At any rate, for the modern reader, there is the satisfaction of knowing, when he reads the School Dialogues of Vives, that he is reading a work which won the approval of children. With all our modern advance, of which of the writers of our text-books to-day would present-day children say as much as was said of this sixteenth-century scholar, who merely wrote a text-book to help boys of the Tudor Age to speak Latin!—“As a boy I so loved Luis Vives that not even now do I feel my old love for him has faded away from my mind.”
NOTE
The short summaries or headings to each dialogue in the text are translations from the edition of Vives’ Dialogues by John Thomas Freigius, published at Nürnberg, 1582. After each dialogue Freigius provides a commentary, by far the most complete of any commentator on Vives’ book, giving illustrative quotations and notes on obscure points, and giving references to the ancient sources from which technical expressions were taken by Vives. The headings of the sub-sections of each dialogue as given in the present translation are taken from Freigius. They are not a part of the original text of Vives.
The above is the most scholarly and thorough edition of the Dialogues, but it may be noted that Dr. Bömer[29] has distinguished over one hundred editions of the book, showing its popularity not only in the sixteenth century but its continued interest in still later generations of the study of Latin speech.
TUDOR SCHOOL-BOY LIFE
[I]
SURRECTIO MATUTINA—Getting up in the Morning
Beatrix Puella, Emanuel, Eusebius
Dialogue (Latin—colloquium, collocutio, sermo) is so called from διαλέγεως, in which sort of composition Plato was the first to delight. In this first dialogue or discourse (sermone) there are laid down five duties, which should be performed carefully in the morning by youths and boys, viz. to rise betimes (because early morning is the friend to studies), to dress, to comb the hair, to wash, to pray.