This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Academy was evidently one designed more particularly for the children of noble or wealthy people. He adds:—
“Or any young Gentleman design’d for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language.
“Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish’d by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment.”
This is altogether worth attention. It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the name or locality of the college where all these advantages and temptations (in the way of buying your Songs of the King’s own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centuries ago.
IV. In all the great provincial centres there were, of course, educational institutes supported by local or royal endowment; and in all these the method of teaching and general policy followed that pursued in the metropolis, except that, as we shall presently see, some of the establishments in the country trod in the footsteps of the Academy just described more promptly and more cordially than St. Paul’s or Merchant Taylors’, which modified their constitutions only to save themselves from ruin.
Of the seventeenth-century school at Manchester we gain an accidental glimpse and notion from the Delectus of Latin Phrases which was prepared for use there by a former scholar, Thomas Bracebridge. It is a MS. volume of no interest or moment, unless it is locally and personally regarded; but one is apt to cherish every added fraction of light as to the state of education in the Midlands in former days; and this Delectus carries us back precisely to the Restoration, so far as its mere date is concerned, but furnishes a fair idea of the sort of phrase-book which a Manchester teacher of 1660 thought suitable for the boys of his old school.
In Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster, Shakespear has not improbably preserved to us some fragmentary reminiscences of his own school-days at Stratford. The probation through which William Page is put by Sir Hugh at his mother’s instance might very well be a literal or close transcript from actual experience. With what mingled feelings the poet must have contemplated a class of men to whom such minds as his have ever owed so little!
Both Sir Hugh and the Reverend Doctor Primrose may be accepted as provincial types of the clerical preceptor, as they seemed to two excellent observers in their respective centuries. We easily remark the difference between them and such a creation as Holofernes.
The course of studies followed in the rural districts of England at a later period is illustrated by a letter from Hazlitt, the essayist, to his elder brother, the miniature-painter, when the former was attending a school at Wem in Shropshire in 1788. He was at that time ten years old. After stating that he had been learning to draw, he proceeds:—“Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Eutropius.... I began to cypher a fortnight after Christmas, and shall go into the rule of three next week.... I shall go through the whole cyphering book this summer, and then I am to learn Euclid. We go to school at nine every morning. Three boys begin by reading the Bible. Then I and two others show our exercises. We then read the Speaker [by Enfield]. Then we all set about our lessons.... At eleven we write and cypher. In the afternoon we stand for places at spelling, and I am almost always first.... I shall go to dancing this month.”
The glimpse which we here obtain of a small private seminary in a Shropshire village a hundred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education. From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr. Lempriére, whose name the lad transformed into Dolounghpryée, was a visitor at the school; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792. It was still in use at Merchant Taylors’ in 1850.