the one with the other; commend his good choice, and right placing of wordes; shew his faultes gently, but blame them not sharply; for of such missings, gentlie admonished of, procedeth glad and good heed taking; of good heed taking springeth chiefly knowledge, which after groweth to perfitnesse, if this order be diligently used by the scholer, and jently handled by the master. For here shall all the hard pointes of grammar, both easilie and surelie be learned up; which scholars in common scholes, by making of Latines, be groping at, with care and feare, and yet in many years they scarce can reach unto them.

I remember, when I was young, in the north they went to the grammar schole little children; they came from thence great lubbers, always learnyng, and little profiting; learnyng without booke, every thing, understanding within the booke little or nothing. Their whole knowledge, by learning without the booke, was tied only to their tonge and lips, and never ascended up to the hair and head; and therefore was soon spitte out of the mouth againe. They were as men alwayes going, but ever out of the way. And why? For their whole labour, or rather great toile without order, was even vaine idlenesse without profit. Indeede they took paynes about learnyng, but employed small labour in learnyng; when by this way prescribed in this booke, being straight, plaine, and easie, the scholer is always labouring with pleasure, and ever going right on forward with proffit. Always labouring, I say; for, or he have construed, parsed, twice translated over by good advisement, marked out his six pointes by skilfull judgment, he shall have necessary occasion, to read over every lecture a dozen tymes at the least. Which because he shall do alwayes in order he shall do it alwayes with pleasure: "and pleasure allureth love, love hath lust to labor, alwayes obtaineth his purpose;" as most trewly both Aristotle in his Rhetoricke, and dipus in Sophocles do teach.

And this oft reading, is the verie right following of that good counsell, which Plinie doth give to his frende Fucas, saying, Multum, non multa. But to my purpose againe.

When by this diligent and spedie reading over those forenamed good bookes of Tullie, Terence, Cæsar, and Livie, and by this second kinde of translating out of your English, tyme shall breede skill, and use shall bring perfection: then

ye may trie, if ye will, your scholar with the third kinde of translation; although the two first wayes, by mine opinion, be not onlie sufficient of themselves, but also surer, both for the master's teaching, and scholer's learnyng, than this third way is; which is this:

Write you in English some letter, as it were from him to his father, or to some other frende, naturallie, according to the disposition of the childe; or some tale, or fable, or plane narration; and let him translate it into Latin againe, abiding in such place where no other scholer may prompt him. But yet, use you your own self such discretion for choice therein, as the matter may be within the compass, both for words and sentences, of his former learnyng and reading. And now take heede, lest your scholer do not better in some point than you yourselfe, except ye have been diligentlie exercised in these kindes of translating before.

I had once a profe hereof, tried by good experience, by a deare frend of myne, when I came first from Cambridge to serve the queen's magestie, then ladie Elizabeth, lying at worthie Syr Antony Deny's in Cheston, John Whitney, a yong gentleman, was my bed felloe; who willing by good nature, and provoked by mine advise, began to learne the Latin tonge after the order declared in this booke. We began after Christmas; I read unto him Tullie de Amicitia, which he did twice every day translate, out of Latin into English, and of English into Latin againe. About St Lawrence tide after, to prove how he profited, I did chose out Torquatus taulke de Amicitia, in the latter end of the first booke de Finibus; because that place was the same in matter, like in wordes and phrases, nigh to the forme and fashion of sentences, as he had learned before in de Amicitia. I did translate it myselfe into plaine English, and gave it to him to turn into Latin; which he did so choislie, so orderlie, so without any great misse in the hardest pointes of grammar, that some, in seven years in grammar scholes, yea, and some in the universities to, cannot do half so welle. This worthie yong gentleman, to my greatest grief, to the great lamentation of that whole house, and especiallie to that noble ladie, now queene Elizabeth herselfe, departed within a few days. out of this world.

MILTON ON CLASSICAL EDUCATION.*

The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and of that knowledge to love him, to imitate, 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 kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages 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 the 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 competently wise in his mother dialect only. Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful. First, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years

* After his return from Italy, Milton rented a house in a garden in Aldersgate street, London, where he undertook the education of his nephews, John and Edward Phillips; and, doubtless to supply the deficiencies of his income, received other boys as boarders and pupils. His plan as will be perceived from his "Tractate" was quite extensive, and in some respects peculiar, especially so in insisting on copious reading of authors who have treated of the physical sciences. “One part of his method deserves general imitation. He was careful to instruct his scholars in religion. Every Sunday was spent upon theology, of which he dictated a short system which he gathered from the writers that were then fashionable in the Dutch Universities.' Of the accuracy and extent of Milton's classical attainments, his English no less than his Latin writings bear ample testimony. His mind was thoroughly imbued with the spirit and fortified by the wisdom of the ancients. No where does he seem conscious of a'burthen. The very weight of his knowledge made him elastic. Of his merits and success as a teacher, we have no record. Such however was his zeal in education that he prepared for the use of learners a system of Latin grammar, an edition of Ramus's Logic, and accumulated several folios of materials for a Latin Thesaurus, which he designed to be one of the great labors

of his life.

merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year. And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behind, is our time lost partly in too oft idle vacancies given both to schools and universities; partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled, by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit; besides the ill habit which they get of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untored Anglicisms, odious to be read, yet not to be avoided, without a well continued and judicious conversing among pure authors digested, which they scarce taste; whereas, if, after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, they were led to the praxis thereof, in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then forthwith proceed to learn the substance of good things, and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages, and whereby we may best hope to give account to God of our youth spent herein.

And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that, instead of beginning with arts most easy, and those be such as are most obvious to the sense, they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming, with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics; so that they, having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows, where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now, on the sudden, transported under another climate, to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge, till poverty or youthful years call them importunately their several ways, and hasten them, with the

sway of friends either to an ambitious and mercenary, or ignorantly zealous divinity; some allured to the trade of law, grounding their purposes, not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, which was never taught them, but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees. Others betake them to state affairs, with souls so unprincipled in virtue and true generous breeding, that flattery, and court shifts, and tyrannous aphorisms appear to them the highest points of wisdom, instilling their barren hearts with a conscientious slavery, if, as I rather think, it be not feigned. Others, lastly, of a more delicious and airy spirit, retire themselves, knowing no better, to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their days in feast and jollity, which indeed is the wisest and the safest course of all these, unless they were with more integrity undertaken. And these are errors, and these are the fruits of misspending our prime youth at the schools and universities, as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things chiefly as were better unlearned.

I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct you to a hill side, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education, laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming. I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have now to bale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age. I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war. And how all this may be done between twelve and one and twenty, less time than is now bestowed in pure trifling at grainmar and sophistry, is to be thus ordered.

First, to find a spacious house and ground about it, fit for an academy, and big enough to lodge a hundred and fifty persons, whereof twenty or thereabout may be attendants, all under the government of one, who shall be thought of