Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters / A Contribution to the History of Educational Development in Great Britain

by William Carew Hazlitt

VII.

Influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More—Visits of the former to this country—His friendship with Dean Colet—Establishment of various schools in England—Foundation of St. Paul’s by Colet—Statutes—Books used in the school—Narrow lines—Notice of the old Cathedral School.

I. We must not attempt, in fact, to consider the educational question in early England without studying very sedulously the Lives of Erasmus and Colet by Samuel Knight. The influence of Erasmus on our scholastic literature I believe to have been very great indeed. He came over to this country, it appears, in 1497, and spent a good deal of time at Oxford, where he acquired a knowledge of Greek. “While Erasmus remained at Oxford,” says his biographer, “he became very intimate with all those who were of any Note for Learning; accounting them always his best friends, by whom he was most profited in his studies. And as he owns M. Colet did first engage him in the Study of Theology, so it is also well known that he embraced the favourable Opportunity he now had of learning the Greek Tongue, under the most Skilful Masters (viz.) William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, and William Latimer. Grocyn is said by one who lived about this Time to have been the first Professor, or Publick Teacher of Greek in Oxford to a full Assembly of Young Students.”

Knight affords an interesting and tolerably copious account of Linacre, as well as of Grocyn; and in connection with the former he relates an anecdote, on the authority of Erasmus, about Bernard Andreas, tutor to Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII. But I shall not enter into these matters, as Linacre, though a great promoter of Greek authors, scarcely comes within my plan. Yet I may mention that among the friends whom the learned Hollander made here was Cuthbert Tunstall, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and author of the first book on arithmetic published in this country, and Richard Pace, who succeeded Colet in the Deanery of St. Paul’s.

There is, however, a passage which I may be suffered to transcribe, where, speaking of the time when Erasmus was contemplating a departure homeward, Knight observes:—

“Before Erasmus left England, he laid the plan of his useful Tract de conscribendis epistolis, for the Service, and at the Suggestion of his noble Pupil the Lord William Montjoy, who had complained that there were no good Rules, or Examples of that kind, to which he could conform himself. Erasmus took the hint very kindly, and making his just Reflections, upon the emptiness of Franciscus Niger, and Marius Phalelfus,[2] whose Books upon that Argument were read in the common Schools, he seems resolv’d at his first leisure, to give a New Essay of that kind; and accordingly upon his first return to Paris he fell upon it, and finished it within twenty Days.”

So we see that, prior to the visit of Erasmus to us at the end of the fifteenth century, there were already polite letter-writers current, and current, too, as school-books. Erasmus came to the conclusion that he had done his own work too hastily, and the appearance of an edition of it in England about thirty years later, and likewise of a counterfeit, induced him to revise the undertaking, which was finally published at Basle in 1545 in a volume with other analogous tracts by various writers.

A story which Knight relates about his author’s literary enterprise in the epistolary line is too amusing to be overlooked:—

“In that Essay of the way of writing Epistles, Erasmus had put in two sorts of Declamations, one in the praise, the other in dispraise, of Matrimony, and asking his young Pupil L^d. Montjoy how he lik’d that of the first sort. ‘Oh sir,’ says he, ‘I like it so well, that you have made me resolve to marry quickly.’ ‘Ay!’ but says Erasmus, ‘you have read only one side, stay and read the other.’ ‘No,’ replies L^d. Montjoy, ‘that side pleases me; take you the other!’” The subject is an obvious one for humorous controversy; but there is a similar idea in Rabelais, who makes his two chief characters debate the advantages and drawbacks of wedlock.

Altogether, Erasmus must have done very much toward the advancement of a taste for Hellenic culture in our country, and his biographer apprises us that he exhorted the physicians of his time to study that language as more necessary to their profession than to any other. Yet the knowledge of the tongue was very sparingly diffused in England at and long after that time; and Turner, in the dedication of his Herbal to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, complains of the ignorance of the apothecaries of his day even of the Latin names of the herbs which they employed in their pharmacopœia. The illustrious and erudite Dutchman did, doubtless, what he could, and made several of the classics more familiar and intelligible by new editions, with some of which he connected the names of English scholars and prelates; but the time had not arrived for any general movement.