XV.
Ascham’s Schoolmaster—Richard Mulcaster—The earliest Anglo-Latin Dictionary—Ocland’s Anglorum Prælia.
I. The Schoolmaster, by Roger Ascham, is a work so celebrated and so classical, and has been so often reprinted, that it seems almost supererogatory to pass any remark upon its character and merits. It arose, as we all know, out of a conversation at Windsor in 1563 between Sir Richard Sackville, Treasurer of the Exchequer, and the author, and it is a literary treatise rather than a technical one. Ascham did not live to see it in type, nor was his patron spared to witness its completion in MS.; it was published in 1570 by the author’s widow, and dedicated to Sir William Cecil, who was one of the party at Windsor when the idea was first ventilated. The opening paragraphs of the Preface, where Ascham describes the company at dinner, and Sackvile afterwards drawing him aside, and leading him to turn his thoughts to the production of such a book, are as famous and unforgettable as Latimer’s noble and touching narrative to us, in one of his sermons before the King, of his boyhood and the obligations under which he lay to his father for sending him to a good school.
Ascham’s Schoolmaster, 1570, is a volume, as its title perhaps may import, for the teacher indeed rather than for the learner. It is a manual of valuable suggestions and counsels for the guidance and use of those under whose direction the course of school-work was carried out, although immediately it was designed for the benefit of Mr. Robert Sackville, the deceased Treasurer’s grandson. The writer confesses his indebtedness to Sir John Cheke and to Sturmius, among the moderns, and to his old masters, as he calls them, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.
Sir Richard Sackville, who was happily instrumental in persuading Ascham to undertake the task, told him that he had found the disadvantage in his own case of an imperfect education; “for a fond scholemaster,” quoth he, “before I was fullie fourtene yeare olde, draue me so, with feare of beating, from all loue of learninge, as nowe, when I know what difference it is to haue learninge, and to haue little or none at all, I feele it my greatest greife, and finde it my greatest hurte, that euer came to me; that it was my so ill chance to light vpon so lewde a schoolmaster.”
Ascham was of his friend’s opinion in regard to greater clemency and patience on the part of teachers, and he also preferred such text-books as Cicero de Officiis to the Manuals compiled by Horman, Whittinton, and the rest of the old school of English grammarians. The passage in the Schoolmaster where the author narrates his interview, before he went on his travels into Germany, with Lady Jane Grey at her father’s house in Leicestershire, is familiar enough; it exhibits a converse case, so far as the severities of school-teachers are concerned; for that amiable and unfortunate woman found her only compensation for the harshness and rigour of her parents in a gentle and beloved tutor, “who,” she told Ascham, “teacheth me so ientlie, so pleasantlie, with such faire allurements to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing whiles I am with him.”
One sees that Ascham, while loth to say too much on such a topic, did not cordially relish the old translations into English verse of some of the classics, even when the translator was such a man as Surrey or Chaucer; and there I agree with him, and indeed I think that many more are inclined so to do.
Richard Mulcaster, first head-master of Merchant Taylors’ School, and for several years after his retirement from that position principal of St. Paul’s, was the author of two works of comparatively slight interest and importance at the present day, whatever estimate may have been formed of them by some of his learned contemporaries. Of the two “fruits of his writing,” as he terms them, he dedicated the earlier, “Positions,” 1581, a kind of introduction to the matter, to Queen Elizabeth, and the other, “The First Part of the Elementary,” 1582, to Lord Leicester, in two rather turgid and verbose epistles. But it is a question whether either production met with much applause on its appearance, though ushered into notice under such influential auspices; certainly they never grew popular or reached a second impression. They were both calculated for the guidance of teachers, like Ascham’s Schoolmaster; but they present a stiff and didactic frigidity, which is absent in the famous and favourite manual of his predecessor, who knew how to make us the partakers of his own learning in a more agreeable manner than the professional pedagogue. I think it very possible that the very few readers which the publications of Mulcaster have found have arrived at the conclusion of their labour without being much wiser than when they embarked in it. But, of the two, I prefer very decidedly the Positions, which are written in a more natural style, and contain occasional passages of interest. This gentleman lived to see the close of the long reign of which he had witnessed the opening, and to write some dull verses upon the death of the Queen.
II. The early teacher and his pupils enjoyed, when the typographical art had been applied to the production of educational works previously accessible in a limited number of MSS., the considerable advantage of books of reference for Latin, Greek, French, and eventually Italian and other tongues. Within a year of each other (1499-1500), the Ortus Vocabulorum and the Promptorius Parvulorum furnished our schools, so far as Latin was concerned, with two excellent lexicons, both formed out of the best compilations of the kind current abroad. These were the Ainsworth and Riddle of our ancestors, who resorted to them where the required information was not forthcoming in the Primer or the Delectus.
Both these phrase-books passed through a series of reprints between the commencement and middle of the sixteenth century. The former purports to have been grounded on the Catholicon of Balbus, 1460, the Cornucopia of Perottus, the Gemma Vocabulorum, and the Medulla Grammatices, with additions by Ascensius. The Promptorius, or, as it is also called in some of the issues, Promptuarium, appears to be substantially identical with the Medulla.
But the earliest regular Anglo-Latin Dictionary in our literature is that of Sir Thomas Elyot, first published in 1538, and frequently reprinted with additions by others from a variety of English and foreign sources, until it became the bulky folio known as Cooper’s Thesaurus. Elyot, the first compiler, tells us, in the dedication to Henry VIII. prefixed to the editio princeps, that he had accomplished about half his labour when it reached the royal ear through Master (subsequently Sir) Anthony Denny that he had such a project in hand; whereupon the King caused all possible facilities to be afforded him, and the books in the royal library to be open to his inspection. It is hard to say how far Elyot flatters his sovereign when he assures him that, after it was all done, he was so afraid of his Lexicon being faulty and imperfect, that he felt as if he could have torn the MS. to pieces, “had not the beames of your royal maiestie entred into my harte, by remembraunce of the comforte whiche I of your grace had lately receyued.”
In the epistle to Henry just referred to, the author pays a tribute to the encouragement which he had experienced from Lord Cromwell; and in the British Museum is the copy presented to the Lord Privy Seal, with a holograph Latin letter prefixed, in which hardly any form of adulation is spared, so far as Cromwell’s virtues, magnanimity, culture, and other cognate qualities are concerned, and nothing is said about him being secondary to royalty in these matters, as in the printed inscription is expressed. But much, after all, is to be forgiven to a man of rank who in those days chose to consume his time, as Elyot did, in the pursuit of letters.
The plan of the work is familiar enough, first, through the later impressions, which are among the commonest volumes in Early English literature; and, secondly, from the fact that the principle on which it is constructed is similar to that of Ainsworth and others. The main difference seems to be where certain Latin words, by an intelligible survival, continued in Elyot’s day to bear a meaning which subsequently grew obsolete; as, for instance, in the case of Aviarium, “a thycke wodde without waye,” although he at the same time adds the ordinary acceptation.
Still the credit remains with Elyot, of course, of having supplied a model for many succeeding lexicographers and phraseologists; and if we turn, for example, to the Dictionary for Children, by John Withals, 1553, or the Manipulus Vocabulorum of Levins, 1571, we see that the general plan is similar. Elyot, in fact, got rid of the tiresome and perplexing arrangement which renders the books of reference and instruction prior to his day, like the Promptorius and the Eclaircissement de la langue Françoise, so uninviting to consult.
Save in respect to development and extension, there is no substantial difference, in fact, between the dictionaries of Elyot and Littleton or of Littleton and Ainsworth. The general plan is the same, whereas in some of the early lexicons the arrangement is so obscure and defective as to render them comparatively useless for practical purposes. The old Ortus Vocabulorum, one of these archaic works of reference, had been largely formed out of the Cornucopia of Perottus, and Cooper owed very considerable obligations to the Lexicon of Stephanus, which he was censured by a critic of his day for not properly acknowledging.
The Short Dictionary for Children by Withals, already specified, supplied the obvious need for a more portable work than either Elyot or Cooper. It met with a cordial response from the constituency to which it appealed, and was reprinted, with large additions and improvements, by successive editors down to the time of Charles I.
Littleton, who brought out his Dictionary in 1678, was Rector of Chelsea. He includes the barbarous Latin for the first time.
Robert Ainsworth, whose famous Latin Dictionary belongs to the reign of George II., having been first printed in 1736, planned his enterprise on a sensible and enduring basis, and earned for himself the reputation of a classic and a type. He had of course the advantage of all the improvements of Elyot, Cooper, and Littleton, besides the numerous other minor lexicographers, of whom he supplies an interesting chronological account in his preface; but his substantial quarto volume, “designed for the use of the British Nations,” was a clear advance on its precursors. He gives not only the Latin-English and English-Latin appellatives, the Christian names of men and women, the proper names of places, the ancient Latin names of places, and the more modern names, but the Roman calendar, the Roman coins, weights and measures, and ancient law-terms. Of the preceding workers in the same field, whom he commemorates, he may very well have known some personally. The catalogue, enriched with biographical particulars, begins with the Promptuarium Parvulorum, and closes with Elisha Coles, embracing a period of nearly two centuries.
III. The Latin Lexicon was an indispensable vade-mecum where boys had to translate the classics of that language into English; and the taste for some of the Roman writers, including Ovid, so far from declining, appears in the time of Elizabeth to have spread in schools. The authors at whom the criticism is more particularly aimed may be guessed in the absence of the names; but the clerical party about 1580, being of opinion that these ancient productions were injurious to morality, availed themselves of a most singularly fortunate opportunity for substituting a work which should be to Latin versification what Lily’s Grammar was to English accidence—a standard and a model.
A year or two prior to the discovery of this pernicious influence, Christopher Ocland had printed a metrical narrative in doggerel metre of the martial achievements of the English people from the time of the Plantagenets down to that of Elizabeth, whom he places before Zenobia; and this gentleman or his friends had sufficient influence to procure, through the Lords Commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical, letters-patent prescribing the use of his Anglorum Prælia in all grammar-schools in England and Wales in lieu of the books of less moral authors. The privilege, dated May 7, 1582, was accorded in consideration not only of the freedom of Ocland’s volume from profligacy, but of “the quality of the verse,”—an encomium quite seriously intended, in whatever degree it may strike us as ironical.
This literary gem, which was to supersede Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and the rest of the heathens, was dedicated to Zenobia by the worthy writer in some lines which are a fair sample of the “quality of the verse.” They begin:—
“Regia Nympha, soli [sic] moderatrix alma Britanni,
Quæ pace et vera religione nites,
Quæ vitæ meritis, morum & candore coruscans,
Zenobiam vincis, siqua vel ante fuit.”
Such was the Oclandian Muse which the Lords Commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical accounted preferable to the compositions which were the glory of their own and the delight of every succeeding age!
Despite the lofty patronage and auspicious circumstances under which the Anglorum Prælia was launched on its proud career, the imbecility of the whole idea appears to have been promptly appreciated; and the “lascivious poets,” whom it was to have effaced, continued, and to this day continue, “to corrupt the youth.”