Child Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

It was said of Ezekiel Cheever, the old Boston schoolmaster, who taught for over seventy years, "He taught us Lilly and he Gospel taught." But he also wrote a Latin grammar of his own, Cheever's Accidence, which had unvarying popularity for over a century. Cheever was a thorough grammarian. Cotton Mather thus eulogized him:—

"Were Grammar quite extinct, yet at his Brain
The Candle might have well been Lit again."

There was brought forth at his death a broadside entitled The Grammarian's Funeral. A fac-simile of it is here given. Josiah Quincy, later in life the president of Harvard College, wrote an account of his dismal school life at Andover. He entered the school when he was six years old, and on the form by his side sat a man of thirty. Both began Cheever's Accidence, and committed to memory pages of a book which the younger child certainly could not understand, and no advance was permitted till the first book was conquered. He studied through the book twenty times before mastering it. The hours of study were long—eight hours a day—and this upon lessons absolutely meaningless.

The Grammarians Funeral,

OR,

An ELEGY compoſed upon the Death of Mr. John Woodmancy, formerly a School-Maſter in Boſton: But now Publiſhed upon the DEATH of the Venerable

Mr. Ezekiel Chevers,

The late and famous School-Maſter of Boſton in New-England; Who Departed this Life the Twenty-firſt of Auguſt 1708. Early in the Morning. In the Ninety-fourth Year of his Age.