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grammar school, the boy must learn to read, speak, and write the Latin language under the tutelage of grammar and rhetoric-logic. To this end, the best authors of antiquity were studied grammatically and rhetorically, the aim being to enable the boy to speak and write as did the masters of literature. Thus the grammar school provided an intensive and detailed Iiterary training based upon the best Latin authors. The grammar school visualized by Erasmus and the sixteenth century was not merely grammar school, but also rhetorical or literary school. The mechanical means by which these admired authors attained their literary effects were supposed to be drilled into every learned grammarian. Whether anything came of it would depend, of course, upon the particular grammarian. That a great deal did come of it we have the Renaissance to show.
These men planned consciously and worked systematically and unrelentingly to create a Renaissance and a Reformation. A Renaissance and a Reformation were created. In the Reformation, the church, whose devoted servants these schoolmasters were, took the lead. But in the Renaissance the fundamental propagation, at least in England, was the work of the schoolmasters. If we are to under-stand the creation but especially the propagation of the Renaissance, we must clear up the function of the Elizabethan grammar school.
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