| De Officiis Servandis in eos qui intulerunt nobis iniuriam. | Of offyces to be obserued agayne suche as haue done vs wronge | |
| Svnt autem quædam officia etiam aduersus eos seruāda à quibus iniuriam acceperis. Est enim ulciscendi & puniendi modus. Atq; haud scio an satis sit eum, qui lacessierit, iniuriæ suæ pœnitere, ut & ipse ne quid tale posthac committat, & cæteri sint ad iniuriam tardiores. | There be also certayne offyces to be kepte agayne suche / of whom a mā hath taken wrong. For there is a maner of reuengynge and punysshyng, and I can not tell whether it be suffycient for hym that hath done wronge to be sory of his wronge / and that he offende no more so after that. Also other shall be the more lothe to do wronge. |
There are few English renderings of ancient literature which it is possible to regard as completely satisfactory; and it must be recollected, on the behalf of Whittinton, that he was among the pioneers in this laborious field. Let me conclude with a sample of his essay on the De Senectute—a chef d’œuvre, which it is a sin to read in any idiom but its own.
| Sequitur tertia vituperatio senectutis, quod eam carere dicunt voluptatibus. O præclarum munus ætatis, siquidem id aufert nobis, quod est in adolescentia vitiosissimum. Accipite suim optimi adolescentes, ueterem orationem Archytæ Tarentini, magni in primis, et præclari viri, quæ mihi tradita est cum essem adolescens Tarenti cum Q. Maximo. Nullā capitaliorē pestē quam corporis uoluptatē hominibus dicebat à natura datā.... | The thyrde accusacion of olde age foloweth. By cause it must forgo pleasures. O that excellent benefyte of olde age: yf it take away from vs that thynge / whiche in youth is moost vicious. Therfore ye gentyll yonge men heare the olde sentence of Archytas a Tarentyne / a great and a famous man amonges all other / which was taught vnto me whan I was a yonge man in the citye of Tarentū with Quintus Maximus. He sayd that there was not a more deedly poyson gyuen to man by nature / than sensuall pleasure of body.... |
These two passages afford a fair idea of the capability of Whittinton for his task, and of the means which the English student of those days enjoyed for profiting by the lessons of antiquity and holding intercourse with the greatest minds of former ages, at the same time that it led the way to the purification of the current Latinity from mediæval barbarism and the heresies of the Dutch school.
To be hypercritical in the judgment of these experimental, and of course imperfect, attempts to impart to the educational system in this island a better tone and to place it on an improved footing, would be ungracious and improper. The introduction of the Roman writers in prose and verse into our schools and universities was an important step in the right direction, and tended to counteract the monastic temper and element in our method of training.
V. Outside the pale of the schoolroom, but still clearly designed for learners, one finds such literary fossils as the Book of Cato, the Cato for Boys, the Eclogues of Mantuan, of which Bale speaks as popular in his day, and which Holofernes mentions in Love’s Labour’s Lost; various abridgments of the Colloquia of Erasmus and his Little Book of Good Manners for Children (another monument of the industry and scholarship of Whittinton); and, lastly, such elementary guides to mythology and history as Lydgate’s Interpretation of the Natures of Gods and Goddesses, and the Chronicle of all the Kings’ Names that have reigned in England, 1530. With these I should perhaps couple the Latin Æsop of 1502, with a commentary in the same language, and the later edition of which, in 1535, includes the Fables of Poggius.
Considering the state of our population and the restrictions on learning, it cannot be said that the market for works of reference and instruction was poorly supplied, and the remains which have descended to us of books published in England, many wholly or partly in that language, for the use of the young, certainly bespeak and establish an eager and wide demand on the part of our public and private seminaries in the fifteenth and following centuries.
I take occasion to shew the beneficial share which Erasmus had in the promotion of culture in England in various ways, and the interest which he evinced in the establishment and success of St. Paul’s School. Not only were his own works translated into English, and received with favour among the book-lovers of that age, but he ventured so far as to turn several of the Dialogues of Lucian into Latin, encouraged by the proficiency which he had acquired during his first visit to England, in the original language, added perhaps to the satisfactory result of his later experiments as a teacher of Greek at Cambridge.