Sulpitii Examen de octo partibus orationis.
Carmen Iuuenile.
De declinatione nominum orthoclitorum.
—————————— heteroclitorum.
De nominibus heteroclitis.
De generibus nominum.
De verbis defectiuis.
De præteritis verborum.
De supinis —————.
De regimine et constructione dictionum Libellus.
De componendis ornandisq; epistolis.
De Carminibus.
De quantitate syllabarum.
De A, E, &c. in primis syllabis.
—————— mediis ——.
De ultimis syllabis.
De Carminibus decoro [sic] &c.
Donati de figuris opusculum.
De latinarum dictionum recta scriptura.
De grecarum dictionum orthographia.
De ratione dipthongangi.
Ascensii de orthographia carmina.
Vocabulorum interpretatio.
The Carmen Juvenile, inserted here and in the antecedent issues, is the poem better known as Stans Puer ad Mensam, and in its English dress by Lydgate. Mr. Blades tells us that the editio princeps of the Latin poem appeared in 1483, and that Caxton printed Lydgate’s English one at an anterior date. Lydgate, however, had been dead many years when his production saw the light in type, and as he could scarcely have translated the piece from Sulpicius, the probability seems to be that both resorted to a pre-existent original, which the Englishman rendered into his own tongue, and the foreign grammarian adopted or modernised. A comparison of the English text with that given in the work of Sulpicius shews considerable variations; the latter version is here and there more outspoken and blunt in its language than the paraphrase of the good Monk of Bury St. Edmunds. It is accompanied by a running gloss by the learned Ascensius; and although the book was ostensibly designed for the use of students, the contractions are unusually troublesome, and many of the proper names are exhibited in an orthography at any rate rather peculiar. The god whose special province was the management of the solar orb is introduced as formosus appollo. His substitution of Vergilius as the name of the Latin poet is so far not remarkable, inasmuch as Polydore Vergil of Urbino appears always to have spelled his name so, and in the edition of Virgil by Aldus, 1501, the author is called Vergilius. I am afraid that if I were to furnish a specimen of the contractions, a modern typographer would be puzzled to reproduce it with the desirable exactitude.
III. When one turns over the leaves of a volume of this kind, and sees the way in which the avenue to learning and knowledge was hampered by pedantic and ignorant instructors, it seems marvellous, not that the spread of education was so slow and partial, but that so many scholars should have emerged from such a process.
A more obscure and repellent series of grammatical dissertations can hardly be imagined; yet Sulpicius holds a high rank among the promoters of modern education, as the precursor of all those, such as Robert Whittinton, John Stanbridge, and William Lily, who, after the revival of learning and the institution of the printing-press, prepared the way for improved methods and more enlightened preceptors. His followers naturally went beyond him; but Sulpicius was doubtless as much in advance of his forerunners as Richard Morris is in advance of Lindley Murray.
After the restoration of letters, Sulpicius seems to have been the pioneer in re-erecting grammar into a science, and formulating its rules and principles on a systematic basis.
In enumerating the aids to learning which the English received from the Continent, we must not overlook Alexander Gallus, or Alexander de Villâ Dei, a French Minorite and school-teacher of the thirteenth century, who reduced the system of Priscian to a new metrical plan, doubtless for the use of his own pupils, as well as his personal convenience and satisfaction.
The Doctrinale of Alexander, which is in leonine verse, circulated more or less in MS. during his life, and was one of the earliest books committed to the press, as a fragment on vellum with the types of Laurence Coster of Haarlem establishes. It was repeatedly published abroad, but does not really seem to have ever gained a strong footing among ourselves, since three editions of it are all that I can trace as having come from London presses, and of these the first was in 1503. It did not, in fact, command attention till we were on the eve of a great reform in our school-books; and while in France, if not elsewhere abroad, it preserved its popularity during two or three centuries, till it was supplanted by the Grammar and Syntax of Despauterius about 1515, here in a dozen years it had run its course, and scarcely left even the marks of its influence behind.
IV. But the prototype of all the grammatical writers and teachers of early times in this as well as other countries was Ælius Donatus, a Roman professor of the fourth century, who probably acquired his experience from Priscian and the other works published under the Empire upon his favourite science, and who had the honour to number Saint Jerome among his disciples.
Donatus is the author of a System of Grammar in three parts, and of a series of Prefaces and Scholia to Terence; and his reputation became so great and was so widely diffused, that a Donatus or Donet was a well-understood synonym for a Primer, and John of Basing even christens his Greek Grammar, compiled about 1240, Donatus Græcorum. Langland, in his Vision concerning Piers Ploughman, written a century later, says—
“Thaune drowe I me amonges draperes my donet to lerne;”