How common such practical methods of learning French were may be gathered from the fact that the few memoirs and similar writings which give any detail on the subject invariably mention them. For instance, the mother of Mrs. Hutchinson, the wife of the regicide and Governor of Nottingham, was sent to board in the house of a refugee minister in order to learn French.[850] As to Mrs. Hutchinson herself, she had a French nurse, and was taught to speak English and French together.[851] Others had tutors. Thus the mother of Lady Anne Halkett, the royalist and writer on religious subjects, paid masters to teach Lady Anne and her sister "to write, speak French, play on the lute and virginals and dance";[852] and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, held up by Mrs. Makin as an example to "all ingenious and Vertuous Ladies," also had tutors for the polite accomplishments, and refers to her language lessons as "prating."[853] She acquired a good knowledge of French, became attendant to Queen Henrietta Maria, and accompanied her in her exile in France.
An example of the opportunities of acquiring a knowledge FRENCH BY CONVERSATIONof French, "in any leisure hour," as Milton said of Italian, is found in the Letters of Robert Loveday, the translator of part of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre. Loveday lived during the Commonwealth as a dependent in the house of Lady Clinton at Nottingham, where, he says, French "was familiarly spoken by the best sort of the family."[854] He therefore had every opportunity of learning the language, and was much helped by an old Italian gentleman, skilled in French, who was living in the house on the same footing as himself. As a result of his application he was able to translate several French works into English "in those empty spaces of time which were left by those that command me at my disposall." He procured a copy of Cotgrave's dictionary and asked a friend in London to make enquiries at the booksellers if there was "any new French book of indifferent volume that was worth the translating and not enterprised by any other."[855] Loveday hoped by this means to give "larger scope to (his) narrow condition" at Nottingham. One of his first enterprises was the translation of a "mad fantastick Dream" he met with in Sorel's Francion, which he sent to his brother; but his chief work was a rendering of the first three parts of Cléopâtre, which was hardly of the "indifferent size" he writes of. The several parts appeared in 1652, 1654, and 1655 respectively, under the title of Hymen's Praeludia, or Love's Masterpiece, and were dedicated to his "ever-honoured lady" Lady Clinton. In the complete version, the fourth, fifth, and sixth parts are also ascribed to Loveday.
Thus practical methods gained a firm hold in the teaching of French; when grammar was studied, it was within limited boundaries, and only so far as desirable for practical purposes. In the teaching of Latin, on the other hand, more and more importance was attached to the study of grammar, which took the foremost place, literature being regarded as little more than a collection of illustrative examples of the rules.[856] Grammar had become "a full swolen and overflowing stream, which, by a strong hand, arrogates to itself (and hath well-nigh gotten) the whole traffic in learning, especially of languages."[857] The use of the Grammar and reading books in Latin alone was another practice which engaged the attention of the reformers.[858] "A book altogether in Latin is a mere Barbarian to our children," wrote Charles Hoole,[859] who published many of the popular Latin school-books with English translations, in the style of those which are always present in the French text-books. His opinion was that "no language is more readily got than by familiar discourse in it, and ability therein is in no way sooner gained then by comparing the tongue we learn with that we know, and asking how they call this or how they say that in another language, which we are able to express in our own." A writer of the time[860] thus describes "that wild goose chase usually led": "ordinarily boys learn a leaf or two of the Pueriles, twenty pages of Corderius, a part of Esop's Fables, a piece of Tullie, a little of Ovid, a remnant of Virgil, Terence, etc. ... to read the accidence, to get it without book, is ordinarily the work of one whole year. To construe the Grammar and to get it without book is at least the task of two years more, and then, it may be, it is little understood until a year or two more is spent in making plain Latin ... when it is all done, besides declining nouns and forming verbs and getting a few words, there is very little advantage to the child." And a French teacher,[861] writing at about the same time, has left a very similar picture. He describes how the GRAMMATICAL STUDY OF LANGUAGESchild slaves till the age of fifteen or sixteen, forced to learn against his will a little Latin and Greek, with little result after seven or eight years of hardship. "Not 10 per cent really know either; they are buried under a fatras of words and rules, which stun the memory and overturn the judgment, and all under the rule of the rod." Such is the learning of a foreign language "by grammar."
The feeling of dissatisfaction with the usual method of teaching Latin in grammar schools, however, seems to have been general in the seventeenth century, and many were the protests and appeals for reform. "No man can run speedily to the mark of languages that is shackled and ingiv'd with grammar precepts," wrote Joseph Webbe,[862] who draws a careful distinction between the grammar-Latin thus acquired and what he calls Latin-Latin,[863] that is, "Such as the best approved authors wrote and left us in their books and monuments of use and custom," as distinct from "that Latin which we now make by grammar rules, and their collection out of that custom and those authors was to make us write and speak such Latin as that custom and those authors did, which was Latin-Latin, but it succeeded not."
Consequently there arose a belief that "practice"—in speaking, reading, and writing the language—should take its place by the side of grammar. Writers pleaded, in the style of Elyot and Ascham, for the teaching of Latin on more practical lines, quoting Montaigne's experience.[864] Thomas Grantham[865] opened a private school, in which he sought to deliver youth from their "great captivity" and the hardship and uselessness of learning grammar word for word without book and in Latin, which the boy does not understand, "just as if a man should teach one an art in French when he understands not French." Grantham, on the contrary, taught his scholars to understand the rules first, and by repeatedly applying them they came to know them without book, whether they would or no. Similar was the method of the French teachers, who often carried the idea further, and taught their pupils the rules as need for them arose in practice.
John Webster thus puts the case for and against learning by "rule." "As for grammar," he says,[866] "which hath been invented for the more certain and facile teaching and obtaining of languages, it is very controvertible whether it perform the same in the surest, easiest and shortest way or not, since hundreds speak their mother tongue and other languages very perfectly, use them readily, and understand them excellent well, and yet never knew or were taught any grammar rules, nor followed the wayes of Conjugations and Declensions, Noun or Verb. And it is sufficiently known that many men, by their own industry, without the method or rules of grammar, have gotten a competent understanding in divers languages: and many unletter'd persons will, by use and exercise, without Grammar rules, learn to speak and understand some languages in far shorter time than any do learn them by method and rule, as is clearly manifest by those that travel.... And again, if we conceive that languages learnt by use and exercise render men ready and expert in the understanding and speaking of them, without any aggravating or pushing the intellect and memory, when that which is gotten by rule and method, when we come to use and speak it, doth exceedingly rack and excruciate the intellect and memory: which are forced at the same time, not only to find fit words agreeable to the present matter discoursed of, and to put them into a good Rhetorical order, but must at the same instant of speaking, collect all the numerous rules of number, case ... as into one centre, where so many rayes are united and yet not confounded, which must needs be very perplexive and gravaminous to memorative faculty: and therefore none that attains languages by grammar do ever come to speak and understand them perfectly and readily, until they come to a perfect habit in the exercitation of them, and so thereby come to lose and leave the use of those many and intricate rules, which have cost us so many pains to attain to them, and so to justifie the saying that we do but discere dediscenda." Those who learn by "use and exercitation," on the other hand, acquire languages more quickly and with better results. If the study of grammar is insisted on, it should be made very brief. The indeclinables require no rules, but are learnt by use. LOCKE ON THE TEACHING OF FRENCHOf the declinables the only ones that present any difficulties are the noun and the verb, regular and irregular. As to the irregulars, they are best learnt by "use," as rules only "render the way more perplexed and tedious. And the way of the regulars is facile and brief, being but one rule for all."
Many others wrote in a similar strain,[867] advocating the teaching of Latin on lines widely used in the teaching of French. Several actually specified the modern language, which was first mentioned in books on education in this connexion. Thomas Grantham, in his Brain Breaker's Breaker (1644), points out that many young gentlemen and ladies learn to speak French in half a year without grammar, and argues that the same purpose could be achieved with Latin and Greek in a twelvemonth. Similarly George Snell argued that Latin might be learnt "in as short a time as a Monsieur can teach French,"[868] for the pronunciation, so great a task in learning the living tongue, is of no importance in the dead language. At a somewhat later date, when French had made more headway in the scholastic world, Locke plainly states that people are accustomed to the right way of teaching French, "which is by talking it into children by constant conversation, and not by Grammatical Rules,"[869] and proposes that the same method should be applied to Latin. "When we so often see a Frenchwoman teach an English girl to speak and read French perfectly in a year or two, without any rule of grammar, or anything else but prattling to her, I cannot but wonder how gentlemen have overseen this way for their sons, and thought them more dull and incapable than their daughters."[870] Elsewhere Locke again draws comparisons between the teaching of Latin and that of French,[871] and a French teacher of the early part of the eighteenth century recognized the importance of this tribute when he published a grammar intended to confirm the knowledge acquired by "practice."[872]
Yet all these proposals and protests do not seem to have had much effect on the teaching of Latin. In a few cases, however, experiments were attempted, usually in connexion with French. Several were made with the Janua of Comenius, which had early been adapted to the teaching of French as well as Latin. The theories of Comenius himself had no doubt inspired the English reformers. He had written that rules are thorns to the understanding, that no one ever mastered a language by precept alone, though it is often done by practice; rules, however, should not be entirely discarded.[873]
J. T. Philipps, who was later tutor to the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II., relates[874] how he taught both Latin and French on practical lines with the help of Comenius. His pupil first got a good notion of the Latin tongue by studying the verbs and nouns, and then learning the Latin column of the Janua Linguarum. "I likewise at som leisure Hours," continues Philipps, "taught him to read French and when he had good the pronunciation, he labour'd for some time, as he did before in the Latin, to make himself Master of the French Verbs and Nouns, and then began to learn the sentences in another column of the Janua Linguarum, which, by the assistance of the Latin, he mastered in a very short time. So that before the end of the first year, he could read Fontaine's Fables from French into English, and give me an LANGUAGES LEARNT WITHOUT GRAMMARaccount of the French Minister's text which he heard, and part of the sermon; for I charg'd him never to miss the French Church, that he might the better accustom himself to the true Accent of that Tongue.... I spent an hour every Sunday Morning all the time the Boy was with me, to read over several short Catechisms or systems in Divinity both in French and Latin."[875]
The learned Mrs. Bathsua Makin, who had been governess to the daughters of Charles I., and later kept a school at Tottenham High Cross, also advocated the use of the Janua Linguarum for learning Latin and French. The young ladies of her school learnt ten Latin sentences of the Janua a day thoroughly, spending "but six hours a day in their books." By the end of six months they had a fair knowledge of the language, and turned to French: "If the Latin tongue may be learnt in 6 months, where most of the words are new, then the French may be learnt in three, by one that understands Latin and English, because there is not above one word of ten of the French Tongue, that may not fairly, without force, be reduced to the Latin or English."[876]