STUDY OF A MODEL BOOK.

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hereby your scholar shall be brought not only to like eloquence, but also to all true understanding and rightful judgment, both for writing and speaking."

Again he says: "For speedy attaining, I durst venture a good wager if a scholar in whom is aptness, love, diligence, and constancy, would but translate after this sort some little book in Tully (as De Senectute,' with two Epistles, the first 'Ad Quintum Fratrem,' the other 'Ad Lentulum '), that scholar, I say, should come to a better knowledge in the Latin tongue than the most part do that spend from five to six years in tossing all the rules of grammar in common schools." After quoting the instance of Dion Prussæus, who came to great learning and utterance by reading and following only two books, the Phædo" and "Demosthenes de Falsa Legatione," he goes on: "And a better and nearer example herein may be our most noble Queen Elizabeth, who never took yet Greek nor Latin grammar in her hand after the first declining of a noun and a verb; but only by this double translating of Demosthenes and Isocrates daily, without missing, every forenoon, and likewise some part of Tully every afternoon, for the space of a year or two, hath attained to such a perfect understanding in both the tongues, and to such a ready utterance of the Latin, and that with

judgment, as there be few now in both Universities or elsewhere in England that be in both tongues comparable with Her Majesty." Ascham's authority is indeed not conclusive on this point, as he, in praising the Queen's attainments, was vaunting his own success as a teacher, and, moreover, if he flattered her he could plead prevailing custom. But

we have, I believe, abundant evidence that Elizabeth was an accomplished scholar.

Before I leave Ascham I must make one more quotation, to which I shall more than once have occasion to refer. Speaking of the plan of double translation, he says: "Ere the scholar have construed, parsed, twice translated over by good advisement, marked out his six points by skillful judgment, he shall have necessary occasion to read over every lecture a dozen times at the least; which because he shall do always in order, he shall do it always with pleasure. . . . And pleasure allureth love; love hath lust to labor; labor always obtaineth his purpose."

MONTAIGNE.

Montaigne was a contemporary of Ascham, but about thirty years younger. In his Essays he may be said to have founded a school of thinkers on the subject of education, of which Locke and Rousseau were afterward the great exponents. As far as regards method of teaching languages, he simply discarded grammatical teaching, and wished that all could be taught Latin as he had been, i. e., by conversation. His father had found a German tutor for him, who spoke Latin, but not French; and the child thus grew up to consider Latin his mother-tongue. At six years old he knew no more French, he tells us, than Arabic.

As I intend giving an account of Montaigne's prin

ciples, in the form in which they were presented by Locke and Rousseau, I need not state them fully in this place; but a quotation or two will show how much his successors were indebted to him. He complains of common education as being too much taken up with language. "Fine speaking," says he, "is a very good and commendable quality, but not so excellent or so necessary as some would make it; and I am scandalized that our whole life should be spent in nothing else. I would first understand my own language, and that of my neighbor, with whom most of my business and conversation lies. No doubt Greek and Latin are very great ornaments, and of very great use; but we may buy them too dear." From our constant study of words the world is nothing but babble; and yet of the truly educated we must say with Cicero, "Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam, vita magis quam literis persecuti sunt." He would take for his models not the Athenians, but the Spartans. "Those cudgelled their brains about words, these made it their business to inquire into things; there was an eternal babble of the tongue, here a continual exercise of the soul. And therefore it is nothing strange if, when Antipater demanded of them fifty children for hostages, they made answer that they would rather give him twice as many full grown men, so much did they value the loss of their country's education.”

Ordinary teaching, again, gives only the thoughts of others, without requiring the pupil to think for himself. "We suffer ourselves to lean and rely so very strongly upon the arm of another, that by doing so we prejudice our own strength and vigor.

I have no taste for this relative, mendicant, and precarious understanding; for though we should become learned by other men's reading, I am sure a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom" As it is, "we only toil and labor to stuff the memory, and in the meantime leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void. And, like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain bring it home in their beak without tasting it themselves, to feed their young, so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there out of several authors, and hold it at their tongue's end only to spit it out and distribute it amongst their pupils." The dancing-master might as well attempt to teach us to cut capers by our listening to his instructions without moving from our seats, as the tutor to inform our understandings without setting them to work. "Yet 't is the custom of schoolmasters to be eternally thundering in their pupils' ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the pupils' business is only to repeat what the others have said before. Now I would have a tutor to correct this error, and that at the very first: he should, according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste and relish things, and of himself to choose and discern them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes making him break the ice himself; that is, I would not have the governor alone to invent and speak, but that he should also hear his pupils speak. Socrates, and since him Arcesilaus, made first their scholars speak, and then spoke to them. Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt auctoritas corum qui docent." (Cic. "De Nat. Deor.")

EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION.

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He also insisted on the importance of physical education. 66 We have not to train up a soul, nor yet a body, but a man; and we can not divide him.”

THE INNOVATORS.

The Papal system was connected, in the minds of he Reformers, with scholastic subtilties, monkish Latin, and ignorance of Greek; the Reformation itself, with the revival of classical learning. Their opponents, the Jesuits, also fostered Latin as the language of the Church, and taught Greek as necessary for controversy. So, for a time, the effect of the Reformation was to confine instruction more exclusively to the classical languages. The old Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), had recognized, at least in name, a course of instruction in what was then the encyclopædia of knowledge. But now all the great schoolmasters-Ascham in England, Sturm in Germany, the Jesuits everywhere -thought of nothing but Latin and Greek. Before long, other voices besides Montaigne's were heard objecting to this bondage to foreign languages, and demanding more attention for the mother-tongue and for the study of things.* This demand has been kept

* The reader will find in the Appendix, p. 300, a singular passage from Mulcaster's Elementarie, which shows how soon the advantage of studying the mother-tongue and rejecting the dominion of Latin was advocated in this country.