The Sententiæ Pueriles was a collection of brief sentences from many authors, including moral and religious passages intended for the use of the boys on Saints' days.
The Latin Grammar studied by William was certainly Lilly's, the standard manual of the time, as long before and after. The first edition was published in 1513, and one was issued as late as 1817, or more than three hundred years afterward. In The Taming of the Shrew (i. 1. 167) a passage from Terence is quoted in the modified form in which it appears in this grammar.
There are certain people, by the way, who believe that Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon. Can we imagine the sage of St. Albans, familiar as he was with classical literature, going to his old Latin Grammar for a quotation from Terence, and not to the original works of that famous playwright?
In Love's Labour's Lost (iv. 2. 95) Holofernes quotes the "good old Mantuan," as he calls him, the passage being evidently a reminiscence of Shakespeare's schoolboy Latin. The "Mantuan" is not Virgil, as one might at first suppose (and as Mr. Andrew Lang, who is a good scholar, assumes in his pleasant comments on the play in Harper's Magazine for May, 1893), but Baptista Mantuanus, or Giovanni Battista Spagnuoli (or Spagnoli), who got the name Mantuanus from his birthplace.
He died in 1516, less than fifty years before Shakespeare was born, and was the author of sundry Eclogues, which the pedants of that day preferred to Virgil's, and which were much read in schools. The first Eclogue begins with the passage quoted by Holofernes.
A little earlier in the same scene the old pedant gives us a quotation from Lilly's Grammar. Other bits of Latin with which he interlards his talk are taken, with little or no variation, from the Sententiæ Pueriles or similar Elizabethan phrase-books.
THE NEGLECT OF ENGLISH.
No English was taught in the Stratford school then, or for many years after. It is only in our own day that it has begun to receive proper attention in schools of this grade in England, or indeed in our own country.
It is interesting, however, to know that the first English schoolmaster to urge the study of the vernacular tongue was a contemporary of Shakespeare. In 1561 Richard Mulcaster, who had been educated at King's College, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford, was appointed head-master of Merchant-Taylors School in London, which had just been founded as a feeder, or preparatory school, for St. John's College, Oxford. In his Elementarie, published in 1582, he has the following plea for the study of English:—