were utterly ignorant of the art of teaching-seem too often to have taken what Barrow calls 'a rascally delight' in inflicting pain upon others, as if to get rid of discontent by indulging anger and malignity, and by the exercise of tyrannical power to indemnify themselves for the slavery of their hopeless occupation. The abuses of this kind in the Protestant charter-schools, which were brought to light by the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, might excite a wish that, as the Court of Equity was originally instituted for the purpose of administering relief in cases where the law failed to provide a remedy, so there were a court of criminal justice by which condign punishment might be awarded for such offences as now, through the defects of law, escape with impunity. It is worthy of observation that while boys were treated with such unnatural severity in the monastic schools, and those which growing out of those old establishments were conducted upon the old principles, the system of education pursued in nunneries seems, on the whole, to have been mild, benignant, and, as far as the fatal errors and abuses which are inseparably connected with such institutions could allow, judicious. This difference might be expected to arise from the tenderness of the female character. The nuns, to whose charge children are committed, have in that charge some substitution for nearer and dearer ties,—it is the only channel in which their human affections may freely flow. There are, probably, no other schools in which the children are so happy, because of the kindness with which they are treated, and because also of the share to which they are admitted in the business of the little community, and the interest which they are taught to feel in its concerns, and in the flocci-naucities to which so much importance is attached in that elaborate superstition. There is likewise the further and weighty reason, that girls have no difficulty in learning, and because no difficulty, therefore no disinclination to learn, everything which is included in the course of such an education. Whatever they are taught is easy and of obvious utility. Very different has it been with the poor little lords of the creation in the method of tuition which was prepared for them! The old grammars have an emblematical print, in which the tree of learning is represented as an apple-tree, from which the boys are filling their satchels with fruit ;-to have made the emblem just, it should have been a crab-tree, the boughs thorny, and the fruit austere and sour. If all malicious fiends and men,' said the master of a grammar-school,* * were met in consult to contrive a way to learning, of endless trouble to the master, and vexatious toil to the scholar, they could not have found one that would be admitted to use, worse than we have.' It was well for the boys under him that the strong and apparently impatient feelings of this preceptor expended themselves upon the grammar, instead of visiting upon them the vexation which he derived from its manifold and preposterous imperfec tions. Let us not, however, hastily condemn the grammar, quam solam Regia Majestas in omnibus scholis docendam præcepit, as if it were as preposterous as it appears to be upon cursory inspection, and as common experience might seem to show that it has been in practice found to be.. The preface to Lily's Grammar has been ascribed, upon insufficient authority, to Cardinal Wolsey; if it were, indeed, his, it would be far more creditable to his abilities and sound judgment than any other document which remains of them. In that preface, or rather epistle to the reader, some of the surest principles of tuition are clearly enounced. Nothing,' it is there said, 'can surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty; and no building be perfect whenever the foundation and groundwork is ready to fall, and unable to uphold the burden of the frame.' The necessity of making the scholar learn thoroughly what he is taught step by step, is fully stated and enforced. It is especially recommended, that the boy be made perfect in the nouns and verbs, not by rote but by reason,' before he proceeds further; and he is required to be more cunning in the understanding of the thing, than in the rehearsing of the words,-(a maxim this upon which Dr. Vincent acted, there are still many who, when they read this, will remember how frequently he used to say that he had rather a boy should give him a reason than a rule.) About a quarter of a year was deemed sufficient for this, or little more for a boy of ordinary capacity, under a painful and diligent teacher. This being done, and the concords mastered with the same care, 'plain and sundry examples, then, and continual rehearsals of things learned, and especially the daily declining of a verb, and turning him into all fashions, shall make the great and heavy labour so easy and so pleasant for the framing of sentences, that it will be rather a delight unto them that they be able to do well, than pain in searching of an unused and unacquainted thing.' They were no longer to proceed in learning the rules as they lie in the grammar, but to begin upon some easy book, and be made acquainted with the rule as the example occurred, care being taken that the instruction should be perfect as it proceeded, and that the boy never advanced a step without feeling his footing firm. They were to learn but little at a time, and never be idle in school. Thus expressly are some of the leading principles of the new school laid down in Lily's grammar: grammar: so that, in fact, many things which might be likely to provoke opposition as innovations, appear, when investigated, to be in the spirit, and even, according to the letter of that system which was digested by some of the ablest and most learned men of a learned age. One thing more must be remembered in order to form a clear judgment of the system which Henry VIII. established in all grammar schools. Latin was to be taught colloquially-not as a dead language. It was by help of some use of speaking, which must necessarily be had,' that the boy was to be brought past the wearisome bitterness of his learning.' Et quoties loqueris, memor esto loquare Latine is a law delivered by Lily himself among his Monita Pedagogica. Whoever has observed with what facility children in a foreign land acquire a foreign language, will at once perceive how much boys must insensibly have learned from one another when this rule was observed, and how soon, with this assistance, the regular part of the language would almost insensibly be rendered familiar, as it is in learning a mother-tongue. No one has informed us at what time this practice fell into disuse; nor when the further and greater departure from the original system took place, in consequence of which boys were carried on straight through the grammar, and made to proceed, as soon as they had done with the accidence, into those didactic poems, the most rueful of their kind, in the composition of which Lily and Robinson must have tortured their brains, as much as poor lads have been tortured at the other end in the desperate business of committing them to memory, Instead of firm ground here, they had to make way through straight, rough, dense, or rare,' treading the crude consistence,' floundering in it, and nigh foundered at every step.' They were perplexed and confused with strange intricacies of speech, uncouth and elliptical constructions Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things Technical helps to memory, and as such very useful ones, such verses unquestionably are; and the more they rhyme and rattlethe more jingle there is of sound or sense-the cramper the collocation of words, and the more whimsical the juxtaposition, the better may the end be answered, for the more tenaciously they are retained. But it was never intended by the authors of the old grammar that the memory should be crammed with such an olla podrida, till there was an appetite for it-till it could be digested and assimilated as wholesome food. The man who read through Bailey's Dictionary with virtuous perseverance, and could not tell what It what the book was about when he came to the end of it, did not act more unreasonably in commencing his task than those schoolmasters who set their boys upon learning the grammar thus. is inconceivable how any children should have been able to pick out the meaning of such verses, or any masters to flog it into them, while there was no construing' annexed to the book, The necessity of such a construing was so evident, that written helps of this kind appear to have been provided, till at length a certain William Haines (of blessed memory for his pains!) published such a version, being thereunto importuned by many,' Haines's useful performance seems from that time always to have been bound up with the grammar; prosodia and figura being construed and sold severally; from whence it appears that those por tions were not generally taught. The grammar kept its ground by prescription, long after the injunction for its exclusive use had become obsolete; and, so late as 1765, when the patent was purchased by Buckley and Longman from the family of the Nortons, and the new patentees set forth an improved edition, they thought it advisable to keep an edition in the old form still on sale, But about this time prescription itself was beginning to give way, and grammars appeared in abundance. The Eton, as the clearest and best simplification of Lily, prevailed very extensively over' all others. As this was the simplest, so was the Westminster the most complicated and the worst. That of Christ's Hospital was, perhaps, as good as any of its kind: it has the fault of not presenting the accidence to the eye in a manner which shall be readily and at once intelligible (a great fault); and it has the further fault of comprehending too much, for before a boy could possibly obtain knowledge enough to make use of half the book, the other would have been thumbed to pieces, and the whole worn out in the process. It contains, also, much which might have been left in the dictionary; for what have boys to do with such terms as Polysyndeton, Asyndeton and Parelcon, Diasyrmus, Synæciosis, Oxy moron and Antanaclasis, and other such throat-choking and teeth-breaking nugacities of hyper-grammatical and ultra-erudite absurdity! Wesley, who had a clear, strong, single sight, and went straight to the mark in everything, composed a Latin grammar for his school at Kingswood, comprising the accidence with the sum and substance of the Propria quæ maribus, Quæ genus, As in præsenti, Syntax, and Prosody, in somewhat less than two duodecimo sheets. Wesley did everything in haste, or he would have done this better; this, however, was more simple and compendious than that had preceded it. The most curious that has ever appeared is entitled 'A Critical Latin Grammar, containing clear and dis any tinct rules for boys just initiated, and notes explanatory of almost every antiquity and obscurity in the language, for youth somewhat advanced in Latin learning.' The author (a singular, simplehearted, and very learned man, whose name has become deservedly great in his posterity) complained of the obscurity in old grammars, the want of philosophy in them, and the perplexity which was thus occasioned to the learner; and to remedy this in part, he new-named the tenses, calling them the present-imperfect, preterimperfect, present-perfect, preter-perfect, future-imperfect, and future-perfect, and apologized for not arranging them in more appropriate order-because, on this point, he thought it advisable to keep an agreement with other grammars. Antiquity,' he said, pleads also for the present names of the cases, in opposition to reason, and prevails-wherefore he did not attempt to change them; nevertheless, he gave the names by which reason and he would have had them called-if the still, small voice of reason and a country school-master might have hoped to be heard: these names were the prior case, the possessive, the attributive, the posterior (no new case in schools, though it was not one in which his boys often found themselves, for he, God bless him! was a good, easy man) the interjective, and,-Di boni! the quale-quare-quidditive case—a word for which Jeremy Bentham might have almost forgiven him his faith as a clergyman. But whatever simplification was made in the old grammar, the method of teaching continued, till our own days, to be what Professor Pillans calls mechanical rather than intellectual. Milton complained that we did amiss to spend seven or eight years in scraping together as much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year;' and he might have added—as is in one year forgotten by the greater number of those who have thus imperfectly acquired it. What was amiss in Milton's time has not been amended. It is observed by Paley that, at our public schools, quick parts are cultivated, slow ones are neglected.' The remark will hold good of all large schools, and of the large majority of smaller ones as well; and the reason wherefore there should be this general failure-wherefore so very few are made scholars so as to retain in after life the scholarship which they have acquired in boyhood-is, that few are under the necessity of keeping up their knowledge of this kind, few have the opportunity of exercising it, and fewer still the inclination. Of this, both boys and masters are, each in their station, sensible. The boy, unless he is destined for one of the learned professions, or has a disposition for learning, persuades himself that learning can be of no use to him; that he has been sent to school because it is the custom, and because his father was there before |
