Squire of Low Degree_, _Sir Isumbras_, _Robert the
Devil_, and ballads. There are, besides, the _Sermon of the Boy-Bishop_,
the _Book of Cookery_, the _Book of Carving_, and an Anglo-French
vocabulary.
But I do not enter into these details. It was merely my intention to peep
in at the shop, and see what a bookseller at one of the Universities
nearly four centuries ago had in the way of school-literature. Perhaps
next to the _A. B. C._ and the primers, the educational works of Erasmus
were in greatest demand.
This old ledger has a sort of living value, inasmuch as it carries us back
with it to the very Oxford of the first race of teachers and grammarians,
about whom I write. All of them, except perchance Anniquil, must have
known Dorne and had transactions with him; and here is his ledger, upon
which the eyes of some of them may have rested, still preserved, with its
record of stock in hand--new copies damp from the printer, or remainders
of former purchases, now scarcely extant, or, if so, shorn of their coeval
glory by the schoolboy's thumb or the binder's knife.