“Therbe fiue maner poyntys / and diuisiōs most vside with cunnyng men: the whiche if they be wel vsid: make the sentens very light / and esy to vnderstōd both to the reder & the herer. & they be these: virgil / come / parēthesis / playne poynt / and interrogatif. A virgil is a sclēder stryke: lenynge forwarde thiswyse / be tokynynge a lytyl / short rest without any perfetnes yet of sentens: as betwene the fiue poyntis a fore rehersid. A come is with tway titils thiswyse: betokynyng a lenger rest: and the sētens yet ether is vnperfet: or els if it be perfet: ther cūmith more after / lōgyng to it: the which more comynly can not be perfect by itself without at the lest sūmat of it: that gothe a fore. A parenthesis is with tway crokyd virgils: as an olde mone / & a neu bely to bely: the whiche be set theron afore the begynyng / and thetother after the latyr ende of a clause: comyng within an other clause: that may be perfet: thof the clause / so cōmyng betwene: wer awey and therfore it is sowndyde comynly a note lower: than the vtter clause. yf the sētens cannot be perfet without the ynner clause: then stede of the first crokyde virgil a streght virgil wol do very wel: and stede of the latyr must nedis be a come. A playne point is with won tittil thiswyse. & it cūmith after the ende of al the whole sētens betokinyng a lōge rest. An īterrogatif is with tway titils: the vppir rysyng this wyse? & it cūmith after the ende of a whole reason: wheryn ther is sum question axside. the whiche ende of the reson / tariyng as it were for an answare: risyth vpwarde. we haue made these rulis in englisshe: by cause they be as profitable / and necessary to be kepte in euery moder tuge / as ī latin. ¶ Sethyn we (as we wolde to god: euery precher [? techer] wolde do) haue kepte owre rulis bothe in owre englisshe / and latyn: what nede we / sethyn owre own be sufficient ynogh: to put any other exemplis.”
VI. It is perhaps fruitless to offer any vague conjecture as to the authorship of the Ascensian Declensions. Many Englishmen resident in Paris, Antwerp, and Germany might have edited such a book. The orthography and punctuation are alike peculiar, and suspiciously redolent, it may be considered, of a foreign parentage; but one of our countrymen who had long resided abroad, or who had even been educated out of England, might very well have been guilty of such slips as we find here. A Thomas Robertson of York, of whom I shall have more presently to say, was a few years later in communication with the printers and publishers of Switzerland, and became the editor of a text of Lily the grammarian. Robertson, as a Northern man, was apt, in writing English, to introduce certain provincialisms; and I put it, though merely as a guess, that he might have executed this commission, as he did the other, for Bebelius of Basle.
Two years subsequently to the appearance of his Vulgaria, Horman involved himself in a literary controversy with Whittinton in consequence of an attack which he had made on the laureate’s grammatical productions in a printed Epistle to Lily; it was the beginning of a movement for reforming or remodelling the current educational literature, and Horman himself was a man of superior character and literary training, as we are able to judge from the way in which he acquitted himself of his own contribution to this class of work.
A curious and very interesting account of the dispute between Lily and Horman, in which Robert Whittinton and a fourth grammarian named Aldrich became involved, is given by Maitland in his Notices of the Lambeth Palace Library. I elsewhere refer to the warm altercation between Sir John Cheke and Bishop Gardiner on the pronunciation of Greek. Both these matters have to be added to a new edition of Disraeli’s Quarrels of Authors.
The Salernitan gentleman (Andrea Guarna) who set the Noun and the Verb together by the ears in his Grammar War, acted, no doubt, more discreetly, since he reserved to himself the power to terminate the fray which he had commenced.
VII. Generally speaking, it is the case that the men who compiled the curious and highly valuable Manuals of Instruction during the Middle Ages were superseded and effaced by others following in their track and profiting by their experience. The bulk of these more ancient treatises, such as I have described, still remained in MS. till of recent years, like the college text-books, which are yet sometimes left unprinted from choice; and after the introduction of typography the teaching and learning public accorded a preference to those scholars who constructed their system on more modern lines, and whose method was at once more intelligible and more efficient.
Of all the names with which we have become familiar, the only one which seems to have survived is Johannes de Garlandia; and it is remarkable, again, that the two works from his pen which passed the London press, the Verborum Explicatio and the Synonyma, are by no means comparable in merit or in interest to the Dictionary already noticed. Subsequently to the rise of the English Grammatical School the reputation and popularity of Garlandia evidently suffered a permanent decline, and we hear and feel no more of him.
A new generation, trained in foreign schools or under foreign tutors, set themselves the task of forming educational centres, and of introducing the people of England to a conversance with the foundations of learning and culture by more expeditious and effectual methods; and as from Scrooby in Lincolnshire a small knot of resolute men went forth in the May Flower to lay the first stone of that immense constitutional edifice, the United States of America, so from an humble school at Oxford sprang the pioneers of all English grammatical lore—Anniquil; his usher, Stanbridge; Stanbridge’s pupil, Whittinton; and Whittinton’s pupil, Lily.
It is not too much to say that during three hundred years all our great men, all our nobility, all our princes, owed to this hereditary dynasty, as it were, the elementary portion of their scholastic and academical breeding, and that no section of our literature can boast of so long a celebrity and utility as the Grammatical Summary which is best known as Lily’s Short Introduction, and which in most of its essentials corresponds with the system employed by those who preceded him and those who followed him almost within the recollection of our grandfathers. It was reserved for scholars of a very different temper and type to overthrow his ancient empire, and establish one of their own; and this is a revolution which dates from yesterday.
At the period when the school at Magdalen was established by Bishop Waynflete, the teachers in our own country and on the Continent were working on nearly parallel lines, just as the religious service-books printed at Paris and Rouen were made, by a few subsidiary alterations, to answer the English use; and indeed in the case of the grammatical system of Sulpicius an impression was executed at Paris in 1511 for Wynkyn de Worde, and imported hither for sale, without any differences or variations from the text employed in the Parisian gymnasium and elsewhere through the French dominions. It was not till the English element in these books gained the ascendancy, having been introduced by furtive degrees and by way of occasional or incidental illustration, that a marked native character was stamped on our school-books. Ultimately, as we know, the Latin proportion sensibly diminished, and even a preponderant share of space was accorded to the vernacular.