J 62 



SCIEJSrCE. 



jVoL. IX . No. 211 



ism as a stimulus to independence and originality of 

 thought, that we do not consider what a loss was 

 at first suffered by the breach with the old reli- 

 gion. The whole culture of the middle ages was 

 intimately connected with the church. If we 

 take Dante as an example, who was steeped in all 

 the knowledge of his time, we find that, in every 

 thing be wrote, the ecclesiastical aspect is as 

 prominent as the poetical. There is no moment 

 when he has not an equal right to stand among 

 the doctors of theology and with the poets of Par- 

 nassus. Those who broke with the church of 

 Rome had to create a culture of their own, and 

 the culture which they created was naturally that 

 which then prevailed in the church which they 

 were leaving. 



It was this that gave Melanchthon his importance 

 in the reformation, and that earned for him the 

 name of the ' teacher of Germany.' He was by 

 nature an exact scholar. He was well read in 

 both Greek and Latin. He may have intended to 

 fill up the other divisions of learning, but both his 

 taste and his powers led him to confine himself to 

 those departments in which he excelled. He said 

 to his school-boys, 'Whatever you wish to learn ^ 

 learn grammar first.' He recommended the study 

 of Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Ovid, and QuintiUan, and 

 among Greek writers. Homer, Herodotus, Demos- 

 thenes, and Lucian. He recommended the writ- 

 ing of Latin letters and Latin verses, with Latin 

 speeches and themes for the more advanced stu- 

 dents. 



Melanchthon might have intended, if life lasted, 

 to deal successively with other branches of the 

 mediaeval curriculum, but his own tastes and the 

 success of his first efforts determined his whole 

 career. He made the study of language in all its 

 branches current coin for Protestants, but here he 

 stopped. 



Whatever may have been the influence of Me- 

 lanchthon on Protestant schools, there is no doubt 

 that they received their form from John Sturm 

 of Strasburg, who was rector of Strasburg high 

 school for forty-five years, from 1538 to 1583. We 

 find his name in the pages of Ascham, and it is 

 very probable that his plan of study formed the 

 model on which the new college of Westminster 

 was organized , but his influence extended not only 

 to England but to all Protestant countries. He 

 was a politician as well as a school-master ; and. 

 was in constant correspondence with the leaders 

 of the Protestant party all over Europe. His great 

 powers were devoted to an elaborate plan for 

 teaching the Latin language, in all its extent and 

 in its fullest elegance, to school-boys. We have a 

 complete account of the organization of his school, 

 and there is this remarkable fact about it, — the 



boys were not only made to proceed from step to 

 step towards final excellence, but they were 

 strictly prohibited from taking more than one 

 step at a time. In the examinations which were 

 held at the close of each year, it was not only a 

 crime to have omitted to learn the set subjects for 

 that period, but it was as great a crime to have 

 learned more than h^d been set. Not only was 

 the human mind tied and bound within the limits 

 of a curriculum, but individual minds were pro- 

 hibited from outstepping the limits of that curri- 

 culum in any particular. Sturm must be regarded, 

 more than any one else, as the creator for Protest- 

 ants of the classical system of English public- 

 school education as it is remembered by many 

 who are still living. In this system, boys began 

 to learn the Latin grammar before they learned 

 English grammar ; they were set to do Latin 

 verses before they could write Latin prose. The 

 Latin taught was not the masculine language of 

 Lucretius and Caesar, but the ornate and artificial 

 diction of Horace and Virgil, and, above all, of 

 Cicero. There is no doubt that this system, nar- 

 row and faulty as it was, gave a good education, 

 so long as people believed in it. To know Horace 

 and Virgil by heart became the first duty of an 

 English gentleman. Speeches in parliament were 

 considered incomplete if they did not contain at 

 least one Latin quotation. A false quantity was 

 held to be a greater crime than a slip in logical 

 argument. Cicero not only influenced the educa- 

 tion of English statesmen, but had no inconsider- 

 able effect upon their conduct. The vanity of 

 self-inspection, the continual reference to what is 

 dignified and becoming, coupled with a high- 

 minded devotion to duty and a strong if some- 

 what romantic patriotism, distinguished English 

 statesmen in the eighteenth century as much as 

 they distinguished the great orator of Rome. 



There is. indeed, much to be said for humanis- 

 tic training as a discipline of the mind. It is true 

 that it deals only with words, and its highest 

 efforts are, to decide what expression is absolutely 

 best under certain circumstances. It is no light 

 thing to render an English sentence, ornate and 

 idiomatic, into a Latin sentence which exactly 

 represents its meaning and which is equally ornate 

 and idiomatic. It is difficult to analyze the subtle 

 tact by which a scholar decides a particular reading 

 in a particular passage to be right and all other 

 readings to be wrong, or by which he determines 

 one Latin or Greek verse to be so decidedly superior 

 to another, that their comparative merit admits of 

 no argument or hesitation. Anj number of com- 

 petently trained scholars would agree together in 

 a matter of this kind, and yet it is entu-ely beyond 

 argument that not one of them, if cross-examined 



