in Hegius’ letter to Agricola, he had not made his way above the third; thus giving little indication of his future fame.  An explanation may perhaps be found by supposing that his time in the choir at Utrecht was an interlude in the Deventer period; but in any case the school in his time was still ‘barbarous’, to use his own word, that is, it was still modelled on the requirements of the scholastic courses, the literae inamoenae, which from his earliest years he abhorred.  Zinthius (or Synthius), who was one of the Brethren, and Hegius ‘brought a breath of something better’, he tells us:  but both of them taught only in the higher forms, and Hegius he only heard during his last year, on the festivals when the head master lectured to the whole school together.

A few years later the school numbered 2200 boys.  It is difficult to us to imagine such a throng gathered round one man.  There were only eight forms, which must therefore have had on an average 275 in each; and even if subdivided into parallel classes, they must still have been uncomfortably large to our modern ideas.  On the title-pages of early school-books are sometimes found woodcuts which represent the children sitting, like the Indian schoolboy to-day, in crowds about their master, taking only the barest amount of space, and content with the steps of his desk or even the floor.  Some idea of the character of the teaching may be derived from the experiences of Thomas Platter (1499-1582) at Breslau about thirty years later.  ’In the school at St. Elizabeth’, he says, ’nine B.A.’s read lectures at the same hour and in the same room.  Greek had not yet penetrated into that part of the world.  No one had any printed books except the praeceptor, who had a Terence.[8] What was read had first to be dictated, then pointed, then construed, and at last explained.’[9] It was a wearisome business for all concerned.  The reading of a few lines of text, the punctuation, the elaborate glosses full of wellnigh incomprehensible abbreviations; all dictated slowly enough for a class of a hundred or more to take down every word.  Lessons in those days were indeed readings.  For a clever boy who was capable of going forward quickly, they must have been great waste of time.

[8] It is worth remarking that in the fifteenth century Terence
was regarded as a prose author, no attempt having been made
to determine his metres.  As late as 1516 an edition was
printed in Paris in prose.
[9] Here, and later on, I follow Mrs. Finn’s translation, 1839.

At Deventer Erasmus began with elementary accidence.  The books which he first mentions, Pater meus, a series of declensions, and Tempora, the tenses, that is the conjugations of the verb, were probably local productions of a simple nature which never found their way into print.  From this he proceeded to the versified Latin grammars which mediaeval authorities on education had invented to supersede the prose of