OCRed data provided
for searching only. 560 SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE
systematically or only upon urgent and emergent occasion, yet he would eventually and necessarily have performed the same processes. He would have read the rules, he would have learned from the ex-ample each time how the rule was applied, and he would have constructed other examples in illustration of the rules.
These supplementary examples might be obtained in various ways. In the upper stages, the authors which the boys were reading furnished many examples. At the elementary stage, the grammar suggests a collection of sententiae which will elicit the rules haphazard, as in life, not as in the system of the grammar. Some of the Vulgaria, however, were arranged systematically for this purpose of illustrating the rules, Whittinton's, for instance. With such a systematized collection of sententiae, one could perform the operation demanded in the grammar, since the ,sententiae, being in order, would call for the rules in order. He would violate the spirit, however, since the gram-mar is following Erasmus and Colet, insisting that actual practice is the important thing, and the grammar only an explanatory hand-book. This is well enough for individual teaching, but mass work calls for regimentation, and the schoolmasters frequently if not always regimented by systematic memorization and illustration of the elementary rules of the Shorte Introduction. But however they did it, the varying instructions show that the schoolmasters made the boys memorize their rules and write illustrative Latins in connection with them, which is the fundamental process recommended by the grammar itself. In some way, each time an English was devised to illustrate the rule. It was then turned into Latin and the approved form of both English and Latin was written down to be memorized.
This is the fundamental drill. But the boy must speak Latin as well as write it, and the grammar refers to this process. For the "making" of Latin, whether written or oral, is the important process, not translation into English. Hence the boys should have, not only sententiae to illustrate their rules, but also some English book to turn intoLatin. Here the boy would be wholly free from all leading strings of the grammar and would be actually composing, catch as catch can. By constant repetition he must also be made to retain what he has once learned.
The boy usually continued systematically to memorize certain sections of the Brevissima Institutio, the parts and rules of the Shorte Introduction and this together occupying the first hour of the day for the first three or four years, and being sometimes reviewed through-
[ Volume
One ] 
