IV. But scarcely any books in the Greek character were printed in England until Edward Grant, head-master of Westminster School, brought out his Græcæ Linguæ Spicilegium, or Greek Delectus, in 1575. It saw only a single edition, and is still a common book, not having been apparently successful; and the next attempt of the kind did not even appeal to the English student, though the work of a native of North Britain; for Alexander Scot published his Universa Grammatica Græca at Lyons in a shape calculated to invite a yet more limited circulation than the essay of Grant.
Perhaps one of the earliest English publications relative to the study of Greek poetry was the Progymnasma Scholasticum of John Stockwood, published in 1596. Stockwood had been master of Tonbridge School, a foundation established by the Skinners’ Company, and while he was there brought out one or two professional works. This was avowedly taken from the Anthology of Stephanus, and presents a Greek-Latin interlinear text.
Again, in 1631, William Burton, the Leicestershire historian, and a schoolmaster by profession, delivered at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, an oration on the origin and progress of Greek, which many years later, when he had charge of the school at Kingston-on-Thames, was edited by Gerard Langbaine. It was a scholarly thesis, and of no educational significance, except that it exhibited the survival of some languid interest in the topic at the University.
Very few Greek authors found early translators here beyond the selections prepared for schools; but it is remarkable that the example in this way was set by a citizen of London, and a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, Thomas Niccols, who in 1550, at the instance of Sir John Cheke, undertook to put into English the History of Thucydides. This was almost a century before the version by Hobbes of Malmesbury.
The partial translation of the Iliad by Arthur Hall of Grantham, 1581, was taken from the French. But Chapman accomplished the feat of rendering the whole of Homer, as well as the Georgics of Hesiod and the Neo-Greek Hero and Leander. At a later date, Thomas Grantham, a schoolmaster in Lothbury, who seems to have been in a state of perpetual warfare with his critics as to the merits of his fashion of teaching, brought out at his own expense, and possibly for the use of his own pupils, the first, second, and third books of the Iliad.
The grand work of Herodotus was approached in 1584 by an anonymous writer, who completed only Clio and Euterpe.
But these intermittent and isolated cases shew how languid the feeling for Hellenic literature and history long remained in England; nor, when we regard the unsatisfactory character of the translations from the Greek, with rare exceptions, down to the present day, is it hard to see that the want was at least as largely due to incapacity on the part of scholars as to indifference on that of the public.
Many of the schools employed a small elementary selection from the Greek writers, of which a fifth edition was printed in 1771.
When Charles Lamb was at the Blue Coat School (1782-9), the Greek authors read there appear to have been Lucian and Xenophon, the former in a Selection from the Dialogues. The present writer, who was at Merchant Taylors’ School from 1842 to 1850, used Xenophon, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and some volume of Analecta. When the school was founded in 1561, it was difficult to find a boy to read Greek; but in the following century it enters rather prominently into the prospectus on Examination-day.
All the great seminaries differ in their lists; the choice depends on the personal taste of the masters from time to time; and there is a certain virtue in traditional names.