Jonson’s Grammar, as we have it, is a book for scholars and philologists, however, rather than for the elementary stage of education. The method is discursive and the style obscure; and it is chiefly prizable as an evidence of the versatility, the extensive reading, and the perseverance of the author. He quotes among his examples Sir Thomas More, Gower, Lidgate, Fox’s Martyrs, Harding’s Chronicle, Chaucer, and Sir John Cheke.
It is curious enough that Jonson’s notion as to the superfluities of our alphabet is supported to some extent by the orthography sanctioned by M. Vimont in his Relation de la Nouvelle France, 1641, where he puts Kebeck for Quebec; but the change must necessarily influence the pronunciation.
Neither of these writers was avowedly an advocate of Phonography; but the adoption of that principle of spelling would necessarily involve the dispensation with certain letters which at present form part of the English A. B. C.
In the dedication to Lord Herbert of his little book, James Shirley refers to the abundance of such treatises at that time before the public, “by which some,” he says, “would prophetically imply the decay of learning, as if the root and foundation of art stood in need of warmth and reparation.” But he furnishes no information respecting himself or the motives which led him to write the volume, although it is readily inferable that he did so to augment the slender income which he derived, after the closing of the theatres, from school-work in Whitefriars. Some of the illustrations are in such couplets as the subjoined:—
“In di, do, dum, the Gerunds chime and close,
Um, the first Supine, u the latter shews.”
As late as 1726, Jenkin Thomas Phillipps reprinted Shirley’s Grammar with additions. On the title-page of this edition it is said to be “for the use of Prince William.”
In 1640 Thomas Hayne published his Grammatices Latinæ Compendium. A copy before me was presented by the author to Charles II. when a boy, and has an autograph inscription on the blank page before the title to the young Prince. It also passed through the hands of his brother, James Duke of York, who has written James Duke of Yorke in a childish hand on the fly-leaf. During the troubles it seems to have passed out of their hands, and was bought at Oxford on the 4th October 1647 by a later owner, who records the fact at the top of another page. It was subsequently at Stowe, and the fine old blue morocco binding betrays no sign of a schoolboy’s thumbs.
Hayne supplies a highly interesting survey of the progress and development of this branch of literature and learning in former days, and some of the later attempts made with a view to improve the method, and explains his own plan, which introduces the English and Latin in parallel columns, and systematises and tabulates the cases and declensions in a more lucid manner than the prior experiments. If we set it side by side with Whittinton’s eleven divisions, we see that it is a great advance.
From the commencement of the seventeenth century an increasing volume of literature calculated to assist the diffusion of useful and improving knowledge supplemented the books expressly designed for schools. These publications, belonging to nearly every department of science and inquiry, were often reproduced with the same steady regularity as the educational works themselves; and nothing more triumphantly establishes the unceasing progress of discovery and reform than the fact that the standard manuals of one century become the waste paper of the next.
As one arrests a stray copy of Heylin’s Cosmography, Godwin’s Roman Antiquities, edited for the use of Abingdon School, Provost Rous’s Attic Archæology, Prideaux’s Introduction to the Reading of Histories, or any other book of the same stamp, on its passage from an old collection to the mill, a not unlikely reflection to arise is that, considering their straitened opportunities and the force of clerical influence, the culture and light of our ancestors were in fair relative proportion to our own.