Part 11 (1/2)

This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Acadened more particularly for the children of noble or wealthy people He adds:--

”Or any young Gentlen'd for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct hie

”Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish'd by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the saether worth attention It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the naes and te's own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centuries ago

IV In all the great provincial centres there were, of course, educational institutes supported by local or royal endoweneral policy followed that pursued in the metropolis, except that, as we shall presently see, some of the establishments in the country trod in the footsteps of the Academy just described more promptly and more cordially than St Paul's or Merchant Taylors', which modified their constitutions only to save themselves from ruin

Of the seventeenth-century school at Manchester we gain an accidental glimpse and notion from the _Delectus of Latin Phrases_ which was prepared for use there by a fore It is a MS volume of no interest or arded; but one is apt to cherish every added fraction of light as to the state of education in the Midlands in former days; and this _Delectus_ carries us back precisely to the Restoration, so far as its mere date is concerned, but furnishes a fair idea of the sort of phrase-book which a Manchester teacher of 1660 thought suitable for the boys of his old school

In Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster, Shakespear has not imentary reminiscences of his own school-days at Stratford The probation through which Williaht very well be a literal or close transcript fros the poet must have contemplated a class of men to whom such h and the Reverend Doctor Primrose may be accepted as provincial types of the clerical preceptor, as they seemed to two excellent observers in their respective centuries We easily remark the difference between them and such a creation as Holofernes

The course of studies followed in the rural districts of England at a later period is illustrated by a letter from Hazlitt, the essayist, to his elder brother, thea school at Wem in Shropshi+re in 1788 He was at that ti that he had been learning to draw, he proceeds:--”Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid's _Metaht after Christo into the rule of three next week I shall go through the whole cyphering book this suo to school at nine everythe Bible Then I and two others show our exercises We then read the Speaker [by Enfield] Then we all set about our lessons At eleven rite and cypher In the afternoon we stand for places at spelling, and I a this limpse which we here obtain of a se a hundred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr Lehpryee, was a visitor at the school; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792 It was still in use at Merchant Taylors' in 1850

The proprietary establishrees over the land, formed a valuable succedaneum to the Edward and other endowed schools, and useful nurseries for pupils who ai But they at the same time proved a source of e the last fifty years the distance between the two systereat charities and other ancient foundations like St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Eton, Harrow, have onlyand extending their prospectus; and there is scarcely a country town at the present moment without one or iven than ithin the reach of our grandfathers at any of the large public schools of the metropolis

Even in the time of Carlisle, rote in 1818, some of the principal institutions in the provinces were treading closely on the heels of Christ's Hospital and other endowdon, and at Witton near Chester, see

XII

Educational condition of SCOTLAND--Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters--Buchanan and other early writers on grammar--Thomas Ruddiman and his i--Decline of culture during the Civil War

I When we turn to Scotland, we find the compendium of the Grammar of aelius Donatus, of which I have already furnished some account, in use there from time almost immemorial It appears that the Scotish seminaries adopted this favourite class-book in coland at least as far back as the tiland and Chaucer In his _Original Chronicle of Scotland_ he speaks of the Barnys (bairns) lering Donate at their beginning of Gra and important piece of testimony in its way, since there is so little to enable us to for in North Britain, although there ht cast incidentally or indirectly on the subject to lead us to judge that Scotland, if not indeed the North generally, was in this respect, as in others, far behind the Southern English

In Scotland, the influence of Knox and his supporters favoured the early institution of parochial schools throughout the country, where a class and range of instruction prevailed which, coious tendencies, had the effect of increasing, in coence without developing ht or much intellectual refinement

The aims of the parish schools are humble, and beyond its limited possibilities there are its impediments and its snares In addition to schools, the friends of education in the North, as early as the reign of Williaitation for the establishhlands The movement was set on foot by certain ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and its basis and scope would have been narrow enough if the idea had been realised But nothing beyond a discussion and some correspondence seems to have resulted at the oes on, find much information obtainable on this part of the subject But both the systen origin; and the grammatical publications of an Aberdeen man, John Vaus, whose name seems to be the earliest on the roll of native authors, were, so far as we at present knoithout exception published, as well as written, in France, to which Scotland perhaps owed, a other matters, her adoption of the Continental law of Latin pronunciation

Vaus grounded his _Rudiments_, printed at Paris repeatedly about 1520, on the old _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus, which bespeaks a backwardness of information, since at this date Lily's Grammar was already in use in the South, and even the systedalen School method had been almost completely discarded there, except, perhaps, as occasional auxiliaries

At a later period, the eminent Scotsman Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody, and two others of his countrymen, Andrew Symson and James Carmichael, reduced to a si and the outlines of etyrammar in Scotland for the special use of that country is due, however, to Alexander Hume, who is known to us not only as an educational reforical student His _New Grammar for the Use of the Scotish Youth_, 1612, was a popular compendium founded on Lily; it seems to have met with liraphy and Congruity of the British Tongue_, which was a literary essay intended rather for the closet (to use the old-fashi+oned parlance), remained till lately in MS

II But books of instruction and for employment in schools continued, down to the days of THOMAS RUDDIMAN, to be at once scarce and unsatisfactory, insomuch that, side by side with these and other unrecovered productions, it was found possible and convenient to keep in print the old text-books of Stanbridge, of which editions continued to be issued at intervals both here and in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century

Ruddiman may be considered as the apostle of scholastic education and literature in Scotland; and as he was not born till 1674, this amounts to a proposition that his country was at least two centuries behind England in knowledge and culture Even Ruddiht up at the parish school, and was, moreover, for some time a parochial teacher But, partly by force of character and partly by good fortune, he extricated himself from his early associations, and became the Lily of the North His _Rudiments of Grammar_ were published in 1714, when he was already in middle life; they were little more than the St Paul's Prih; but they proved eed hiical enterprise the _Institutions of Latin Grammar_, which, like the disquisition of Alexander Hume recently mentioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece of authorshi+p