High School, says that "Scotland had schools in her principal towns so early as the twelfth century."

The "grammar schools" first established in the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven colonies, were evidently modeled, as near as possible, after the grammar or public schools of England, with which the founders of the colonies were perfectly familiar, inasmuch as they had been educated in them as well as in the English Universities, of which many of them were distinguished graduates.

It is not necessary to dwell very particularly on the "Public or Foundation Schools of England," which served as the model of the first classical schools of this country, since they have already been the subject of articles in this Journal.

*

In their attempts to transplant the English system of grammar schools as a part of their earliest institutions, our fathers did not succeed in their efforts to give them the endowments, which had been the ground of their inherent vitality in the fatherland, and caused them to be, for ages before America was discovered, what they have been truly called, "the most English institutions of England."

The Puritans were too poor to endow their institutions, even their first college, with other than a most meager foundation. They have left on record their ideals of what they attempted in their great enterprise of founding a new commonwealth, and among them all none is of greater interest than what they themselves called their first essays to establish colleges and classical schools.

66 a

Unable at first to plant a college, they did the next best thing possible. "A general court held at Boston† advanced a small sum, (and it was a day of small things,) namely, four hundred pounds, by way of essay towards the building of something to begin a college." In this "something," before it became a college, the notorious Nathaniel Eaton was master, whom Mather berates as blade who marvelously deceived the expectations of good men concerning him." Yet "he was a rare scholar himself and made many more such; but their education truly was in the school of Tyrannus." There is no doubt that the "grammar schools" at Boston, Dorchester, Cambridge, New Haven, Salem, Hartford, and a few other places, were in the first generation good schools. Mather has given us their course of study for boys in training for "ye universitie." "When scholars had so far profited at the grammar schools

abel causis, that na maner of nychtbouris nor indwellers within this burt, put their bairinis till ony particulare scule within this toun, but to the principale gramer scule. 1531, March 19. Maister Adam Melvil of the hie scule oblist him to mak the bairnys perfyte gramariaris within thrie zeires. (See Stevens' History of High School of Edinburgh.)

* See Vol. VIII., p. 257; XV., p. 81-117,

† Mather's Magnalia, Book, IV., Section 4.

that they could read any classical author into English and readily make and speak true Latin, and write it in verse as well as in prose, and perfectly decline the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, they were judged capable of admission to Harvard College." This standard of "admission" speaks well for the early scholarship of the college as well as of its preparatory schools. It may be doubted whether the standard of classical attainments, on the whole, was not higher then at Harvard than it has been in any American college since.

It is certain that good scholars of that day could both make and speak "true Latin," the language which learned men of the time used with the ease and fluency of their own vernacular. The first civilians and ministers of New England, the Winthrops and Winslow, Robinson, Cotton, Ward, Rogers, and Chauncey, were excellent scholars and some of them authors of distinguished repute. Norton, Shephard, Eliot, and Symmes, were graduates of Cambridge, and Davenport of Oxford; and most of them were the contemporaries of John Milton, the great classic scholar of his own century and the great poet of all the centuries. At no period before or since, in the history of English literature, were the ancient classics more eagerly or extensively studied than in the days of the Puritan emigration to America. The great questions of controversy in ecclesiastical and civil affairs were discussed by the master-minds of the time in the Latin tongue, as for instance the conflict of Milton with Salmasius,

In liberty's defense, a noble task,

Of which all Europe rang from side to side.

Those great men wrote in Latin, not for a few scholars only but that all the thinking, well educated men of the world might read and understand.

In the great strifes of the first and second English revolution, no class of men in Christendom were more interested than were the early colonists of New England. When we read, then, of their anxious fears, lest the learning, which the first generation of scholars brought with them to these shores, should be buried with them in their own graves, we may better understand what that learning was they prized so much, when we know the uses to which it was applied in their own times, and why they deemed it so essential that that same learning should live after them in all ages of the future. The dread of the early Puritans as to the decline of learning in the colonies came near to actual realization, notwithstanding their

Mather's Magnalia, Vol. 2d, Book IV. 4.

earnest attempts to prevent this calamity. For nearly three generations one college only could be sustained, and this was chiefly through the legacy of the Rev. John Harvard, who died soon after his arrival from England, where he had not long before graduated at Emanuel College in Cambridge. When Yale was founded in 1700 its chief benefactor was Gov. Yale, who was a resident of London and acquired his fortune in India during his administration as Governor of the East India Company. So, too, when Dartmouth was founded near the era of the Revolution its chief patron was an English nobleman. If, then, the colleges of the colonial period of our history were able to live only by benefactions which came chiefly from a foreign land, how could it be expected that the grammar schools could retain the rank they might have had under Master Cheever and other teachers of the first generation?

Perhaps no greater efforts were made to sustain a good "grammar school" or "free" school, in which "Latin, Greek, and Hebrew" were taught so as to fit young men for "ye universitie," than in the colony of New Haven, which, in point of wealth, was equal at least to any other in New England. Rev. John Davenport, minister of New Haven, "the prince of preachers and fit to be a preacher to princes," was unremitting in his labors to establish "a free" school, for the support of which "the town paid twenty pounds a year to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever for two or three years at first, but in August, 1644, it was enlarged to thirty pounds a year and so continueth." Master Cheever was one of the first emigrants to New Haven, where he began his long service as a grammar school teacher in 1638, in which he continued for nearly seventy years, ending his career as the master of the Latin School in Boston, where he died in 1708. He used his own "Latin Accidence" for successive generations, and long after his death it was the only "text-book" for Latin beginners in New England.*

When Master Cheever left New Haven in 1649 to go to Ipswich, the grammar school declined and although every effort was made to retrieve its fortunes, it never regained its earliest renown under its first and most famous teacher.

Not long afterwards Mr. Davenport tried "to settle at New Haven a small colledg such as the day of small things will permitt," but for that measure the fullness of time had not yet come. Having urged in vain the leading towns of the colony to maintain each a grammar school of their own, he then planned "a colony school" for the entire jurisdiction. But this, after two years, was "laid down" and never taken up again.

• Cheever and the Early Free Grammar Schools of New England, I, 297: XVI, 102.

It was at this time of greatest discouragement that the donations of Governor Hopkins were made for the endowment of classical • schools in Hartford, New Haven, Hadley, and Cambridge. No benefaction for a good cause was ever more opportunely given. The "true intent" of his legacy was well expressed in the words of his will "to give encouragement in those foreign plantations for the breeding up of hopeful youths, both at the grammar school and college, for the public service of the country in future times." It was well that the avails of the Hopkins' donations accrued chiefly to the benefit of the grammar schools, which received his endowments. It thus became possible for a classic school, formed after the English grammar school, to be planted on American soil and to take deep root, nourished, as the English schools were, with ample endowments, and to bear fruit perennially to the latest generations. Whatever fate might befall the grammar schools of other towns planted by the Puritans, it was a consolation to Davenport and his fellow-trustees of the Hopkins' endowments, that one school, at least, in each of the leading colonies, could be maintained, in which "the three languages, Lattine, Greeke, and Hebrew, might be taught soe far as was necessary to prepare youth for colledge." Though the Hopkins' donations made it possible to establish grammar schools at a few important localities, yet classic culture did not readily thrive, and those precious funds were in danger of perversion even in New Haven, under the trusteeship of Davenport, who was the only man that could have saved them. For the people were so poor even in that colony, which was more wealthy than the others, and the public mind was so distracted by the political questions resulting in the union of New Haven Colony with Connecticut, that but little attention was given to the interests of education for the time. Hence, public sentiment at first tolerated the use of the funds for an English school. Indeed, teachers of the classics were so scarce that no fit master could be found except for an English school and hardly for that. "The fittest that could be found was George Pardee, who was willing to do what he was able, but told the town frankly that he had lost much of what learning he formerly attained." He however "undertook to teach Englishe and to carry on the scholars in Lattine as far as he could; also to learn them to write." It was then that Mr. Davenport performed "one of the last and most useful public services" to the town of New Haven, by protesting, as he was required to do according to the "will of the dead," against the longer misapplication of the avails of the Hopkins' fund contrary to the intent of the

donor, and declared it to be his purpose to transfer the fund to some other town if the use of it was not made for a proper grammar school. This intimidation had the desired effect; and as soon as possible the school was established according to the true intent of its founder. "The advantage of this single effort in favor of liberal education," says Prof. Kingsley,* "can not be easily estimated." One of its results was the great number of young men sent to Harvard College from the single town of New Haven, being one in thirty of all the graduates of that college prior to 1700, and that, too, from a town not having more than five hundred inhabitants at any time during that period.

The endowments at Hartford and Hadley were far less fortunate. The people of those towns used those funds for a long period to maintain schools of no higher grade than a common English school. "The Hopkins School at Hartford seems to have been the only public school of any sort for the first century of its existence."t In 1797 the town of Hartford sought a charter of incorporation and surrendered its control of the Hopkins' fund to a self-perpetuative board of trustees, under whose management the funds were greatly increased and a classical school of a high order was maintained on the ancient foundation according to the will of the donor. So, too, the Hadley Grammar School became an Academy after the town had controlled and perverted the use of the Hopkins' fund from 1669 to 1816. Under the new organization a contest soon arose between the town and the Academy, which at last was decided by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1833, when Judge Shaw held that the devise of Gov. Hopkins was made, not for founding a town school for the exclusive benefit of the inhabitants of Hadley only, but for all the persons in that (then) newly settled part of the country who desired to avail themselves of a grammar school adapted to instruct and qualify pupils for the University."

If one of our distinguished divines has said that "barbarism is the first danger" of modern civilization in America, it was surely a fearful peril when Hopkins and Davenport tried to withstand it. It was their glory that they laid the foundations of the State aright. They could not be expected to do much more than this, which was their destined work. The day of small things, as they called their own cherished plans and institutions, was really a day of great

See Kingsley's Historical Discourse, page 92.

† See Rev. L. W. Bacon's Address at the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Hopkins Grammar School at New Haven, page 65. [Mr. Bacon is mistaken as to his surmise of there having been no other school at Hartford. H. B.]

See L. W. Bacon's Address, page 65.

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