The Short Dictionary for Children by Withals, already specified, supplied the obvious need for a more portable work than either Elyot or Cooper. It met with a cordial response from the constituency to which it appealed, and was reprinted, with large additions and improvements, by successive editors down to the time of Charles I.
Littleton, who brought out his Dictionary in 1678, was Rector of Chelsea. He includes the barbarous Latin for the first time.
Robert Ainsworth, whose famous Latin Dictionary belongs to the reign of George II., having been first printed in 1736, planned his enterprise on a sensible and enduring basis, and earned for himself the reputation of a classic and a type. He had of course the advantage of all the improvements of Elyot, Cooper, and Littleton, besides the numerous other minor lexicographers, of whom he supplies an interesting chronological account in his preface; but his substantial quarto volume, “designed for the use of the British Nations,” was a clear advance on its precursors. He gives not only the Latin-English and English-Latin appellatives, the Christian names of men and women, the proper names of places, the ancient Latin names of places, and the more modern names, but the Roman calendar, the Roman coins, weights and measures, and ancient law-terms. Of the preceding workers in the same field, whom he commemorates, he may very well have known some personally. The catalogue, enriched with biographical particulars, begins with the Promptuarium Parvulorum, and closes with Elisha Coles, embracing a period of nearly two centuries.
III. The Latin Lexicon was an indispensable vade-mecum where boys had to translate the classics of that language into English; and the taste for some of the Roman writers, including Ovid, so far from declining, appears in the time of Elizabeth to have spread in schools. The authors at whom the criticism is more particularly aimed may be guessed in the absence of the names; but the clerical party about 1580, being of opinion that these ancient productions were injurious to morality, availed themselves of a most singularly fortunate opportunity for substituting a work which should be to Latin versification what Lily’s Grammar was to English accidence—a standard and a model.
A year or two prior to the discovery of this pernicious influence, Christopher Ocland had printed a metrical narrative in doggerel metre of the martial achievements of the English people from the time of the Plantagenets down to that of Elizabeth, whom he places before Zenobia; and this gentleman or his friends had sufficient influence to procure, through the Lords Commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical, letters-patent prescribing the use of his Anglorum Prælia in all grammar-schools in England and Wales in lieu of the books of less moral authors. The privilege, dated May 7, 1582, was accorded in consideration not only of the freedom of Ocland’s volume from profligacy, but of “the quality of the verse,”—an encomium quite seriously intended, in whatever degree it may strike us as ironical.
This literary gem, which was to supersede Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and the rest of the heathens, was dedicated to Zenobia by the worthy writer in some lines which are a fair sample of the “quality of the verse.” They begin:—
“Regia Nympha, soli [sic] moderatrix alma Britanni,
Quæ pace et vera religione nites,
Quæ vitæ meritis, morum & candore coruscans,
Zenobiam vincis, siqua vel ante fuit.”
Such was the Oclandian Muse which the Lords Commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical accounted preferable to the compositions which were the glory of their own and the delight of every succeeding age!
Despite the lofty patronage and auspicious circumstances under which the Anglorum Prælia was launched on its proud career, the imbecility of the whole idea appears to have been promptly appreciated; and the “lascivious poets,” whom it was to have effaced, continued, and to this day continue, “to corrupt the youth.”