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for searching only. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;Vives shows the same preoccupation with the moral aspects of education as had Dean Colet. His instructions on grammar cover almost exactly the same materials and much in the same order as the Short Introduction, leading to the Lily-Erasmus Libellus. Vives thus gives many interesting hints as to how about i 523 grammar would be taught. He approves the regular elementary texts and processes, such as learning to speak in the phrases of the Colloquies of Erasmus, vocabulary building through dictionaries, sentential composition on moral matters, study of the collection of Erasmus surrounding Cato, including the Publianus and the sayings of the seven sages heavily moralized, recreating with moral stories from Gellius, the Bible, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Sabellicus, etc., and keeping a notebook stuffed with morality by way of provision for the future. Apparently, Vives would use moral stories collected from various sources instead of the Aesop which was to be almost universal in the grammar schools of England. No one should overlook the fact that Vives thinks the story of Lucrece from Livy an eminently suitable one for such a purpose. Such a story would easily come to the attention of young William Shakspere; in fact, was probably thrust early upon that attention. And Shakspere later tells the story with its proper back-ground atmosphere of piosity. He could not free it wholly from its conventional associations, even had he wished to do so.
Vives also provides for repetition of grammar, and the fixing of it through the reading of suitable authors for grammatical polish and moral content. He approves as rapturously as Dean Colet of the Christian poets, for their subject matter is the best possible and their verse elegancies may in many places compare with those of the ancients! So no one of the elegant ancients in verse gets mentioned, not even Virgil, much less Ovid, Horace, Terence, Plautus, etc .4 Instead, morals are to be drawn from Cicero, Seneca, and Latin translations of Plutarch and Plato. History may be drawn from Justin, Florus, Valerius Maximus, who were used also frequently in grammar school. The religious works of Augustine, Erasmus, and More, together with diligent reading of the New Testament were to prepare the way for the Christian poets and the moral and political extract of ancients to make a good ruler out of Mary. History records
4 This is true in my edition, but Watson has a sentence not in my text, "Nor are the heathen poets to be entirely omitted-particularly Lucan, Seneca the Tragedian, and a good part of Horace" (Watson, F., Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, p. 147). This is in the first collected edition of the works of Vives, J. L, Opera (Basle, 1556, copy in University of Illinois Library), Vol. I, p. 7. Even so, not much is conceded to the heathen.
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