Part 9 (1/2)
II Probation-Day still continued in my time to be an important event--a sort of red-letter day in our calendar The hour for asseht o'clock, instead of nine; it had been half-past six while the school was exclusively coed time was a sore trial in the winter where one had to travel from a suburb, as I did froratuitously, but at a fixed tariff It would not have been much for a wealthy Company to provide an entertainment once or twice a year for two or three hundred lads at a shi+lling or so a head; but the Merchant Taylors, I think, have always been notorious for parsimony Very little was accomplished before the meal, and after its co as ill-adapted for the purpose of an exa to use the forms as desks and to kneel in front of thees Matters were not inal establishard's _School's Probation_, 1652, that in the seventeenth century the Company paid for some kind of collation:--
”There shall be paid unto the Master of the School, for beer, ale, and new manchet-bread, with a dish of sweet butter, which hee shall have ready in the lasses set upon the Table, and covered with two fair napkins, and two fine trenchers, with a knife laid upon each trencher, to the end that such as please may take part, to staie their stomachs until the end of the examinationijs”
The number of boys was in 1652 comparatively limited; but of course without a revival of the ancient one far in allaying the hunger of a far s, and this allowance must have simply been for such as had missed their meal at home, or desired additional refreshment
The old examination itself presents nuh the present medium Considerable stress seems to have been laid on dictation The master opened, on the sudden, Cicero, the Greek Testae, which the boys of a particular fore, or into verse, or , much like the nonsense-verses which we used to have to colish sentences to be turned into Latin are odd enough: ”Bacchus and Apollo send for Homer;” ”I went to Colchester to eat oysters;” ”My Uncle went to Oxford to buie gloves;” ”The Atheist went to Aht have been autobiographical: ”Marie was my sister, she dwelt at London;” ”Elisabeth was my Aunt, she dwelt at York;” ”Anna was my Grandmother, she dwelt at Worcester”
In another place, under _Sententiae Varietas_, there are five-and-twenty ways of describing in a sentence the great qualities of Cicero
Greek was certainly studied with a good deal of attention here in the early ti froard, in whose se occupy twenty pages Eras us the cultivation of hellenic grammar and letters
Even when the present writer was at the school, Hebreas by no means assiduously or scientifically followed, nor do I believe that on the staff of e But it was part of the programme, and the late Sir Moses Montefiore, who usually attended on Speech and Prize Day, was the annual donor of a Hebrew medal
Speech-Day at Merchant Taylors' was the sole occasion on which the large schoolroom in Suffolk Lane was ever honoured by the presence of the fair sex The lower end of the rooe, and the monitors and prompters took part in some recitation, or select scene from the Latin or Greek dramatists At a later period French then of Charles I, the large contribution which the ladies and other friends of the scholars made to the audience, and their ies, rendered it a subject of regret and coiven in the vernacular, and the writer of a s to report a series of speeches delivered at various breakings-up, states that the lish on this very account As early as the ti some dramatic performance at the close of the terue; but these spectacles were, it is to be suspected, ale of the classic author, or in the scholastic Latin of the period
A feeling in favour of a reforements had, as has been mentioned, arisen when Hawkins wrote for the free school at Hadleigh in Suffolk his play entitled _Apollo Shroving_, 1627, where one of the characters desires the Prologue to speak what he has to say in honest English, for all their sakes, and describes the predilection for e Latin as more appropriate to the University
Occasionally, instead of plays, there werethe termination of the school-work seems to have been followed by the private acadee and the temptation to a display of erudition have always proved too strong an obstacle to improvement; and when the writer was last present at this anniversary, the ancient precedent was still in force, and the Court of the Merchant Taylors and general company listened in respectful silence to interlocutions oron the Wall
III Williaht and inforood service to the Co so round of ht proper, on the 27th Decee hi hi Midsuard states in _An huht Worshi+pfull Company of Merchant-Tailors, Maii 15, 1661_, that the Co; but he says at the saed in your Order, _That many Complaints have been frequently from time to time made to the Master and Wardens of the Company, and to the Court, by the parents and friends of the young Scholars, of the neglect of the chief-Master's dutie in that School, and of the breach of the Coard replies that he had never heard of any complaints in all the seventeen years he had filled the post, and he declared his readiness to subainst him He had been in the profession, he said, thirty-three years, and ”in all places wherever I caence, and my scholars' proficiency”
The writer attributes his fall to the presence a the members of the Court of persons unjustly hostile to hi froo down unless soard averred that the decline of the school and the shrinkage of its numbers were due to the Company's order of March 16, 1659, which forbad him to admit any scholar who had not a warrant from the Master and Wardens, and the consequence was that parents, not caring to go to the Court, took their sons elsewhere As many as sixty boys had been lost in this ithin a twelvemonth, he o, when it was an hard et a Scholar to read Greek, there was such an Order ht in the School, unless first admitted by the Company But afterward there was found a necessity to dispense with that Order, and so it ith my Predecessors; which I can prove for above threescore years bygone They (and my self too froence that did not limit or restrain them to admit quarterly-Scholars, who did not immediately depend on the Charity of the Coraven on the School speaks as much; _Nulli praecludor, Tibi pateo_”
The _Remonstrance_ did not please the Merchant Taylors, and in a second docuard tried to soften what he had said; for his language, itthat he was in the hands of those who had the power to act as they judged fit
Whatever the precise result was, there are two or three curious points brought out in the course of the head-master's vindication, and one can hardly avoid a conclusion that the main cause of the discontent of the Court was not even so much the application of a portion of his time to literary pursuits, as the abuse of the per the machinery, intended only for the production of school text-books, for political publications of a republican stamp This fact does not transpire in the tract itself, but is ascertained from the imprints to books; and moreover, in 1650, at the end of a periodical publication, he had announced hiether the Merchant Taylorsthe displeasure of the newthe holder of opinions hostile to the Stuarts
He had sold the press at the desire of the Company for 300 less than the cost; and this was by no means the full extent of his sacrifices and ives his principals to understand that he had grown lean by the observance of fast-days in accordance with their recent order; and,his nineteen years' teres, thusit seem probable that he was directly responsible for the fees
Altogether, nothing worse than indiscretion, perhaps, was chargeable to Dugard ”I bless God for it,” he expressly says, ”I know the Divel himself cannot justly accuse me of any notorious or scandalous Crime”
Probably not; but there are seasons when indiscretion is criminal, and besides his proclamation of his appointment at the time to the Commonwealth as their official printer, in 1657 there came from his press the reply of Milton to Salmasius, an anti-royalist manifesto not calculated to be palatable to the restored dynasty or to the civic feeling, and certainly, so far as one can forment, an encroachard's collateral occupation
X
Successors of Lily--Thoes--Nuland upon them--Their various uses--The Vocabularies for travellers and merchants--Rival authors of Grammars--Different text-books employed at schools--Milton's _Accidence_ (1669)--Oldprivate establishments
I After the death of Lily his as carried on and developed by other , or reducing into aseries of ele these followers of the Master of St Paul's was a schoolmaster at Oxford, the Thomas Robertson of York whom I had lately occasion to name in connection with Ascensius, and who at all events produced in 1532 at Basle an edition of Lily's Grammar with a Preface and Notes