centuries there was added to the Latin a study of the Greek and the Hebrew tongues. The end and aim of literary study was the knowledge of Holy Writ. The means to this knowledge were the Latin schools. Consequently educational traditions and educational practices alike tended to promote this type of school in America.

Finally the very genius and spirit of the early colonists led them to cherish education for noble ends. Many of the settlers of Massachusetts were well educated gentlemen for whom the highest ideals of life were a free Church and a free State in which pious, godly, and learned men were to play equal and active parts. They had come to America to seek to realize those ideals, and the first and foremost means to the end sought was the public school-that is to say, the Latin or grammar school which should fit the youth for college. The ideal evidently was that every boy in the colony should receive a college education. Everywhere among the early political and religious documents of these Puritans one finds reference to the religious, civil, and moral aims that lay at the basis of all activity and all institutional life. For example, in the annals of Roxbury of 1645 one reads: "Whereas the inhabitants of Roxbury, in consideration of their religious care of posterity, have taken into consideration how necessary the education of their children in Literature will be to fit them for public service, both in Church and Commonwealth, in succeeding years. They therefore unanimously have consented and agreed to erect a free school in the said town of Roxbury." Again and again in the New England town documents do we find repeated the thought that life is best lived when it is devoted to the

1 Annals of Roxbury, quoted by Brown, op. cit., p. 40. See also Dillaway's History of the Grammar School in Roxbury; and Parker's Sketch of the History of the Grammar School in Roxbury.

Church and the Commonwealth, and that the best preparation for such a life is the training given by the Latin school and college.

Thus motives of religious and public service dominated the entire life of the times, and in so doing set the ideals for the schools. The theoretical and ultimate aims and ideals were, therefore, for the most part general and primary; but the immediate and practical ends were not wholly lacking. For example, the law of 1642 provided that the various towns and their selectmen should, among other duties, see that there was furnished "learning and labor and other employments which may be profitable to the Commonwealth." So, too, in 1645, the General Court decreed that boys from ten to sixteen years of age should be trained in the "art and practice of arms"- the instruction to be given "by some one of the officers of the band." Kindred, too, to the religious and civil motives for education was found the philanthropic and missionary motive. Schools were to be open free of charge to the poor children of the town, and express provision was also made, in some of the annals, for the gratuitous instruction of Indian youths.

It is thus to be observed that the leading motive back of all efforts to establish schools was, in the early colonial times, the religious motive. It determined largely the aim, scope, and administration of all educational undertakings. Closely allied with it, however, were the civic and the philanthropic ideals. Though the Renaissance and the Reformation had swept over Europe more than a hundred years earlier, there was still left in Christendom much of the old spirit of medievalism. Asceticism; rigidity of morals and manners; unquestioning faith within the somewhat enlarged, yet still narrow, limits 1 Clews, op. cit., p. 60.

which an individualism partially enthroned had set; the conceptions of the words "God" and "the Bible" as the most awful that the mind possessed; the view which placed the real goal of life beyond the grave; the contempt for the physical, the natural, the aesthetic, because of the belief that these are evil or at least invite to evil;-all these were characteristics of the fourteenth century, but they are also characteristics that were more or less prominent in New England in the early years of the seventeenth century. To the people of that day, to live at all was a most serious and awful affair; to live a godly life, unselfishly to serve one's fellow men through the state, was the height and depth of human perfection and the noblest pursuit the individual could follow.

Hence the Christian minister took social rank above all others. His ideals became the ideals of the town; his advice became the accepted creed of his flock. From his exalted station he was regarded as ex officio a member of every public organization and every administrative body. Consequently his power was enormous, and he exerted it with a feeling that he was divinely directed. The schools therefore were shaped to approximate a youth to the ministerial ideal. The aim was, therefore, at least nominally democratic, in that it was hoped and expected that every boy would receive a thorough education,- that he would become past-master of Latin, and perchance have a good command of Greek and Hebrew.

Nor does the ambition appear so strange when one recalls that, at the very time the Puritans were settling in America, ecclesiastical and civil authority and lay influence in Europe were strenuously seeking to preserve Latin intact as the universal language. It was at this time that Comenius brought forth his Janua linguarum

reserata and promised that his method would not only enable one in a brief period to conquer fully the Latin language, but would give a complete and full comprehension of all the knowledge of the world. The optimism and egoism of the teachers and the educational reformers of the age knew no limits; nor is it strange that this peculiar infection respecting the powers of the schools, and of Latin within the schools, should have extended to America. The Latin school was indeed regarded as the very servant of the Lord.

Exactly what was the program of studies in these early schools is not determinable. Certain it is, however, that the ideals were to teach only Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and to inculcate precepts and habits of morals, manners, and religion. If other and more elementary subjects were admitted, it was to make them serve as a foundation for the advanced subjects; they had no merit or worth in their own right or name. Theology was the noblest branch of learning; the classics were the way thereto.

Dr. Brown thinks that the most representative of all the English grammar schools, and therefore the one that best furnishes the ideal of our colonial Latin schools, was that founded by Dean Colet about 1508,1 and known as St. Paul's School, London.2 Certain it is that there was great similarity among all the grammar schools, so that a study of one of them ought to give a fairly accurate notion of all. Moreover, the first master of St. Paul's was William Lilly, the author of the famous Latin grammar that became the standard authority in the schools of England and America. It is therefore very probable that the work in the early colonial schools differed little

1 It is doubtful whether this school was established in 1508, 1509, 1510, or 1512. See Knight's Life of Colet, pp. 102-109. 2 Brown, op. cit., p. 12.

from that of St. Paul's. Respecting the requirements of admission to this school one reads: "If your childe can rede and wryte latyn and Englisshe sufficiently soo that he be able to rede and wryte his owne lessons, then he shal be admytted unto the scole for a scholar." "If your childe after reasonable season proved be founde here unapte and unable to lernynge, than ye warned thereof shal take hym awaye, that he occupye not here rowme in vayne." "If he be apte to lerne, ye shal be content that he contynue here tyl he have some competent literatur."1

Respecting the subjects to be taught, the account continues as follows: "I would that they [the pupils] were taught all way in good literature both laten and greke, and good auctors suych as have the veray Romayne eliquence joyned withe wisdome." Later follows a list of these authors, and it includes both the classical and the Christian. Unless the youth had a fair foundation in the rudiments of learning (which most frequently was apparently not the case) the first work in the grammar school consisted of a study of the alphabet and of simple sentences in English, and the memorizing of the catechism, the Psalms, and the Testament. Then the study of Latin was begun and as proficiency in this subject increased, attention to English diminished. The pupil passed successively through the stages of accidence, grammar, construing, and the making of Latin letters, verses, declamations, and themes. Then followed the study of the selections of the classical literature itself the works of Æsop, Cæsar, Tully (Cicero), Ovid, Vergil, Horace, Eutropius, Juvenal, Persius, Terence, Sallust, Nepos, Corderius, and Erasmus.2

1 Lupton, Life of Colet, Appendix B.

2 Meriwether, Our Colonial Curriculum, pp. 74 ƒ.