Proposed University of London in 1647--The _Museum Minervæ_ at Bethnal
Green--Its catholic character and liberal
programme--Calligraphy--Shorthand--Bright's system patented in
1588--Education in the provinces--The old school at
Manchester--Shakespear's _Sir Hugh Evans_ and _Holofernes_--William
Hazlitt's account of his Shropshire school in 1788.
I. It is a fact, probably within the knowledge of very few, that two
hundred years and more before the actual establishment of the University
of London, a project for such an institution was mooted by an anonymous
pamphleteer, who may be considered as a kind of pioneer, preceding the
Benthams and Broughams.
I hold in my hand _Motives Grounded upon the Word of God, and upon Honour,
Profit, and Pleasure for the present Founding an University in the
Metropolis, London_, 1647. It purports to be the work of "a true Lover of
his Nation, and especially of the said City."
The lines and object in this piece are purely clerical. The author
maintains the insufficiency of the two existing Universities and the
College in Ireland to rear as many "sons of the Prophets"--an euphemism
for parsons--to attend upon the spiritual needs of the English and the
Londoners.
He puts down on paper statistics of the number of scholars at Oxford and
Cambridge, and he argues that if the total were much larger--10,000
instead of 5900--there would be no means of raising the 20,000 preachers
necessary in his view to carry on the business of religion. He pleads the
fall of Episcopacy in support of his scheme, as "we cannot hope," he says,
"that so many will apply their studies to Divinity, and therefore have the
greater need to maintain the more poor scholars at our Universities," or,
in other words, the absence of the prizes in the lottery had taken the
best men out of the market. In fact, the writer himself does not shrink
altogether from presenting the commercial side of the question, for he
observes:--"Without injury unto any, an University in London would
increase London's Trading, and inrich London, as the Scholars do Cambridge
and Oxford, where how many poor people also are benefited by the Colleges,
yea, the countries round about them."
So far, so good; but he, in the very next paragraph, strikes a chord which
jars upon the ear. We see that he is a partisan of that theory which
flourished here down to our own day, and which contributed so powerfully
to retard and cripple our scholastic and academical studies. Hear what he
says: "If here in London there be a College, in which _nothing but Latin_
shall be spoken, and your children put into it, and from ten years old to
twelve hear no other Language, in those two years they will be able to
speak as good Latin as they do English, and as readily. The Roman children
learned Latin as ours do English...;" and so he goes on as to Greek,
Hebrew, Italian, French, and Spanish.
The sole point here, in our modern estimation, is the admission of the
three living languages into the curriculum, in order to qualify the
students in later life to make themselves understood abroad either as
merchants or as diplomatists. But here he was before his time. Nothing of
the kind was to be attempted in England for generations. For generations
Englishmen were to be instructed only in the dead tongues, and were to
have not an English, but a Latin Grammar put into their hands age after
age.
He talks about the Roman youth learning Latin as we do English; but he
failed, perhaps, to perceive that they did not learn British or Gaulish as
we do Latin. His text is wealthy in Scriptural quotations and parallels;
but whatever one may think of his notions regarding the details and
advantages of such a plan, this unnamed "true Lover of his Nation" is
entitled, at any rate, to the credit and distinction of having been
apparently the first to suggest what we have now before us in the shape of
an accomplished fact.
It is not too much to assert, probably, that if the appearance of this
tract had been followed by the execution of the ideas enunciated in it,
the force of opinion would by this time have spared very little of the
work of the original promoters.
II. The _Musæum Minervæ_, instituted by Sir Balthazar Gerbier d'Ouvilly at
Bethnal Green in 1635, presents a thorough contrast to those philanthropic
or eleemosynary institutions of which I have lately spoken, inasmuch as it
was a novel and costly apparatus of Continental origin, calculated only
for the children of rich persons and for those who desired to complete
themselves in various accomplishments. Lectures were delivered on several
subjects, and printed afterwards for circulation; but the enterprise did
not succeed, and the outbreak of the Civil War probably sealed its doom.
Yet as late as 1649 the management, or the founder himself, issued a
prospectus of the different branches of learning and culture which were
taught at this establishment. The language of this document, which is
curious enough to append entire, portends the approaching collapse, and
reads like a final appeal to public spirit and patronage:--
"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.