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for searching only. substantive in number, gender, and case. Let her learn the nature and syntax of verbs, the five modes, and the five tenses. Make her watch her tenses, in which the English are likely to err. Let her learn the two numbers, the three persons, inflect the four conjugations. Then let her study syntax or construction, for the teaching of which there is rather detailed instruction. One, two, at the most three examples will each time suffice. Let the examples be sometimes grave to teach piety, at others light to please. Chaste and pure little fables may be added to recreate the mind. Participles and verbals receive separate treatment and illustration. One may use here the Thesaurus of Mancinellus. Having become generally acquainted with these matters, she will then use Linacre's Compendium, and the Libellus De Canstructioneh which goes under the name of Erasmus, as well as his Colloquies for words and formulas of daily speech, in which she is to be exercised. Dialogs should be written for her through which she would learn the Latin names of everyday things, as of clothing, parts of a building, food, time, musical instruments, household stuff. The excerpts of Nebrissensis and Mancinellus from Valla on proper use of words will help. But much in Valla, Nonius, Servius, Donatus, and especially in Gellius is worse than useless. Let her study etymologies and note what words are barbarous, what true Latin but of changed signification.
Let her begin at this stage to turn little speeches from English into Latin, easy ones at first, gradually more difficult ones through all kinds and formulas of words, but part grave and holy, part pleasant and urbane. Together with these let her learn the distichs of Cato, and the Publianian mimes, and the sentences of the seven sages, all of which Erasmus has brought together and explained in the same little volume. Let her learn from these little sentences some especially useful for life, which she may have for the future as antidotes against poison, and of good and evil fortune let her learn even now in this tender age the true and uncorrupted opinions, that she may think those things alone good which truly are such, as the virtues and learning, those evil which in truth are evil, as vices, and ignorance, and folly, lest she should accept evils for goods, or on the contrary lest she be captured and moved by small and trifling things as if they were great. Lest also she contemn the great and precious things as if they were vile. She will be delighted meantime with little tales which teach life, which she herself can tell to others, as of the boy Papyrius Praetextatus in Gellius, of Joseph in the sacred books, of Lucrece in Livy, of Griselda and others, as from Valerius, Sabellicus, and writers of this kind, which will pertain
+ The Lily-Erasmus Libellus of the grammar schools. Cf. Watson, Vices: On Education, pp. 47 ff for a similar discussion of grammar.
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