J'ay bien dormi ceste nuit.
Tu as trop mangé.
Il a trop bu, etc.
The practical exercises, which fill the next three hundred pages, reproduce the dialogues of the same sixteenth-century writers—the only two who retained their popularity in the seventeenth. The exercises of the French Schoolemaister, the French Littleton, and the French Alphabet are all repeated without any acknowledgement.
Like Du Terme, Cogneau attached much importance to pronunciation and reading. He held that pronunciation was best learnt with the help of a teacher, and that rules were not of much use in this case.
"I have observed," he writes, "how many of my countrymen have taken great pains and labour to show the English how to pronounce the French letters, by letters; but these men labour in vain: for I know that the true pronunciation of any tongue whatsoever cannot be taught so: nor none can learn it so; I mean, to speak it well and truly as it ought to be: to learn to understand it by such rules, one may in time and with great pains, but, as I have said, never to speak it well and perfectly, without he be taught by some master. I say not that the rules are unprofitable, no, for they are very profitable being well used, and the learner being well directed to understand them aright; but, as I have said, so I say still, that whosoever will learn this noble and famous tongue, must chuse one that can speak good French, and one that hath a good method in teaching, and the first thing to learn of him must be to pronounce perfectly our 22 letters, and give every one its due sound and pronunciation."
The student should undertake nothing until he has mastered the sounds of the letters and syllables. PAUL COGNEAUThen he may pass to the reading, "and in that reading learn to spell perfectly, for it is that which will perfect thee, so that thou wilt be able to correct many Frenchmen both in their speaking and writing, if thou wilt take pains to learn it perfectly and be as perfect in it as in thy native tongue. If thou dost mark well what I have said, and do it, and if thou hast a good teacher, thou maiest learn the French tongue easily in a year." Cogneau gives his grammar rules in both French and English, and evidently intended them to form part of the reading material on which the student was to begin as soon as he had mastered the French sounds. From these he proceeds to the dialogues. "Thou must learn this book perfectly, to read the French in English and also the English in French perfectly, and I durst warrant that whosoever shall learn this book perfectly will be a perfect Frenchman, and shall be able both to speak and write the French tongue much better than the most part of Frenchmen." The only differences, then, between the methods advocated by Laur Du Terme and Cogneau are that the first would have the student learn the pronunciation by reading, and the second from the lips of a master before the student begins to read; and that Cogneau adopts the method of double translation, so strongly urged by De la Mothe, while Du Terme mentions only translation of French into English. In fact, Cogneau's method was probably suggested by the sixteenth-century teachers.
Cogneau's Guide was in vogue for a number of years. In 1658 a French teacher, Guillaume Herbert, who appears to have had no mean opinion of his own abilities, edited the fourth edition. He describes the earlier form of the work as a "blind" guide rather than a sure one, but now that it has been revised by him "both masters and scholars may with more confidence venture upon it as the most correct book now extant of this kind and in these tongues, and I dare promise them that if I live to see and oversee the next edition, I will so purge and order it that every reader may (if ingenious and ingenuous) give it deservedly the name of a Sure Guide." It is difficult to see in what the improvements he boasts of consist, for his is little more than a reprint of the earlier editions. With Herbert's edition the popularity of the Sure Guide came to an end, no doubt owing to the appearance of more recent works.
William Aufeild complained, not without reason, that most professors teach only what other men "have set downe to their hand in English many years agoe," and it is undeniable that several of the sixteenth-century French grammars continued to be used in England as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. Holyband was specially in favour, and so was De la Mothe. Peter Erondell, it has been seen, prepared new editions of the French Schoolemaister in 1606, 1612, 1615, and 1619. Another French professor, James Giffard, was responsible for other editions in 1631, 1636, 1641, 1649, 1655, and it appears to have been printed again in 1668; this Giffard was probably the Jacques Giffard who attended the Threadneedle Street Church;[793] he is said to have been a native of the isle of Sark, and in 1640 he married Elizabeth Guilbert of Guernsey. Editions of the French Littleton saw the light in 1602, 1607, 1625, 1630, 1633, and 1639. None of these editions contains any very noticeable alterations. The new editions of De la Mothe's French Alphabet (1625, 1631, 1633, 1639, and 1647) are merely reprints of the first edition of 1592. Thus it came about that the French of the sixteenth century was still taught in England in the seventeenth, regardless of the great changes which had been accomplished in the language in the meantime.
The first half of the seventeenth century was also a period during which French began to receive greater recognition in the educational world. Latin, it is true, retained its supremacy in the grammar school; but it is significant that a considerable number of Latin school-books were adapted to teaching French, and helped to swell the number of such manuals at the service of students. Thus French gained a place by the side of Latin, and some went so far as to question the supremacy of Latin as the "learned" tongue of Europe. In 1619 Thomas Morrice[794] deemed it necessary to refute the "error" of those of his countrymen who placed French before Latin—"a most absurd paradox" in his opinion, for "French was never reckoned a learned tongue; it belongs by right to one country alone, where the people themselves learn Latin." Such protests had little effect. In the first years of the century we have the earliest recognition of French as distinct from other modern languages, at the hands of a writer on education; FRENCH MAKES HEADWAYJ. Cleland held that a young gentleman's tutor should be skilled in the French as well as the Latin tongue, because "it is most used now universallie,"[795] and that the student, after translating English into Latin, should proceed to turn his Latin into French, "that he may profit in both the Tongues together."[796]
It was indeed by no means uncommon for French and English tutors to give instruction in both these tongues. Denisot, Palsgrave, Holyband, and many other French teachers had done so. Joseph Rutter, tutor to the son of the Earl of Dorset, at whose request he translated the Cid into English, is said to have made his pupil his collaborator in this task, and probably taught him French as well as Latin, and his case does not appear to have been exceptional. Evelyn, the diarist, learnt the rudiments of Latin from a Frenchman named Citolin, and probably picked up some French at the same time; travel abroad and his marriage with the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, English ambassador at Paris, who from her youth upwards had lived in France, gave him opportunities for improving his knowledge of the language, in which he was soon able to converse with ease.[797] Evelyn's son Richard also studied the two languages together; when he died in 1658, at the early age of five, he was able to say the catechism and pronounce English, Latin, and French accurately, also "to read an script, to decline nouns and conjugate all regular and most of the irregular verbs." He had likewise "learn'd Pueriles, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latine and French primitives and words, and could make congruous syntax, turne English into Latine and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, elipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's Janua, began himself to write legibly, and had a strong passion for Greek."[798]
The manuals for teaching Latin and French together, either Latin school-books with French added, or works specially written for giving instruction in the two languages, probably resulted from this connexion. At an early date French had found a place in several Latin dictionaries.[799] Soon afterwards it made its way into some of the Latin Colloquia and school authors. In 1591 the printer John Wyndet received a licence to print the dialogues of Corderius in French and English.[800] There is also a notice of an edition of Castellion's Sacred Dialogues in the same two languages.[801] Aesop's Fables were printed in English, French, and Latin in 1665, with the purpose of rendering the acquisition of these languages easier for young gentlemen and ladies; each fable is accompanied by an illustration due to Francis Barlow, and followed by a moral reflection. Thomas Philpott was responsible for the English version, and Robert Codrington, M.A., a versatile translator of the time, for the Latin and French. At least two other editions appeared in 1687 and 1703. Another favourite author was published in the same three languages at a later date—the Thoughts of Cicero ... on (1) Religion, and (2) Man.... Published in Latin and French by the Abbé Olivet, to which is now added an English translation, with notes (by A. Wishart) (1750 and 1773). Of these few examples of Latin and French text-books, two are known only by hearsay. It is likely that others, adapted to the same purpose, have disappeared without leaving any trace at all; as such school-books were usually printed with a privilege, their names are not preserved in the registers of the Company of Stationers. Little wonder that such manuals, subjected to the double wear and tear of teaching both Latin and French, have been entirely lost. The one volume which has come down to us is Aesop's Fables in French, Latin, and English, and its survival is explained by the elaborate and costly form in which it was issued.