This was in 1567. In the Preface very just stress is laid on the mischief proceeding from what is termed “a diversity of Grammars,” and from different schoolmasters adopting different methods and books. The proclamation attached expresses at large the objects and advantages of the publication, while it certainly seems to claim for the Queen’s father more credit than, looking at the circumstances, he deserved. For the Primer of 1540 had been preceded by those of Linacre and Wolsey, just as the Short Introduction of 1548 and 1567 was, in the main, a reproduction of Henry’s book. But the same unqualified encomium is pronounced on Henry by John Palsgrave, the celebrated lexicographer and teacher of languages, in the prolix and fulsome dedication to his English Acolastus, 1540, which must have been written and in type when the copies of the Primer had scarcely left the binder’s hands. Palsgrave does not intimate here any personal concern in the undertaking.
The Preface of 1567 is followed by the Latin letters, the vowels and consonants, and the Greek letters; after which comes a prayer, “O Almighty God and merciful Father,” which is still retained at some of our public schools. The Introduction of the Eight Parts of Speech constitutes the body and remainder of the English part.
There are six forms of grace before meat, and six others of grace after meat.
The Latin section opens with the Greek alphabet, and proceeds to the parts of grammar, concluding with Erasmus’s De Ratione. But, as I have stated more than once, this later text-book does not substantially vary from that of 1548. The royal proclamation granted the monopoly of printing to Reginald Wolfe, and forbad the employment of any other Grammar throughout her Highness’s dominions. The document declares that Henry VIII., in the midst of weighty affairs belonging to his office, had not forgotten nor neglected the tender youth of his realm, but had, from a fervent zeal for the godly bringing up of the said youth, and a special desire that they might learn the Latin tongue more easily, instituted a new uniform Grammar; which was so far really the case, inasmuch as the 1540 volume was the first official one, and also at the date of its promulgation the most complete and satisfactory.
V. But in examining this general Grammar for all England and the dominions annexed, one at once misses the graphic and amusing illustrations which present themselves in many of the earlier books which we have been studying. The examples, instead of being drawn from the occupations and various phases of everyday life, are almost without exception purely technical and commonplace. There is no allusion which one would welcome as casting an incidental light on contemporary history or manners. It is mostly a dead level. The learned men have done this! It makes us cheerful, amid the habitual dearth of something to leaven the text, to stumble upon a few of the little touches in the older books retained as an exception, such as: “Vivo in Anglia. Veni per Galliam in Italiam,” or “Vixit Londini: Studuit Oxoniæ.”
How differently Horman in his Vulgaria, 1519, handled his subject, and his pages were intended for schoolboys and students too!
The frequency with which the Primer was henceforth reprinted, contrasted with the very limited call for copies from 1540 to 1566, seems to furnish an indication that the book and the system were at last gaining ground, and beginning to meet with more general acceptance.
But the irreconcilable diversity of opinions, which has always prevailed, respecting etymology, syntax, pronunciation, and other cardinal points, militated against the success on any very grand scale of an official Primer; and the Tudors, arbitrary and absolute as they were in all questions of political significance, were not prompted by the feeling of the time to resort in such a case as this to penal and peremptory legislation. The eighteenth century saw Lily’s Grammar still more or less in vogue under the name of the original author, not to speak of the obligations of its successors to it; but the Tudor book, constructed in some measure out of it, and ushered into existence under the most auspicious and powerful patronage, sank after a not very robust or influential life of six decades (1540-1600) into complete oblivion.
Our great Elizabeth has been dead near three hundred years, and no genuine popular demand for mental improvement has yet come from the people. In the sixteenth century—in the Queen’s time and in her father’s—the spirit which promoted education was based either on political or commercial motives.
The universities and schools reared a succession of preceptors who deserted the monastic traditions, and to whom learning was a mere vocation. One large class of the English community sought to acquire the accomplishments which might be serviceable in the Government and at court; another limited its ambition to those which would enable them to prosper in trade or in the wars.