For the sake of grouping conveniently together the entire Anglo-Terentian literature, I shall conclude with a mention of the version, executed in 1667 by Charles Hoole of six of the plays. It is in English and Latin, “for the use of young scholars,” and was most probably done with a special view to Hoole’s own school, which at this time was “near Lothbury Garden, London.” He kept for a long series of years one of the leading proprietary establishments in the metropolis; but he was originally the principal of one at Rotherham in Yorkshire. We last hear of him as carrying on the same business in Goldsmith’s Alley. This was in 1675. His career as a teacher must have extended over some thirty years.
II. Leaving Terence, we may pass to Virgil, whose Bucolics were published in 1512 with a dull Latin commentary, illustrating the construction of the verse and other critical points.
No ancient English edition of Horace exists, either in the original language or a translation. But Whittinton admitted selections from him into his Syntax. In 1534 he translated Cicero’s Offices for the use of schools, printing the Latin and English face to face; and the treatise of Old Age closely followed.
In these attempts to draw the classics into use for educational purposes, the fine musical numbers of the ancient poet and the noble composition of the writer in prose offer a powerful contrast to the barbarous jargon and dissonant pedantry of the scholiast and editor, whose Latin exposition certainly tended in no way to assist the learner, either from the point of view of an interpreter or a model. For it must have been, in the absence of some one to expound the exposition, fully as puzzling to pupils as the most difficult passages of the Roman poets, while it was eminently mischievous in its influence on the formation of a Latin style.
The teacher in all ages has been a prosaic and unimaginative being; and if the one who directed the studies of Virgil himself had glossed the works of those authors who lived before the Augustan era, he would have probably transmitted to us a labour as dry and unfruitful as those which make part of the reference library of English boys in the olden time.
Except in a prose translation, which bears no mark of having been intended for boys, the Æneid was not introduced among us for a very long period subsequently to the revival of learning, nor were the Georgics. A selection from Ovid’s Art of Love appeared in 1513; perhaps the whole was deemed too fescennine for the juvenile peruser.
I shall add Cæsar, whose Commentaries were printed in 1530, not because this invaluable book was intended as a medium for instruction in the seminaries and colleges, but just by the way, as the only other classic rendered into our tongue so early, on account of its probable interest in relation to France and to military science, and, once more, on account of the person who translated it, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, an accomplished nobleman, who filled at one time a professorial chair in the University of Padua.
The Cæsar, in fact, occupies an analogous position to the English editions of Cicero and the prose paraphrase of the Æneid published by Caxton, and was intended for the use of those few cultivated minds which had imbibed in Italy and France a taste for elegant and refined studies.
III. I have before me a copy of Whittinton’s versions of the Offices and Old Age of Cicero, and I may take the opportunity to present to the reader a specimen of his performance. It is taken from the first book of the Offices:—