Part 1 (2/2)

Bishop Percy says that the syste the Psal the principles of rammar Some of the boys, he adds, who had made the art of ious services on special occasions, while others relinquished their original callings, and sought their fortune as ether, it is evident thatwere pri subsequently, for their encouragement and diffusion to the only class which was at the period capable of undertaking tuition We have to seek in the Church of the Middle Ages the source of all our scholastic erudition and refine influence which music, in all its forms, has exerted over society

III Carlisle, in his well-knoork on the Endowed Schools, supplies us with so the cathedral institutions which preceded the lay seminaries, and over which the bishop of the diocese presided _ex officio_ The pupils in these institutions were termed the scholastics of the diocese; and one of the latest survivals of the system was, perhaps, the old St Paul's, which Colet's endowment eventually superseded The preponderant element here was, of course, clerical; the boys were, as a rule, educated with a view to ecclesiastical preferment; and those studies which lay outside the requirements of the early Church were naturally o course of discipline, which lasted, nevertheless, froe of the Tudors

But these cathedral schools therown out of the antecedent conventual establish us, and consequently the former represented a forward movement and a certain disposition to relax the severity and exclusiveness of purely religious education As we see that subsequently it was the practice to attach to a college a preparatory school, as at Magdalen, Oxford, so in the mediaeval time almost every monastic house had its special educationalaspirants to the various orders This point does not really coht it well to shew briefly how, as the lay schools evolved from the cathedral schools, so the latter were an outcome from the conventual There seems, however, to have been one marked difference between the rammes, that in the latter the sciences of law andbecome independent professions, were abandoned in favour of the acade school were specially inducted into a knowledge of those Faculties

Prior to the institution of colleges and schools of a better class, the nobility and gentry often sent their children to the monasteries and convents to be initiated in the ele

The sort of education obtained here re character; the course was restricted to graue, and divinity; the classics were treated with coes was still n

Even so late as the Tudor time, those who could afford to send their children abroad found the education better, and probably cheaper; solishious differences, brought up their families whitherever they fled as a matter of necessity

Sir Thomas Bodley, in the account of his life written by himself in 1609, acquaints us with the fact that when his father was living at Geneva, the great centre of the Protestant refugees, and he was a boy of twelve, he was sufficiently advanced in learning, through his father's care, to attend the lectures delivered at that University in Hebrew, Greek, and divinity, in which last his teachers were Calvin and Beza; and besides these studies he had private tutors in the house of the gentle Robertus Constantinus, the lexicographer, who read Holand upon the accession of Elizabeth, the member of the family as destined to immortalise their name was sent to Oxford

Bishop Waynflete appears to have been a the earliestboys rammar, and he was the prime mover in the establishment of schools at Waynflete, Brackley, and Oxford, where the Accidence and Syntax were taught on an improved plan The last-nae, and became by far the most iood fortune in having ae, who took a real interest in their profession, and bred scholars capable of diffusing and developing the love of acquiring knowledge and the art of corareat advance on the old e, was merely erected and endowed for a master and six fellows, and a certain nurammar

At the tihamshi+re man, and author of that rather well-known Latin description of the University as refordalen School

In the English _shi+p of Fools_, 1509, which is a good deal more than a translation, Barclay ridicules the archaic syste, and Skelton does the saable exposure of the inefficiency and unsoundness of the prevailing radually conceded and accomplished In all political and social movements the caricaturist plays his part

It is not surprising to find Ascha exception to the school-teaching and teachers which had educated, and enerations

We naturally encounter in much of the literary work of the seventeenth century advice and infor to scholastic and acade of the middle class In the section of a well-known book, entitled _The Gentle_, 8vo, 1660, dedicated to our immediate subject, the anonymous author observes: ”Scarce any that owns the name of a _Gentleman_, but will commit his Son to the care of some Tutor, either at home or abroad, who at first instils those Rudie matures their parts, so advances his Lectures, till he have led the, which will afford thee_ upon which there is no interdict”

The preceding extract points to a sphere of life which ont to conclude its preparatory stage with the Grand Tour and an initiation into the profligacy of all the capitals of Europe; but we see that it deals with a case in which a tutor took a youth als, and does notcourse

The volu title, andand truly important; but it ritten by some dry and pedantic scribbler, and, like Osborne's _Advice to a Son_, 1656, and nate character, is a tissue of dulness and inanity It is characteristic of the whole that portraits of Jereraphic embellishe of a _Grammatica Initialis_, or Elementary Grammar, 1509, we form a conclusion as to the ancient Continentalportrays the interior of a school, apparently situated in a crypt; the master is seated at his desk with a book open before him, and above it a double inkstand and a pen, both of pri aloud to his four scholars, who sit in front of hie from the volume, and they repeat after him, parson-and-clerk-wise They learn by rote They have no books before the process before the science of reading from print or MS had been acquired by the scholar, and copies of school-books were multiplied by the press There was no preparation of work The quarter wage included no charge for books supplied The teaching was purely oral So it was probably throughout It was thus that Stanbridge, Whittinton, Lily, and their followers conducted their schools, long after the cradle at Magdalen had been reinforced by other seminaries all over the country

There is no written record of this fashi+on of co information from the master to the pupil, so diametrically opposed to eneral illiteracy; it is a sister-art, which lends us a helping hand in this case by ad us to what may be viewed as an interior coeval with Erasmus and More

The modern school-holidays appear to have been forement of St Paul's and Merchant Taylors', for instance, where a vacation is called a _reence was permitted save in cases of illness; and it is curious that in the account which Fitzstephen gives of the three sen of Henry II the boys are represented as spending the holy days (rather than holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and disputations

In all the public schools, indeed, holidays were at first intimately associated with the recurrence of saints' anniversaries and with festivals of the Church, and were restricted to them The modern vacation was not understood; and the first step toward it, and the earliest syainst the absence of any such intervals for diversion from studies and attendance at special services, was an appeal made in 1644 to the Court of the Company by the scholars of Merchant Taylors ”for play-days instead of holy-days”

The object of this petition was to procure a truce ork and an opportunity for exercise and sport, in lieu of a system under which the boys, from their point of view, merely substituted one kind of task for another; but the time had not yet arrived for refor tenaciously to the stern and monotonous routine which they found established, and in which they had been bred; and the feeling in favour of relaxing the tension by regular intervals of coht, which betrays a tendency at the present ravitate too far to the opposite extrereat schools in the United States--the West Point School--manifests a survival of the old-fashi+oned ideas upon this subject, carried out by the Pilgrim Fathers to the American Plantations; and whereas in the inal release froious services has resolved itself into the latter-day vacation or holiday, the modern educational system beyond the Atlantic seems to withdraw the boys froround or the country, but as a ulphus, who lived in the reign of Edward the Confessor (AD