In the Preface to his New English Grammar, 1810, Hazlitt complains of the want of any undertaking of the kind, and it has not been really supplied till our own day, when the labours of the Philological and English Text Societies and the payment of increased attention to Early English Literature prepared the way to reform in a quarter where reform was so sadly needed.
The same writer, while edition upon edition of the famous Grammar of Lindley Murray was pouring from the press, like Hayley’s Triumphs of Temper and Moore’s Loves of the Angels, exposed the fallacies of the system, and lamented the mischief done by such erroneous doctrines. Murray, of whose lucubrations, now obsolete to petrifaction, sixty issues were exhausted between 1795 and 1859, aimed not only at popular instruction, but at literary dignity and scientific eminence; for during a portion of the time while his star was in the ascendant two parallel texts, a literary and an elementary one, were kept in print. Looking back from the vantage-ground which it is our privilege to occupy upon this phenomenon, we contemplate it not with the awe inspired by a mighty ruin, of which the remaining fragments are a gladdening and proud survival, but with a feeling of amazement that such a heresy in opinion and taste should have lived so long, and have been so lately dissipated.
The hazy ideas of the old-fashioned schoolmaster on this particular part of his business are brought out in tolerably prominent relief in the reply to a gentleman who had expressed to Dr. Duncan of the Ciceronian Academy at Pimlico his wish that his son might learn English in lieu of Latin Grammar. “Sir,” said the Doctor, “Grammar is Grammar all the world over.”
XV.
Ascham’s Schoolmaster—Richard Mulcaster—The earliest Anglo-Latin Dictionary—Ocland’s Anglorum Prælia.
I. The Schoolmaster, by Roger Ascham, is a work so celebrated and so classical, and has been so often reprinted, that it seems almost supererogatory to pass any remark upon its character and merits. It arose, as we all know, out of a conversation at Windsor in 1563 between Sir Richard Sackville, Treasurer of the Exchequer, and the author, and it is a literary treatise rather than a technical one. Ascham did not live to see it in type, nor was his patron spared to witness its completion in MS.; it was published in 1570 by the author’s widow, and dedicated to Sir William Cecil, who was one of the party at Windsor when the idea was first ventilated. The opening paragraphs of the Preface, where Ascham describes the company at dinner, and Sackvile afterwards drawing him aside, and leading him to turn his thoughts to the production of such a book, are as famous and unforgettable as Latimer’s noble and touching narrative to us, in one of his sermons before the King, of his boyhood and the obligations under which he lay to his father for sending him to a good school.
Ascham’s Schoolmaster, 1570, is a volume, as its title perhaps may import, for the teacher indeed rather than for the learner. It is a manual of valuable suggestions and counsels for the guidance and use of those under whose direction the course of school-work was carried out, although immediately it was designed for the benefit of Mr. Robert Sackville, the deceased Treasurer’s grandson. The writer confesses his indebtedness to Sir John Cheke and to Sturmius, among the moderns, and to his old masters, as he calls them, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.
Sir Richard Sackville, who was happily instrumental in persuading Ascham to undertake the task, told him that he had found the disadvantage in his own case of an imperfect education; “for a fond scholemaster,” quoth he, “before I was fullie fourtene yeare olde, draue me so, with feare of beating, from all loue of learninge, as nowe, when I know what difference it is to haue learninge, and to haue little or none at all, I feele it my greatest greife, and finde it my greatest hurte, that euer came to me; that it was my so ill chance to light vpon so lewde a schoolmaster.”