XI.
Proposed University of London in 1647—The Museum Minervæ at Bethnal Green—Its catholic character and liberal programme—Calligraphy—Shorthand—Bright’s system patented in 1588—Education in the provinces—The old school at Manchester—Shakespear’s Sir Hugh Evans and Holofernes—William Hazlitt’s account of his Shropshire school in 1788.
I. It is a fact, probably within the knowledge of very few, that two hundred years and more before the actual establishment of the University of London, a project for such an institution was mooted by an anonymous pamphleteer, who may be considered as a kind of pioneer, preceding the Benthams and Broughams.
I hold in my hand Motives Grounded upon the Word of God, and upon Honour, Profit, and Pleasure for the present Founding an University in the Metropolis, London, 1647. It purports to be the work of “a true Lover of his Nation, and especially of the said City.”
The lines and object in this piece are purely clerical. The author maintains the insufficiency of the two existing Universities and the College in Ireland to rear as many “sons of the Prophets”—an euphemism for parsons—to attend upon the spiritual needs of the English and the Londoners.
He puts down on paper statistics of the number of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, and he argues that if the total were much larger—10,000 instead of 5900—there would be no means of raising the 20,000 preachers necessary in his view to carry on the business of religion. He pleads the fall of Episcopacy in support of his scheme, as “we cannot hope,” he says, “that so many will apply their studies to Divinity, and therefore have the greater need to maintain the more poor scholars at our Universities,” or, in other words, the absence of the prizes in the lottery had taken the best men out of the market. In fact, the writer himself does not shrink altogether from presenting the commercial side of the question, for he observes:—“Without injury unto any, an University in London would increase London’s Trading, and inrich London, as the Scholars do Cambridge and Oxford, where how many poor people also are benefited by the Colleges, yea, the countries round about them.”
So far, so good; but he, in the very next paragraph, strikes a chord which jars upon the ear. We see that he is a partisan of that theory which flourished here down to our own day, and which contributed so powerfully to retard and cripple our scholastic and academical studies. Hear what he says: “If here in London there be a College, in which nothing but Latin shall be spoken, and your children put into it, and from ten years old to twelve hear no other Language, in those two years they will be able to speak as good Latin as they do English, and as readily. The Roman children learned Latin as ours do English...;” and so he goes on as to Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, and Spanish.
The sole point here, in our modern estimation, is the admission of the three living languages into the curriculum, in order to qualify the students in later life to make themselves understood abroad either as merchants or as diplomatists. But here he was before his time. Nothing of the kind was to be attempted in England for generations. For generations Englishmen were to be instructed only in the dead tongues, and were to have not an English, but a Latin Grammar put into their hands age after age.
He talks about the Roman youth learning Latin as we do English; but he failed, perhaps, to perceive that they did not learn British or Gaulish as we do Latin. His text is wealthy in Scriptural quotations and parallels; but whatever one may think of his notions regarding the details and advantages of such a plan, this unnamed “true Lover of his Nation” is entitled, at any rate, to the credit and distinction of having been apparently the first to suggest what we have now before us in the shape of an accomplished fact.