I have spoken of Ælius Donatus as an author whose Grammar enjoyed a long celebrity and an enormously wide acceptance, down from his own age to the date of the revival of learning. It was used throughout the Continent, in England, and in Scotland.
But prior to our earliest race of native grammarians and philologists, there were several labourers in this great and fruitful field, who began, towards the latter end of the fifteenth century, to cast off the trammels of the Roman professor, and to set up little systems of their own, of course more or less built upon Donatus.
Such an one was Guarini of Verona, whose Regulæ Grammaticales were originally published at Venice in 1470, and are regarded as one of the earliest specimens of her prolific press. These rules were frequently reissued, and I have before me an edition of 1494.
The book, which consists only of twenty-two leaves or forty-four pages, begins with describing the parts of speech, then takes the various sorts of verbs, and follows with the adverbs, participles, and so forth. There is a set of verses on the irregular nouns, and a second headed Versus differentiales or synonyms; and some of the illustrations are given in Italian. The section on diphthongs forms an Appendix.
I merely adduce a cursory notice of Guarini to keep the student in mind of the collateral progress of this class of learning abroad, while our own men were developing it among us with the occasional assistance of foreigners. Perhaps I may just copy out the following small specimen, where the glosses are in the writer’s vernacular:—
| “Largior | ris | per donare e p̱ essere donato | ||
| Experior | ris | per p̱uare e per essere p̱uato | ||
| Ueneror | ris | per honorare e p̱ essere honorato | ||
| Moror | ris | per aspectare e p̱ eēre aspectato | ||
| Osculor | ris | per basare e p̱ essere basiato.” |
In connection with Magdalen School, we see in the account-book of John Dorne, Oxford bookseller, for 1520, the class and range of literature which a dealer in those days found saleable. Among the strictly grammatical books occur the A. B. C. and the Boys’ Primer; the productions, with which we are already familiar, of Whittinton, Stanbridge, Erasmus, Cicero, Terence, and Lucian, interspersed with some of the Fathers, service-books of the Church, classical authors of a less popular type, such as Lucan, Cornelius Nepos, and Pomponius Mela; and more or less abstruse treatises on logic, rhetoric, and theology. On the other hand, we have prognostications in English, almanacs, Robin Hood, the Nutbrown Maid, the Squire of Low Degree, Sir Isumbras, Robert the Devil, and ballads. There are, besides, the Sermon of the Boy-Bishop, the Book of Cookery, the Book of Carving, and an Anglo-French vocabulary.
But I do not enter into these details. It was merely my intention to peep in at the shop, and see what a bookseller at one of the Universities nearly four centuries ago had in the way of school-literature. Perhaps next to the A. B. C. and the primers, the educational works of Erasmus were in greatest demand.
This old ledger has a sort of living value, inasmuch as it carries us back with it to the very Oxford of the first race of teachers and grammarians, about whom I write. All of them, except perchance Anniquil, must have known Dorne and had transactions with him; and here is his ledger, upon which the eyes of some of them may have rested, still preserved, with its record of stock in hand—new copies damp from the printer, or remainders of former purchases, now scarcely extant, or, if so, shorn of their coeval glory by the schoolboy’s thumb or the binder’s knife.