Part 2 (1/2)

Here again there is a full commentary; but the only interpretation that we need notice is the first, 'Salt denotes a prelate of the Church; for it is said in the Gospels, Ye are the salt of the earth.'

When he composed these lines, Garland must surely have had his eye on ecclesiastical preferment.

Another line is interesting, as ill.u.s.trating the confusion between c and t in mediaeval ma.n.u.scripts:

Est katonque malum, katademon nascitur inde.

The commentary runs: 'Kathon est idem quod malum. Inde dicitur kathodemon, i.e. spiritus malignus seu dyabolus, et venit a kathon, i.e. malum, et demon, sciens, quasi mala sciens.' You will notice also the inconstancy of h, and the indifference to orthography which allows the same word to appear as katademon in the text and kathodemon in the commentary.

Garland's _Textus_ is mostly Latin; but in the last composition of his life, the forty-two distiches ent.i.tled _Cornutus_, 'one on the horns of a dilemma', he is mainly occupied with Greek words adopted into Latin: using of course Latin characters. Some specimens will show the mediaeval standards of Greek: I quote from the text and commentary edited in 1481 by John Drols.h.a.gen, who was master of the sixth cla.s.s at Zwolle.

Kyria chere geram cuius ph[=i]lantr[)o]pos est bar, Per te doxa theos nect[=e]n [)e]t [)v]r[=a]n[)i]c[)i]s ymas.

In the commentary we are told that Kyria means the Virgin: but we are to be careful not to write it with two r's, for kirrios means a pig (I suppose [Greek: choiros]), and it would never do to say Kirrieleyson.

Chere is of course [Greek: chaire], salue. Geran (geram in the text) is interpreted sanctus, and seems from a lengthy discussion of it to be connected with [Greek: geron] and [Greek: ieros].[10] Philantropos (notice the quant.i.ties) is Christ, the Saviour. 'Bar Grece est filius Latine.' 'Necten in Greco est venire Latine: vnde dicit Pristia.n.u.s in primo minoris, antropos necten, i.e. h.o.m.o venit.' (For this remarkable form I can only suggest [Greek: enthein] or [Greek: hekein]: -en is probably the infinitive; ne might arise from en; and ct, through tt, from th.) Ymas is explained as n.o.bis, not vobis. The construction of the distich is then given: 'Hail, sacred queen, whose son is the lover of men; through thee divine and heavenly glory comes to us.'

Again:

'Clauiculis firmis theos antropos impos et ir mis Figor ob infirmi cosmos delicta, patir mi.'

Impos = in pedibus. Ir = a hand (probably [Greek: cheir], transliterated into hir, and h dropped) and mis is explained as = mei, according to the form which occurs in Plautus and early Latin. The lines are an address from Christ to G.o.d, and are interpreted: 'O my father, I G.o.d and man am fastened with hard nails in my feet and hands (upon the cross) for the sins of a weak world.'

Another work dictated to Erasmus at Deventer was the metrical grammar of Eberhard of Bethune in Artois, composed in the twelfth century. Its name, _Graecismus_, was based upon a chapter, the eighth, devoted to the elementary study of Greek--a feature which const.i.tuted an advance on the current grammars of the age. A few extracts will show the character of the a.s.sistance it offered to the would-be Greek scholar.

[10] Cf. Gerasmus and Hierasmus as variations of the name Herasmus or Erasmus.

Quod sententia sit b[)o]l[)e] comprobat amphibol[=i]a, Quodque fides br[)o]g[)e] sit comprobat Allobroga.

The gloss explains the second line thus: 'Dicitur ab alleos quod est alienum, et broge quod est fides, quasi alienus a fide'; and thus we learn that the Allobroges were a Burgundian people who were always breaking faith with the Romans.

Constat apud Grecos quod tertia littera cima est, Est quoque dulce c[)i]m[=e]n, inde c[)i]m[=e]t[)e]rium; Est [)v]n[)i]uersal[=e] c[)a]t[)a], fitque c[)a]tholicus inde, ...

C[=a]ta breuis pariter, c[=a]talogus venit hinc.

Die decas esse decem, designans inde decanum ...

Delon obscurum, Delius inde venit.

Ductio sit gogos, hinc isagoga venit.

Estque geneth mulier, inde gen[=e]th[=e][=u]m.

Here the confusion of c with t begins the misleading; which is carried further by the gloss, 'Genetheum: locus subterraneus vbi habitant mulieres ad laborandum, et dicitur a geneth quod est mulier, et thesis positio, quia ibi ponebantur mulieres ad laborandum'; or 'Genetheum: absconsio subterranea mulierum'.

Estque decem gintos, dicas hinc esse viginti, Vt pentecoste, coste valebit idem.

Pos quoque pes tibi sit, compos tibi comprobat illud, Atque p[)e]dos puer est, hinc pedagogus erit.

Dic zoen animam, die ind[=e] z[=o][)e]c[)a]isychen.

This last word appears in eleven different forms in the ma.n.u.scripts.

The gloss interprets it plainly as 'vita mea et anima mea'; but without this aid it must have been unintelligible to most readers, especially in such forms as zoychaysichen, zoycazyche, zoichasichen, zoyasichem.

The 'breath of something better' which Hegius and Zinthius brought was seen in the subst.i.tution of the _Doctrinale_ of Alexander of Ville-Dieu, near Avranches (_fl._ 1200), as the school Latin grammar.

This also is a metrical composition; and it has the merit of being both shorter and also more correct. It was first printed at Venice by Wendelin of Spires (_c._ 1470), and after a moderate success in Italy, twenty-three editions in fourteen years, it was taken up in the North and quickly attained great popularity. By 1500 more than 160 editions had been printed, of the whole or of various parts, and in the next twenty years there were nearly another hundred, before it was superseded by more modern compositions, such as Linacre's grammar, which held the field throughout Europe for a great part of the sixteenth century. The number of Deventer editions of the _Doctrinale_ is considerable, mostly containing the glosses of Hegius and Zinthius, which overwhelm the text with commentary; a single distich often receiving two pages of notes, so full of typographical abbreviations and so closely packed together as to be almost illegible. This very fullness, however, probably indicates a change in the method of teaching, which by quickening it up must indeed have put new life into it; for it would clearly have been impossible to dictate such lengthy commentaries, or the boys would have made hardly any progress.

Thirty years ago in England a schoolboy of eleven found himself supplied with abridged Latin and Greek dictionaries, out of which to build up larger familiarity with these languages. Erasmus at Deventer had no such endowments. A school of those days would have been thought excellently equipped if the head master and one or two of his a.s.sistants had possessed, in ma.n.u.script or in print, one or other of the famous vocabularies in which was ama.s.sed the etymological knowledge of the Middle Ages. Great books are costly, and scholars are ever poor. The normal method of acquiring a dictionary was, no doubt, to construct it for oneself; the schoolboy laying foundations and building upon them as he rose from form to form, and the mature student constantly enlarging his plan throughout his life and adding to it the treasures gained by wider reading. A sure method, though necessarily circ.u.mscribed, at least in the beginning. We can imagine how men so rooted and grounded must have shaken their heads over 'learning made easy', when the press had begun to diffuse cheap dictionaries, which spared the younger generation such labour.