Is it not a marvellous bondage to become servants to one tongue, for learning's sake, the most part of our time, with loss of most time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue with the gain of most time? our own bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom, the Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom and bondage? I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more: I honour the Latin, but I worship the English. I honour foreign tongues, but wish my own to be partaker of their honour. Knowing them, I wish my own tongue to resemble their grace. I confess their furniture, and wish it were ours. . . . The diligent labour of learned countrymen did so enrich those tongues, and not the tongues themselves; though they proved very pliable, as our tongue will prove, I dare assure it, of knowledge, if our learned countrymen will put to their labour. And why not, I pray you, as well in English as either Latin or any tongue else? Will ye say it is needless? sure that will not hold. If loss of time, while ye be pilgrims to learning, by lingering about tongues be no argument of need; if lack of sound skill while the tongue distracteth sense more than half to itself, and that most of all in a simple student or a silly wit, be no argument of need, then ye say somewhat which pretend no need. But because we needed not to lose any time unless we listed, if we had such a vantage, in the course of study, as we now lose while we travail in tongues; and because our understanding also were most full in our natural speech, though we know the foreign exceedingly well-methink necessity itself doth call for English, whereby all that gaiety may be had at home which makes us gaze so much at the fine stranger.

Among various objections to the use of English which he answers, he comes to this one :

But will ye thus break off the common conference with the learned foreign?

To this his answer is not very forcible :

The conference will not cease while the people have cause to interchange dealings, and without the Latin it may well be continued: as in some countries the learneder sort and some near cousins to the Latin itself do already wean their pens and tongues from the use of the Latin, both in written discourse and spoken disputation into their own natural, and yet no dry nurse being so well appointed by the milch nurse's help.

Further on he says:

The Emperor Justinian said, when he made the Institutes of force, that the students were happy in having such a foredeal [i.e.

advantage-German Vortheil] as to hear him at once, and not to wait four years first. And doth not our languaging hold us back four years and that full, think you? . . [But this is not all.] Our best understanding is in our natural tongue, and all our foreign learning is applied to our use by means of our own and without the application to particular use, wherefore serves learning? [As for dishonouring antiquity], if we must cleave to the eldest and not the best, we should be eating acorns and wearing old Adam's pelts. But why not all in English, a tongue of itself both deep in conceit and frank in delivery? I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments either with more pith or greater plainness than our English tongue is. . . . It is our accident which restrains our tongue, and not the tongue itself, which will strain with the strongest and stretch to the furthest, for either government if we were conquerors, or for cunning if we were treasurers; not any whit behind either the subtil Greek for couching close, or the stately Latin for spreading fair.

There is much more in the same strain, but I have already quoted enough to show how vigorously a learned man and a schoolmaster in the sixteenth century took the side of the vernacular against the Latin language. The 'Elementarie' is now, of course, a scarce book. There are two copies of it in the British Museum, but none that I have been able to discover of the 'Positions.'

WORDS AND THINGS.

This antithesis between words and things which constantly occurs in educational literature, from the sixteenth century onward, is not very exact. Sometimes the antithesis so expressed is really between the material world and abstract ideas. In this case the study of things which affect the senses is opposed to the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, &c. Sometimes by words is understood the expression of ideas in different languages, and by things the ideas themselves. This is the antithesis of those who depreciate linguistic study, and say that it is better to acquire

fresh ideas than various ways of expressing the same idea. Of course it may be shown, that linguistic study does more for us than merely giving us various ways of expressing ideas, but I will not here discuss the matter. Besides the disputants who use one or other of these antitheses, many of those who find fault with the attention bestowed on words in education, mean generally words learned by rote, and not connected with ideas at all.

Several of our greatest writers have declared in one sense or other against 'words.' First, both in time and importance, we have Milton :

The end of all learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God, and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kinds of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the language of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom: so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman completely wise in his mother dialect only.'*

Soon after we find Cowley complaining of the

loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing or rather casting away, six or seven years in the learning of words only;

and he designs a school in which things should be taught together with language. (Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy.) Both Milton and Cowley wished that boys should read such Latin books as would.

*Tract to Hartlib.

instruct them in husbandry, &c., and so combine linguistic knowledge with 'real' knowledge.

In the fourth book of the 'Dunciad,' the most consummate master of words thus uses his power to satirise verbal education:

Then thus since man from beast by words is known,
Words are man's province, words we teach alone.

*

To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,
As fancy opens the quick springs of sense,
We ply the memory, we load the brain,
Bind rebel wit, and double chain on chain,
Confine the thought to exercise the breath,
And keep them in the pale of words till death.

Cowper, too, says :—

And is he well content his son should find
No nourishment to feed his growing mind
But conjugated verbs, and nouns declined?
For such is all the mental food purveyed
By public hackneys in the schooling trade;
Who feed a pupil's intellect with store
Of syntax truly, but with little more;

(Lines 148 ff.)

Dismiss their cares when they dismiss their flock;
Machines themselves, and governed by a clock.
Perhaps a father blest with any brains
Would deem it no abuse or waste of pains,

T' improve this diet, at no great expense,

With sav'ry truth and wholesome common sense;
To lead his son, for prospects of delight
To some not steep tho' philosophic height,
Thence to exhibit to his wondering eyes

Yon circling worlds, their distance and their size,
The moons of Jove and Saturn's belted ball,
And the harmonious order of them all;
To show him in an insect or a flower
Such microscopic proof of skill and power,
As, hid from ages past, God now displays
To combat atheists with in modern days;
To spread the earth before him, and commend,
With designation of the finger's end,
Its various parts to his attentive note,
Thus bringing home to him the most remote:
To teach his heart to glow with generous flame
Caught from the deeds of men of ancient fame.*

Tirocinium.
X

On the other side we have Dr. Johnson :

The truth is, that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or for conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong: the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellect, not nature, is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergence, that one may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostatics or astronomy; but his moral and prudential character immediately appears. Those authors therefore are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians.*

In more recent times the increasing importance of natural science has drawn many of the best intellects into its service. Linguistic and literary instruction now finds few supporters in theory, though its friends have not yet made much alteration in their practice. Our two last School Commissions have recommended a compromise between the claims of literature and natural science. Both reports state clearly the importance of a training in language and literature, to which our present theorists hardly seem to do justice. The Public Schools Report says:

Grammar is the logic of common speech, and there are few educated men who are not sensible of the advantages they gained, as boys, from the steady practice of composition and translation, and from their introduction to etymology. The study of literature is the study, not indeed of the physical, but of the intellectual and moral world we live in, and of the thoughts, lives, and characters of those men whose writings or whose memories succeeding generations have thought it worth while to preserve.†

*Life of Milton.

+ Public Schools Report, vol. i. § 8, p. 28.