Besides his Milk for Children and the Parvulorum Institutio, to the latter of which I have already referred, Holt appears to me the most likely person to have compiled the tract called Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione, a small grammatical manual based on that of his predecessor or even colleague at Magdalen School; and this may be the work to which Knight points where he says that Holt put forth an Accidence and Grammar concurrently with his other tract, though the biographer of Dean Colet errs in placing Stanbridge after Holt in chronological sequence.
Another of the miscellaneous unofficial pieces, answering very nearly to the mediæval Nominale, has no other title than Os, Facies, mentum, and is a Latin poem descriptive of the human form, first printed in 1508, with an interlinear English gloss. It begins thus:—
| a mouthe | a face | a chyne | a toth | a throot | a tonge | |||||
| Os | facies | mentū | dens | guttur | lingua | |||||
| a berde | a browe | abrye | a forhede | tēples | a lype | |||||
| Barba | supercilium | ciliū | frons | tēpora | labrū | |||||
| roffe of the mouth | ||||||||||
| palatum | ||||||||||
There is nothing, of course, on the one hand, recondite, or, on the other, very edifying in this; but it is a sample of the method pursued in these little ephemerides nearly four centuries ago.
II. The comparative study of Latin and English acquired increased prominence under the Tudors; and in addition to the regular text-books compiled by such men as Stanbridge and Whittinton, there is quite a small library of pieces designed for educational purposes, and framed on a similar model. Doubtless these were in many cases accepted in the schools on an equal footing with the productions of the masters themselves, or the latter may have had a hand, very possibly, in those which we have to treat as anonymous.
Between the commencement and middle of the sixteenth century, during the reigns of the first and second Tudors, there were several of these unclaimed and unidentified compilations, such as the Grammatica Latino-Anglica, Tractatus de octo orationis partibus, and Brief Rules of the Regiment or construction of the Eight Parts of Speech, in English and Latin, 1537.
The Introductorium linguæ Latinæ by W. H. may perhaps be ascribed to William Horman, of whom we shall have more to say; and there are also in the category of works which had no particular width or duration of currency the Gradus Comparationum of Johannes Bellomayus, and the Regulæ Informationis of John Barchby.
These, and others, again, of which all trace has at present disappeared, were employed in common with the regular series, constantly kept in print, of Whittinton and Stanbridge, prior to the rise of the great public seminaries, many of which, as it will be my business to shew, took into use certain compilations supposed to be specially adapted to their requirements.
William Horman, who is presumed to have been the author of the Introductorium above mentioned, was schoolmaster and Fellow of Eton College; in 1477 he became a perpetual Fellow of New College, Oxford, and he was eventually chosen Vice-Provost of Eton. He survived till 1535. From an epigram appended to the volume it is to be gleaned that Horman was a pupil of Dr. Caius, poet-laureate to Edward the Fourth.
Of the Gradus Comparationum the subjoined may be received as a specimen:—