“Also if he fall thryse into absence, he shal be admytted no more.
“Your chylde shal, on Chyldermas daye, wayte vpon the boy byshop at Powles, and offer there.
“Also ye shal fynde him waxe in winter.
“Also ye shal fynde him convenyent bokes to his lernynge.
“If the offerer be content with these articles, than let his childe be admytted.”
The founder of St. Paul’s, in his statutes, 1518, prescribed what Latin authors he would have read in the school. He recites, in the first place, the Latin version by Erasmus of his Precepts and the Copia Verborum of the same Dutch scholar. He then proceeds to enumerate some of the early Christian writers, whose piety was superior to their Latinity, Lactantius, Prudentius, and others. But while he does not say that Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, and Terence are to be used, he utterly eschews and forbids such classics as Juvenal and Persius, whom he evidently indicates when he speaks of “Laten adulterate which ignorant, blinde foles brought into this worlde, and with the same hath dystained and poysonyd the olde Laten speche and the veray Romayne tongue which in the tyme of Tully and Salust, and Virgill, and Terence, was usid,”—which is so far reasonable from his standard; but he adds incongruously enough: “whiche also sainte Jerome, and sainte Ambrose, and saint Austen, and many holy doctors lernid in theyre tymes.” Whereby we are left at liberty to infer that these holy doctors were on a par with Virgil and Sallust, Cicero and Terence.
What sort of Latin would be current now if all the great writers had perished, and we had had only the works of the Fathers as text-books? We all have pretty similar beginnings, as the prima stamina of a man and any other vertebrate are said to be undistinguishable to a certain point; and as St. Jerome learned his accidence of Donatus, so Virgil got his rudiments. But much as we owe to St. Jerome, it was a mischievous error to adopt him or such authors as Lactantius in a public school, where the real object was to instil a knowledge of the Latin language in its integrity and purity. It was a mischievous error, and it was, at the same time, a perfectly natural one. We are not to blame Colet and his coadjutors for having been so narrow and so biassed; but it must always be a matter of regret and surprise that St. Paul’s, and all our other training institutions, public and proprietary, should, down to the present era, have been under the sway and management of men whose intellectual vision was as contracted and oblique as that of Colet, without the excuse which it is so easy to find for him.
The rules for St. Paul’s, which are set out at large by Knight, were unquestionably of a very austere character, though in harmony with the feeling of the time; and Knight, in his Life of the founder, ascribes the apparent harshness of the discipline enforced under his direction to the laudable motive of preparing boys for the troubles of the world, and inuring them to hardship. But Erasmus was not on the side of the martinets. For he explicitly condemns an undeserving strictness of discipline, which made no allowance for the difference in the tempers of boys; and another point with which he quarrelled was the horse-in-a-mill system and the way of learning by rote, which had begun to find favour both in his own country and with us.
It is vain, however, to expect that there should have been many converts to such a man’s opinions on educational questions at that period. Even in the small circle of his English friends and correspondents there was a wide diversity of sentiment. Sir Thomas More might agree with him mainly; but, on the other hand, Colet was clerical in his leaning and Spartan in his notions of scholastic life; and he deemed it good, as I have above said, to work on the tenderness of youth before it acquired corruption or prejudice, that “the new wine of Christ might be put into new bottles.”
IV. There can be no desire to deprive Colet of any portion of the honour which we owe to him for promoting the cause of education in London; but it would at the same time be an error to conclude that the good Dean was the first who established a school in the metropolis. The foundation which he established about 1510 consolidated and centralised the system, which down to that time had been weakly and loosely organised. Hear what Knight says:—