III. Passing from him, his pleasant book, and its pleasant associations with cordial regret, I just notice the other and latter-day word-books, which are really, in the main, of the same type as those of which a description has gone before. One only differs markedly from the rest in possessing graphic embellishments of a rude and quaint character; among the rest the portrait of a woe-begone gallant, and by his side an arrow-pierced heart. Some of the representations are, of course, happier than others; assuredly those of animals are pre-Landseerian. They are many degrees below the stamp of such artistic essays as one finds in the books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a rule, both in England and abroad. Criticism lays down its arms.
But I must dwell rather longer on one of the tracts in this series—the Anglo-Gallic Dictionary or Phraseologia of Walter de Biblesworth. It is the most ancient monument of its particular kind of which I am aware, and is ascribed to the close of the thirteenth century, in other words, to the period embraced by the later years of the reign of Edward I. The orthography, which naturally strikes a modern French student as strange and uncouth, may be accepted as a key to the ancient pronunciation of the language, at all events in England, if not even among the French themselves; but the language, apart from the spelling, is remarkable for its plentiful use of expressions which have fallen into desuetude, and some of which, as io for je, bespeak a Pyrenæan origin.
This production is intituled “Le treytyz ke moun sire Gauter de Bibelesworthe fist à ma dame Dyonisie de Mounchensy, pur aprise de langwage, ço est à saver, du primer temps ke homme nestra, ouweke trestut le langwage pur saver nurture en sa juvente, &c.” The text is in short rhyming couplets, and takes the child from its birth through all the duties, occupations, and incidents of life. To select a passage which will give a fair idea of the whole is not altogether easy; but here is an extract which is capable of puzzling an average French scholar of our day:—
“Homme et femme unt la peel,
De morte beste quyr jo apel.
Le clerk soune le dreyne apel,
Le prestre fat a Roume apel.
Ore avet ço ke pent à cors,
Dedens ausy et deors.
Vestet vos dras, me chers enfauns,
Chaucez vos bras, soulers, e gauns;
Mettet le chaperoun, coverz le chef,
Tachet vos botouns, e pus derechef
De une coreye vus ceynet.”
This didactic treatise is additionally interesting to the English student from its relationship, in the way of likely literary ancestry, to the subsequent compilations of a cognate sort by Lydgate and others. The diction is obscure enough, and has the air of having been the work of a man of imperfect culture, from the presence of such forms as dreyne for derreniere or derniere and the abundance of false syntax, which ought not to have been so conspicuous, even at this remote date, in a composition professedly educational. Yet, after all deductions, the work is of singular curiosity and fascination, not only for its own sake, but as the best philological standard which we seem to have to put side by side with its successors in the same important direction.
III.
Earliest printed works of instruction—Publications of Bishop Perottus—His Grammatical Rules—Johannes Sulpicius and his Opus Grammaticum—Some account of the book—Importance and influence of these foreign Manuals in England—The Carmen Juvenile or Stans Puer ad Mensam—Alexander Gallus or De Villâ Dei and his Doctrinale—The Doctrinale one of the earliest productions of the Dutch press—Ælius Donatus—His immense popularity and weight both at home and abroad—Selections or abridgments of his Grammar used in English schools.
I. The most ancient published books of instruction for Englishmen in scholastic and academical culture emanated from a foreign country and press. When the Vocabularies, Grammars, and other Manuals ceased to circulate in a manuscript form, or to be written and multiplied by teachers for the use of their own pupils, the early Parisian printers supplied the market with the works, which it had been theretofore possible to procure only to a very limited extent, in transcripts executed by the authors themselves or by professional copyists.