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for searching only. EDUCATING THE "PRINCE"; PRINCESS MARY i97
We then come to the poets of upper school, with Ovid's Meta-morphoses and Fasti serving for mythology. Martial and Persius succeed, to be followed by Virgil's .rleneid. Lucan ends the list. Here is the list and approximate order for English grammar schools, except that Horace is reserved for almost the end, and Seneca appears only a time or two before i6oo. Vives finally admits grudgingly the conventional poets to his curriculum; but he wants them well inoculated and he insists that they are only spice, not nourishment. Ordinary heathen will bear watching, but heathen poets especially so. Vives seeks a Reformation, not a Renaissance.
The ideas of Sir Thomas Elyot in The Gouernour (1531), printed the same year as the work of Vives from which we have just been quoting on the poets, are somewhat less cloistered than those of Vives, but he also is presenting an Utopian scheme for making a "Prince"-a rather far cry from the grammar schools. Sir Thomas, like Vives, wishes that his "Prince" be early taught the Latin names of parts of the body, etc., evidently using some such vocabulary as that of Stanbridge. The child also learns in his own language "to knowe the ptes of speche/and ... [to] seperate one of them from an other." That is, the child masters what was later in the authorised grammar the Accidence, up to Concords. But since this child is a "Prince" under a private tutor, the proposed curriculum now diverges in organization from the one necessary in grammar school, so that we need not follow in detail.
Sir Thomas proposed to spend the first three years, from seven to ten, upon Greek. So the "Prince," having previously attained a smattering of Latin vocabulary and grammar, then acquired a still smaller smattering of Greek grammar with which to read Aesop and by reading to improve his grammar. Here Sir Thomas insists that all lessons must be committed to memory, a cardinal pedagogical principle of the time, and one worth remembering. Such classical authors as Shakspere got in grammar school he would have so long as memory did last. From Aesop, the progress was to select dialogues of Lucian or the comedies of Aristophanes, and thence to Homer as the prime objective in Greek. Virgil may then follow Homer, including the Btrcolics and Georgics. The Metamorphoses and Fasti of Ovid may come next, but there is not much learning in them "concernyng either vertuous maners or policie," so hasten on to Horace. Silius Italicus and Lucan are also good, as is Hesiod in Greek. Selections from these works will be sufficient till the "Prince" attains
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