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for searching only. SHAKSPERE'S GRAMMAR 579
The couplet appears twice in the grammar, but it is only once there attributed to Horace. In this case, it is in the section of Prosodia, under De Generidvs Carminvm, being an illustration of Sapphicum. Thus the author of this section of Titus ,1ndronicus had memorized his Prosodia in the upper school as a guide to writing poetry. We shall later see, at least, that Shakspere had been taught this process, so that the quotation might as easily be his as another's.
Shakspere's quotations from the second part of Lily, the Breuissima Institutio, are from scattered sections of the work. Yet they are not mere scraps selected at random, but each quotation is especially fitted to its context. Nor are they usually from the sections on which the boys were constantly drilled. This can only mean that Shakspere, like every other schoolboy, had eventually memorized his grammar, and so selected from memory the passages best suited to his needs. Were it not for the fact that play-printing Elizabethan printers seem to have had a special genius for mangling Latin, I should suppose that some of the errors in spelling, etc. were due to Shakspere's faulty memory. The grammar proper was supposed to be mastered by the end of the third form, with some further drill in the fourth. Shakspere's knowledge of Lily thus passes him through the first three forms at least, ready to leave the usher's domain for the province of the master.
The quotation in Titus dndronicus from Horace, which is admittedly from the grammar, would put the author of that play into the fourth or fifth form, for, as we have seen, while the passage is twice quoted in Lily, it occurs in the version referred to only in the section on prosody, which was usually begun in the fourth form, when the boys memorized the prosody and began to write "poetry" by its rules. It is not quite certain, however, that this passage comes from Shakspere's own memory, since it is justly doubted that Shakspere wrote the whole play. Yet we shall see later that Shakspere did have his prosody. Incidentally, it should also be noted here that the fact that Shakspere tends to quote his Latin classics in the form he had memorized in Lily gives no indication whatever that he had not later read those classics in the original. With even the best trained Elizabethans one always suspects Lily's grammar first, because his work was so stamped upon memory that for ordinary quotation from memory its form of the given quotation is almost certain to take precedence. About this tendency there is no mystery at all. And obviously it does not mean that one's knowledge of these classics
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