The boy and his schoolmaster were not mistaken in thinking that some of Textor's Moralities would have delighted the people of Ingleton as much as any of Rowland Dixon's stock pieces. Such dramas have been popular wherever they have been presented in the vernacular tongue. The progress from them to the regular drama was slow, perhaps not so much on account of the then rude state of most modern languages, as because of the yet ruder taste of the people. I know not whether it has been observed in literary history how much more rapid it was in schools, where the Latin language was used, and consequently fit audience was found, though few.
George von Langeveldt, or Macropedius as he called himself, according to the fashion of learned men in that age, was contemporary with Textor, and like him one of the pioneers of literature, but he was a person of more learning and greater intellectual powers. He was born about the year 1475, of a good family in the little town or village of Gemert, at no great distance from Bois-le-Duc. As soon as his juvenile studies were compleated he entered among the Fratres Vitæ Communis; they employed him in education, first as Rector in their college at Bois-le-duc, then at Liege, and afterwards at Utrecht from whence in 1552, being infirm and grievously afflicted with gout, he returned to Bois-le-duc there to pass the remainder of his days, as one whose work was done. Old and enfeebled however as he was, he lived till the year 1558, and then died not of old age, but of a pestilential fever.
There is an engraved portrait of him in the hideous hood and habit of his order; the countenance is that of a good-natured, intelligent, merry old man: underneath are these verses by Sanderus the topographer.
Tu Seneca, et nostri potes esse Terentius ævi,
Seu struis ad faciles viva theatra pedes,
Sen ploras tragicas, Macropedi, carmine clades,
Materiam sanctis adsimilante modis.
Desine jam Latios mirari Roma cothurnos;
Nescio quid majus Belgica scena dabit.
Macropedius published Rudiments both of the Greek and Latin languages; he had studied the Hebrew and Chaldee; had some skill in mathematics, and amused his leisure in making mathematical instruments, a branch of art in which he is said to have been an excellent workman. Most of the men who distinguished themselves as scholars in that part of the Low Countries, toward the latter part of the 16th century had been his pupils: for he was not more remarkable for his own acquirements than for the earnest delight which he took in instructing others. There is some reason for thinking that he was a severe disciplinarian, perhaps a cruel one. Herein he differed widely from Textor, who took every opportunity for expressing his abhorrence of magisterial cruelty. In one of these Dialogues with which Guy and young Daniel were so well acquainted, two schoolmasters after death are brought before Rhadamanthus for judgement; one for his inhumanity is sent to be tormented in Tartarus, part of his punishment in addition to those more peculiarly belonging to the region, being that
Verbera quæ pueris intulit, ipse ferat:
the other who indulged his boys and never maltreated them is ordered to Elysium, the Judge saying to him
—tua te in pueros clementia salvum
Reddit, et æternis persimilem superis.
That Textor's description of the cruelty exercised by the pedagogues of his age was not overcharged, Macropedius himself might be quoted to prove, even when he is vindicating and recommending such discipline as Dr. Parr would have done. I wish Parr had heard an expression which fell from the honest lips of Isaac Reid, when a school, noted at that time for its consumption of birch, was the subject of conversation; the words would have burnt themselves in. I must not commit them to the press; but this I may say, that the Recording Angel entered them on the creditor side of that kind-hearted old man's account.
Macropedius, like Textor, composed dramatic pieces for his pupils to represent. The latter, as has been shown in a former chapter, though he did not exactly take the Moralities for his model, produced pieces of the same kind, and adapted his conceptions to the popular facts, while he clothed them in the language of the classics. His aim at improvement proceeded no farther, and he never attempted to construct a dramatic fable. That advance was made by Macropedius, who in one of his dedicatory epistles laments that among the many learned men who were then flourishing, no Menander, no Terence was to be found, their species of writing, he says, had been almost extinct since the time of Terence himself, or at least of Lucilius. He regretted this because comedy might be rendered useful to persons of all ages, quid enim plus pueris ad eruditionem, plus adolescentibus ad honesta studia, plus provectioribus, immò omnibus in commune ad virtutem conducat?