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similar things from others. For such arguments as histories supply, such also it will be permissible to invent, of which kind there are many declamatory ones, as of Lucian concerning the disinherited physician, and of Aulus Gellius concerning the woman in child-bed, whom Favorinus is persuading that she nourish the infant with her own milk, of which kind we once did something.) But that is a briefer kind of exercise and better fitted to the genius of boys to treat by art the various commonplaces, either invented, or told by authors. These are almost all derived either from celebrated apophthegms of the ancients, or from proverbs, or from fables, or from similes and metaphors. Sometimes it is possible from one of these to frame the argument of a letter.2
Thus for epistles Erasmus would use the subject matter which the boys had been gathering in their lower courses. The first work mentioned is the Heroides, which in 1528 the boys at Eton were to get in the fifth form, which was the form for studying letter-writing. The two things are thus tied together as Erasmus suggests. Incidentally, the Ipswich-Paul's system had used the Epistles of Horace instead of Heroides. The next model suggested by Erasmus is Lucian, who is not mentioned at Eton in this period, but is mentioned in 156o, and is mentioned for the third form at Winchester about 1330. It is likely that Eton boys studied Lucian at this early period also. Then Erasmus considers Terence and Plautus, on whom Eton boys were drilled in the third and fourth forms. Next Erasmus recommends such materials as may be found copiously in Valerius Maximus. While Valerius Maximus is not mentioned at Eton in this period, he is prescribed for the fifth form in 156o. Finally came the collections of four classes of materials. First were the apothegms, of which Erasmus had himself made the collection regularly used in sixteenth century grammar schools. In 1542, the year after he had been severed from the headmastership at Eton, Nicholas Udall published an English version of part of this collection. About this collection we shall have more to say under themes. Second were the proverbs, where again Erasmus had made the standard collection. Third were the apologues or fables. The Aesop collections principally served this purpose, and Erasmus had a hand in putting the most popular of these collections into Latin, though this is not the one that Shak-. spere used. Fourth were the similes and metaphors, of which Erasmus has made the standard collection under the title Parabolae. What kind of subject matter was used for epistles at Eton about 1530 and where it was to be obtained should now be evident.
Erasmus, Opera (1703), Vol, I, pp. 766 ff.; cf. Vol. V, pp. 875-876. Erasmus, Opera (1703), Vol. I, pp. 352-354.
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