Schools schoolbooks and schoolmasters Author:William Carew Hazlitt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 27 ) The Foundations- Vocabularies, Glossaries, anil Xumiiuilia —Their manifold utility—Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric (tenth century)-Anglo-Gallic treatise of... more » Alexander Ni.ckam on utensils (twelfth century) — Works of Johannes de Garlandia—His Dictionary (thirteenth century (and its pleasant treatment—The Pictorial Vocabulary—Anglo-Gallic Dictionary of Walter de Biblesworth (late thirteenth century). I. The origin and history of a class of documents which may be viewed as the basis and starting-point of our educational literature have first to be considered. I refer to the vocabularies, glossaries, and nominalla, which afford examples of the method of instruction pursued tn this country from the Middle Ages to the invention of pinting. Such of these manuals as we fortunately still possess represent the surviving residue of a much larger number; and from the perishablematerial on which they were written and their constant employment in tuition, it becomes a source of agreeable surprise that so many specimens remain to throw light on the mode in which elementary learning was acquired in England in the infancy of a taste for letters and knowledge. In the small volumes on Cookery and Gardening by the present writer, he has, as a matter of course, called into requisition these early philological relics to illustrate both those subjects ; and this fact testifies to the multiplicity of purposes for which such relics can be rendered serviceable. There is hardly, indeed, any aspect or line of mediaeval life which these productions do not assist very powerfully in making more luminous and familiar. But their original design and destination were obviously educational. They were rude and imperfect vehicles, contrived by men of narrow culture and limited experience for the instruct...« less