XIV.
The Abacus or A. B. C.—Its construction and use—The printed A. B. C.—The first Protestant one (1553)—Spelling-books—Anecdotes of the A. B. C.—Propria quæ Maribus and Johnny quæ Genus—The Catechism and Primer.
I. The manner in which the earliest Abaci were constructed and applied is precisely one of those points which, in the absence of specimens of remote date and documentary information as to their form and use, we have to elucidate, as far as possible, from casual allusions or internal testimony. The most ancient woodcuts representing a school interior display the method in which the master and pupils worked together; but here the latter appear, as I have stated elsewhere, to reiterate what their teacher reads from a book, or, in other words, the scene depicts a later stage in the educational course.
In the Jests of Scogin, a popular work of the time of Henry VIII., and probably reliable as a faithful portraiture of the habits and notions of the latter half of the fifteenth and opening decades of the following century, one of the sections relates “How a Husbandman put his son to school with Scogin.” From the text it is plain that the lad was very backward in his studies, or had commenced them unusually late, considering that it was the farmer’s ambition to procure his admission into holy orders. “The slovenly boy,” we are told, “would begin to learn his A. B. C. Scogin did give him a lesson of nine of the first letters of A. B. C., and he was nine days in learning of them; and when he had learned the nine Christ-cross-row letters, the good scholar said, ‘am ich past the worst now?’”
The important feature in this passage is the reference to the Christ-cross-row, which contained the nine letters of the alphabet from A to I in the form of the Cross. The time consumed in this particular instance in the acquisition of a portion of the rudiments is, of course, ascribable to a pleasant hyperbole, or to the scholar’s phenomenal density; but the Abacus or Christ-cross-row was, no doubt, the first step in the ladder, and although it was superseded by the Horn-book and the Primer, it did not substantially disappear from use in petty schools till the present century. Its shape and functions, however, underwent a material change, and instead of being employed as a medium for grounding children in the Accidence, it became a vehicle for arithmetical purposes, and resembled a slate in form and dimensions, consisting of a small oblong wooden frame fitted with rows of balls of wood or bone strung on transverse wires. To those who, like the present writer, saw this apparatus in common use to induct the young into the art of counting, its pedigree was naturally unknown. It was an evolution from the contrivance which Scogin put into the hands of the country bumpkin whom he was engaged to prepare for the priesthood, and who, as we learn from subsequent passages in these Anecdotes, was actually ordained a deacon within a limited period.
II. To the Abacus, prior to the Reformation, was added the printed A. B. C. accompanied by prayers and a metrical version of the Decalogue, and in 1553 appeared the first Protestant A. B. C. and Catechism for the use of schools and the young. It is after this date and the accession of Elizabeth that we find a marked and permanent stimulus given to elementary literature; and the press from 1553 onward teemed with A. B. C.’s of all sorts; as, for instance, “an a. b. c. for children, with syllables, 1558;” “an a. b. c. in Latin,” 1559; “the battle of A. B. C.,” 1586; “the horn a. b. c., 1587;” and even the title itself grew popular, not only for manuals of other kinds, but for publishers’ signs and ballads. There was “the aged man’s A. B. C,” the “Virgin’s A. B. C.,” and “the young man’s A. B. C.”
Subsequently to the A. B. C. of 1553, there seems to be nothing actually extant of this nature till we come to The Pathway to Reading, or the newest spelling A. B. C. of Thomas Johnson, 1590, which I have not been able to inspect, but as to which there was a litigation between two publishers in the following year, seeming to shew its popularity and a brisk demand for copies.
A few years later (1610) there is A New Book of Spelling, with Syllables, a series of alphabets, followed by the vowels, alphabetical arrangements of syllables, and remarks on vowels, in the course of which the writer furnishes us with an explanation of the virtue and force of the final e in such monosyllables as Babe.
From vowels he proceeds to the diphthong, where he animadverts on the abuse of the w for the u. He then presents us with the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Decalogue, &c., as orthographical theses.
At the end of the Scriptural selections we arrive at this curious heading: “Certain words devised alphabetically without sense, which whosoever will take the pains to learn, he may read at the first sight any English book that is laid before him.” These words are divided into two classes, dissyllables and words of three and four syllables, and introduced by a few lines of introduction, in which the words are divided by way of guidance.
The spelling-book of 1610 was printed for the Stationers’ Company, by which it had been perhaps taken over; and as the Company did not usually have assigned to it any stock except old copyrights, there is little doubt that there were earlier impressions. At any rate, it is a Shakespearian volume, and, as the only manual for children or illiterate adults except the Protestant A. B. C. of 1553, it becomes interesting to consider that the great poet himself may have had a copy in his hands of some edition, if at least his scholastic researches ever went beyond the Horn-book and the Abacus.
The volume may be regarded as a pioneer in the direction of English orthography and pronunciation; and when the author propounds that you might proceed from his pages to the Latin tongue, he does nothing more than follow in the steps of all teachers of that time, as well as of every other age and country down to almost yesterday.
While I have the book before me, it may be worth while to transfer to these pages a specimen of it:—
kach, kech, kich, koch, kuch,
kash, kesh, kish, kosh, kush,
kath, keth, kith, koth, kuth.
And so it runs through the alphabet. In the Lord’s Prayer and other selections the syllables are also divided for the convenience and ease of the learner.
The biographer of Dean Colet mentions that Mr. Stephen Penton, Principal of St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, in the days of Charles II., published a Horn-book or A. B. C. for children. This, which Knight oddly characterises as a piece of humble condescension on the part of so worthy and noted a man, I have not yet seen.
In Russia they have, or had very lately, the stchoti, a kind of Abacus, a small wooden frame strung with horizontal wires, on which slide a series of ivory balls, each wire representing a certain value from the kopeck upwards. This piece of machinery is used in all commercial transactions, whether they take place in shop, market, counting-house, or bank; and familiarity and practice enable the parties concerned to calculate the amount payable or receivable with equal ease and rapidity.
There is a similar machine in use among the natives of British India, and also for mercantile purposes, not as a vehicle for acquiring the science of numbers in the schools.
III. It is said to have been John Rightwise, second head-master of St. Paul’s, and son-in-law of Lily, who introduced into his predecessor’s book the Propria quæ Maribus and As in Præsenti, to which were subsequently joined the Rules of Heteroclites or Irregular Nouns, probably digested from Whittinton by Robertson of York. This last section, from the commencing words, combined perhaps with the Christian name of Rightwise, was the origin of Johnny quæ Genus.
But an early authority[3] claims for Lily himself the honour of having written the Propria quæ Maribus and As in Præsenti, and informs us that Rightwise merely published them with a glossary.
In some of the schools the course seems to have been to commence with the A. B. C. and Catechism, and then proceed to the Primer. At the end of the A. B. C. of 1757 are these lines:—
“This little Catechism learned
by heart (for so it ought),
The Primer next commanded is
for children to be taught.”
When I speak here of the Primer, I must take care to distinguish between the Service-book so styled and the Manual for the young. It is singular enough that the most ancient which has come under my eyes is of the age of Elizabeth, and includes not only the Catechism, but “the notable fairs in the Calendar,” as matters “to be taught unto children.”
This type of Primer is very rare till we arrive at comparatively modern days. The mission which it was designed to fulfil was one precisely calculated to hinder its transmission to us.
The practice of printing children’s books on some more than usually substantial material is not so modern as may be supposed; for there is an A. B. C. published at Riga for the use of the German pupils, the German population preponderating there over the Russian or Polish, on paper closely resembling linen, and of a singularly durable texture; and this little volume belongs to the commencement of the last century, several generations before such a system was adopted in England.
In the Preface to his New English Grammar, 1810, Hazlitt complains of the want of any undertaking of the kind, and it has not been really supplied till our own day, when the labours of the Philological and English Text Societies and the payment of increased attention to Early English Literature prepared the way to reform in a quarter where reform was so sadly needed.
The same writer, while edition upon edition of the famous Grammar of Lindley Murray was pouring from the press, like Hayley’s Triumphs of Temper and Moore’s Loves of the Angels, exposed the fallacies of the system, and lamented the mischief done by such erroneous doctrines. Murray, of whose lucubrations, now obsolete to petrifaction, sixty issues were exhausted between 1795 and 1859, aimed not only at popular instruction, but at literary dignity and scientific eminence; for during a portion of the time while his star was in the ascendant two parallel texts, a literary and an elementary one, were kept in print. Looking back from the vantage-ground which it is our privilege to occupy upon this phenomenon, we contemplate it not with the awe inspired by a mighty ruin, of which the remaining fragments are a gladdening and proud survival, but with a feeling of amazement that such a heresy in opinion and taste should have lived so long, and have been so lately dissipated.
The hazy ideas of the old-fashioned schoolmaster on this particular part of his business are brought out in tolerably prominent relief in the reply to a gentleman who had expressed to Dr. Duncan of the Ciceronian Academy at Pimlico his wish that his son might learn English in lieu of Latin Grammar. “Sir,” said the Doctor, “Grammar is Grammar all the world over.”