V. A class of school-book destined for special use, besides those enumerated in another place, presents itself in the shape of grammatical works dedicated by their authors, not to particular institutions, but to particular localities or parts of the Empire. Edward Buries, who kept school at East Acton in Cromwell’s day, accommodated his plan to the requirements of adults, but at the same time announces that it is printed for the advantage of the schools in the counties of Middlesex and Hertford, which strikes us as at once a curious limitation and a sanguine proposal, unless Buries was a Hertfordshire man. This was in 1652.
A later writer was more catholic and ambitious in his flight; for in 1712 John Brightland projected a Grammar of the English tongue “for the use of the schools of Great Britain and Ireland,”—a fact more particularly noticeable, because it is the first hint of any scheme comprehending the Emerald Isle. I allude elsewhere to the early Accidence drawn up for Scotland by Alexander Hume; and in 1647 the interests of the rising generation in Wales were specially considered by the unnamed introducer of a simplified Latin Primer in usum juventutis Cambro-Britannicæ, which aimed at a monopoly of the Principality without prejudice to persons beyond the border.
Besides the Grammar itself, certain Manuals purported to be, not for general educational purposes, but for a given school, and even for a specified class in it. Such was the English Introduction to the Latin Tongue for the use of the lower forms in Westminster School; and at Magdalen School, Oxford, they had, at least as far back as 1623, a small text-book on the declensions and conjugations. I take another opportunity to speak of a Latin phrase-book designed for Manchester in 1660, and of the printed examination papers, exhibiting the lines laid down at Merchant Taylors’ about the same time. In a few cases a more elaborate compilation was framed, at all events originally, with the same restricted scope, like the Roman Antiquities of Prideaux, in 1614, for Abingdon.
Perhaps, however, the most conspicuous example of this localisation was the Outlines of Rhetoric for St. Paul’s, of which we meet with a third edition in 1659; and which must have been in connection with some new and temporary effort to enlarge the range of studies during the Protectorate, partly under the stimulus of the promoters of the famous Musæum Minervæ and the commencing taste for a more complex platform. For such subjects do not seem to have made part of the ordinary course of training anywhere since the mediæval period, when the Aristotelian system was paramount at our Universities; although, at the same time, among more advanced students philosophical treatises never ceased to possess interest and attract perusers. But the relevance of the handbook for St Paul’s lies in its professed destination for the young.
It is questionable whether, outside the Universities and the establishments affiliated upon them, the sciences were acquirable as part of the normal routine. At Oxford, in the reign of Henry VIII., they taught what was then termed Judicial Astronomy, which was a mere burlesque on the true study of the planetary bodies; and Logic was on the list of accomplishments within the reach of boys, who were sent up either to college or to school; for in A Hundred Merry Tales, 1526, the son of the rich franklin comes back home for the holidays, and declares, as the fruit of the time and money expended on his education at Oxford school, whither his indulgent father had sent him for two or three years, his conversance with subtleties and ability to prove the two chickens on the supper-table to be sophistically three.
IX.
Merchant Taylors’ School founded in 1561—Its limited scope and stationary condition during two centuries and a half—The writer’s recollections of it from 1842 to 1850—William Dugard and his troubles.
I. I cannot enter very well, in a general view of the subject, into the history of all the civic foundations which rose up one by one subsequently to St. Paul’s, such as the City of London School, the Mercers’ and the Skinners’, beyond the incidental notices which I have taken occasion to introduce of such institutions, as well as of the system of public grammar schools endowed by Edward VI. But I may be allowed to speak of one with which I enjoyed personal associations between the years 1842 and 1850, and to mention that in the third chapter of his Autobiography Leigh Hunt sheds some interesting light on the condition of Christ’s Hospital when Lamb, Coleridge, and himself were there in the last years of the last century.