He had sold the press at the desire of the Company for £300 less than the cost; and this was by no means the full extent of his sacrifices and misfortunes. For he gives his principals to understand that he had grown lean by the observance of fast-days in accordance with their recent order; and, moreover, that during his nineteen years’ term of office he had lost £800 by unpaid quarter wages, thus making it seem probable that he was directly responsible for the fees.
Altogether, nothing worse than indiscretion, perhaps, was chargeable to Dugard. “I bless God for it,” he expressly says, “I know the Divel himself cannot justly accuse me of any notorious or scandalous Crime.”
Probably not; but there are seasons when indiscretion is criminal, and besides his proclamation of his appointment at the time to the Commonwealth as their official printer, in 1657 there came from his press the reply of Milton to Salmasius, an anti-royalist manifesto not calculated to be palatable to the restored dynasty or to the civic feeling, and certainly, so far as one can form a judgment, an encroachment on the special objects and raison d’être of Dugard’s collateral occupation.
X.
Successors of Lily—Thomas Robertson of York—Cultivation of the living languages—Numerous works published in England upon them—Their various uses—The Vocabularies for travellers and merchants—Rival authors of Grammars—Different text-books employed at schools—Milton’s Accidence (1669)—Old mode of advertising private establishments.
I. After the death of Lily his work was carried on and developed by other men, who gradually achieved the task of consolidating, or reducing into a more compact form, the rather perplexing series of elementary treatises edited by Whittinton. Among these followers of the Master of St. Paul’s was a schoolmaster at Oxford, the Thomas Robertson of York whom I had lately occasion to name in connection with Ascensius, and who at all events produced in 1532 at Basle an edition of Lily’s Grammar with a Preface and Notes.
Robertson applauds, in his dedication to Dr. Longlond, Bishop of Lincoln, himself a man of letters, the system of Lily, and testifies to the excellent way in which the boys at Oxford prospered under his educational regimen. But, nevertheless, he does not conceal his notion and expectation of improving on his master; and indeed there is no doubt that we have here the earliest clear approach to our modern grammar-book, although the whole is in Latin, except certain quotations and names in Greek, as he compares the practice of the Greek poets with that of the Romans, much as Robert Etienne a little later pointed out the conformity of the French with the Greek. Philological parallels had become fashionable.
In his section on Derivatives Robertson has some matter, as to which the modern etymologist may form his own conclusions. This is a specimen:—