Here the confusion of c with t begins the misleading; which is carried further by the gloss, ’Genetheum:  locus subterraneus vbi habitant mulieres ad laborandum, et dicitur a geneth quod est mulier, et thesis positio, quia ibi ponebantur mulieres ad laborandum’; or ’Genetheum:  absconsio subterranea mulierum’.

      Estque decem gintos, dicas hinc esse viginti,
        Vt pentecoste, coste valebit idem.

      Pos quoque pes tibi sit, compos tibi comprobat illud,
        Atque p[)e]dos puer est, hinc pedagogus erit. 
        Dic zoen animam, die ind[=e] z[=o][)e]c[)a]isychen.

This last word appears in eleven different forms in the manuscripts.  The gloss interprets it plainly as ‘vita mea et anima mea’; but without this aid it must have been unintelligible to most readers, especially in such forms as zoychaysichen, zoycazyche, zoichasichen, zoyasichem.

The ‘breath of something better’ which Hegius and Zinthius brought was seen in the substitution of the Doctrinale of Alexander of Ville-Dieu, near Avranches (fl. 1200), as the school Latin grammar.  This also is a metrical composition; and it has the merit of being both shorter and also more correct.  It was first printed at Venice by Wendelin of Spires (c. 1470), and after a moderate success in Italy, twenty-three editions in fourteen years, it was taken up in the North and quickly attained great popularity.  By 1500 more than 160 editions had been printed, of the whole or of various parts, and in the next twenty years there were nearly another hundred, before it was superseded by more modern compositions, such as Linacre’s grammar, which held the field throughout Europe for a great part of the sixteenth century.  The number of Deventer editions of the Doctrinale is considerable, mostly containing the glosses of Hegius and Zinthius, which overwhelm the text with commentary; a single distich often receiving two pages of notes, so full of typographical abbreviations and so closely packed together as to be almost illegible.  This very fullness, however, probably indicates a change in the method of teaching, which by quickening it up must indeed have put new life into it; for it would clearly have been impossible to dictate such lengthy commentaries, or the boys would have made hardly any progress.

Thirty years ago in England a schoolboy of eleven found himself supplied with abridged Latin and Greek dictionaries, out of which to build up larger familiarity with these languages.  Erasmus at Deventer had no such endowments.  A school of those days would have been thought excellently equipped if the head master and one or two of his assistants had possessed, in manuscript or in print, one or other of the famous vocabularies in which was amassed the etymological knowledge of the Middle Ages.  Great books are costly, and scholars are ever poor.  The normal method of acquiring a dictionary was, no doubt, to