Baconians can compare the yearly 20 pounds (the salary in 1570-6, which then went much further than it does now) with the incomes of other masters of Grammar Schools, and thereby find out if the Head-Master was very cheap.  Mr. Elton (who knew his subject intimately) calls the provision “liberal.”  The Head-Master of Westminster had 20 pounds and a house.

As to the method of teaching, it was colloquial; questions were asked and answered in Latin.  This method, according to Dr. Rouse of Perse School, brings boys on much more rapidly than does our current fashion, as may readily be imagined; but experts vary in opinion.  The method, I conceive, should give a pupil a vocabulary.  Lilly’s Latin Grammar was universally used, and was learned by rote, as by George Borrow, in the last century.  See Lavengro for details.  Conversation books, Sententiae Pueriles, were in use; with easy books, such as Corderius’s Colloquia, and so on, for boys were taught to speak Latin, the common language of the educated in Europe.  Waifs of the Armada, Spaniards wrecked on the Irish coast, met “a savage who knew Latin,” and thus could converse with him.  The Eclogues of Mantuanus, a Latin poet of the Renaissance (the “Old Mantuan” of Love’s Labour’s Lost), were used, with Erasmus’s Colloquia, and, says Mr. Collins, “such books as Ovid’s Metamorphoses” (and other works of his), “the AEneid, selected comedies of Terence and Plautus, and portions of Caesar, Sallust, Cicero, and Livy.”

“Pro-di-gi-ous!” exclaims Mr. Greenwood, {51a} referring to what Mr. Collins says Will had read at school.  But precocious Latinity was not thought “prodigious” in an age when nothing but Latin was taught to boys—­not even cricket.  Nor is it to be supposed that every boy read in all of these authors, still less read all of their works, but these were the works of which portions were read.  It is not prodigious.  I myself, according to my class-master, was “a bad and careless little boy” at thirteen, incurably idle, but I well remember reading in Ovid and Caesar, and Sallust, while the rest of my time was devoted to the total neglect of the mathematics, English “as she was taught,” History, and whatsoever else was expected from me.  Shakespeare’s time was not thus frittered away; Latin was all he learned (if he went to school), and, as he was (on my theory) a very clever, imaginative kind of boy, I can conceive that he was intensely interested in the stories told by Ovid, and in Catiline’s Conspiracy (thrilling, if you know your Sallust); and if his interest were once aroused, he would make rapid progress.  My own early hatred of Greek was hissing and malignant, but as soon as I opened Homer, all was changed.  One was intensely interested!

Mr. Greenwood will not, in the matter of books, go beyond Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, {52a} “Lilly’s Grammar, and a few classical works chained to the desks of the free schools.”  Mr. Collins himself gives but “a few classical books,” of which portions were read.  The chains were in all the free schools, if Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is right.  The chains, if authentic, do not count as objections.