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for searching only. OVID 419
ployed on suche autors / that do minister both eloquence / ciuile policie / and exhortation to vertue.
Wherfore in his place let vs brine in Horace / in whom is contayned moche varietie of lernynge / and quickenesse of sentence.?
In spite of Erasmus, Sir Thomas would have thrown Ovid entirely out. But the grammar school masters were as a rule evidently more enthusiastic than Sir Thomas.
When we turn to the curricula about the time Sir Thomas was writing, we find that at Winchester in 153o the Metamorphoses was memorized to the extent of twelve lines a week in the fourth and fifth forms and probably in the sixth and seventh, while the poetic and rhetorical exercises began in the fifth. Since most of the requirements for the advanced forms have perished, we do not know whether any other work of Ovid was used. At Eton about 1528, Ovid's Epistolae Heroidum had aided the fifth form in its poetical and versifical attempts. It had evidently rendered service also in connection with epistles after the method of Erasmus, as we have seen.8 Wolsey in 152.8 reserves the Metamorphoses and Fasti for the seventh out of eight forms. He and Sir Thomas Elyot agree as to selections. They are both doubtless doing deference to Erasmus, who had prescribed these two works for mythology. Consequently, these works were embodied, no doubt, in the Paul's system, which Wolsey is copying. Our first mention of De Tristibus is at Bury St. Edmund's in 1550, but it remains thereafter a favorite, probably second only to the Metamorphoses. We know then quite definitely what works of Ovid to suspect as Shakspere's models in grammar school.
As we begin to check Shakspere's knowledge of Ovid, we find that the only really scientific study which has been made of any phase of the subject is that of my old master Professor Robert Kilburn Root. He was concerned with the ultimate sources of Shakspere's classical mythology and so considered all possible classical authors. Professor Root concludes,
Though the number of these definite allusions in Shakespeare is smaller than that of the vague ones, they are yet sufficiently numerous to admit of satisfactory conclusions. Of these allusions for which a definite source can be assigned, it will be found that an overwhelming majority are directly due to Ovid, while the remainder, with few exceptions, are from Vergil. The vaguer allusions, though admitting of no confident attribution, are nearly all of such a character that they might have been drawn from Ovid or Vergil. In other
Elyot, Gouernour (rg3r), fol. 34r; Croft, Vol. I, pp. 66-68. 8 See above, p. 242.
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