Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters Part 17

There can be no desire to be hypercritical in judging such a production, or to lay stress on occasional slips of spelling and prosody; but the English of Pleunus very often strikes one--nor is it surprising that it should be so--as Italian literally rendered. He probably never attained an idiomatic phraseology; and one would have said less about it, had it not been for that sort of professorial a.s.sumption on the t.i.tle-page.

Going back in order of time, I shall furnish some specimens of the tetraglot _History of Aurelio and of Isabel Daughter to the King of Scotland_, translated from the Spanish, and printed in 1556 at Antwerp. I propose to quote a pa.s.sage where two knights in love with Isabel propose to cast lots for her:--"I fynde none occasion that is so iuste, that by the same lof you, or you of me maye complayne vs: inasmuch that euery one of vs by him selfe is ynoughe more bounde vnto the loue, that he beareth to Isabell, then vnto any other bounde of frends.h.i.+ppe. And therfore I see not, that I for respecte of you, nor you also for mine to be ought to withdrawe from the high enterprise alreadie by vs begonne. Nor in likewise might be called a vertuouse worke, that we both together in one place sould displane the louingly sailes [_voilles amoureuses_ in the French column], for that shoulde be to defile, that so great betwene vs and more, then of brother conioyned frends.h.i.+p."

Here it is not so conspicuously the orthography that is at fault, as the composition and syntax. But up and down this little book, too, there are some drolleries of spelling. The translator from the Spanish of Juan de Flores, whoever he was (a Frenchman probably), understood French and Italian; but surely his conversance with the remaining tongue was on a par with that of the majority of his Continental fellow-dwellers then, before, and since; and doubtless his printer has not failed to contribute to the barbarous unintelligibility of the English text. This is the book to which Collins the poet mistakenly informed Warton that Shakespear had resorted for the story of the _Tempest_.

But a far stranger monument of orthographical and grammatical heresies exists in _The historijke Pvrtreatvres of the woll[4] Bible_, printed at Lyons in 1553. It is a series of woodcuts, with a quatrain in English beneath each picture descriptive of its meaning, and is introduced by an elaborate epistle by Peter Derendel and an Address from the printer to the reader. Both, however, probably proceeded from the pen of Derendel, who was doubtless connected with Pierre Erondelle, a well-known preceptor in London at a somewhat later date.

The verses which occur throughout the volume are literal translations, presumably by Erondelle, from the French, and are singular enough, and might have tempted quotation; but, eccentric as they are, they are completely thrown into the background by the _prolegomena_, and more especially by the preface purporting to come from the printer of the work, which is the common set of blocks relating to Biblical subjects, made in the present case to accompany an English letterpress.

I will transcribe only the commencement of the preface, whoseever it may be:--"The affection mine all waies towarde the hartlie ernest, louing reader, being cotinuallie commaunded of the dutie of mi profession, mai not but dailie go about to satisfie the in this, withe thow desirest and lookest for in mi vacation, the withe, to mai please the, I wolde it were to mi minde so free and licentiouse streched at large, as it is be the mishappe of the time restrained."

The discovery of Moses by Pharaoh's daughter is thus poetically set forth:--

"The kinges daughter fonde him in great pitie The russhes amonge, withe to him fauourable, As G.o.d did please, him to saue thought worthie, His owne mother giuing him for noorce able."

Once more, the fall of Abimelech in _Judges_ ix. is portrayed after the ensuing fas.h.i.+on:--

"Hauing killed his bretherne on a stone, Abimelech was forced ielde the ghoast: For besieging with for warre Thebes, anon A strocke he had, of a woman with lost."

The spelling and the syntax in these examples are equally outrageous; yet they are possibly not more so than might be expected from persons unversed in the intricacies and anomalies of our language. But the point is, that the undertaking was executed for the special behoof, not alone of English residents abroad, but also of English students of sacred history at home; for there was nothing of the cla.s.s at that time in our literature or our art. It is almost incomprehensible on what ground English was selected, as French would have been as serviceable to the educated reader here, while the Anglo-Gallic _patois_ must have proved a puzzle to all alike.

The early English educational books produced by foreign printers were not quite invariably so wide of the mark in an idiomatic respect. Some of them were doubtless read in proof by the English author or editor; and such may have been the case with a version of the _Short Catechisme_ of Cardinal Bellarmine published in 1614 at Augsburgh, where the slips do not exceed an ordinary Table of Errata.

Now and then, too, the writer himself was alone responsible for the eccentricities which presented themselves in his book, as where Stanyhurst, in his version of the _aeneid_, published at Leyden in 1582, renders the opening lines of Book the Second thus:--

"With tentive list'ning each wight was setled in harckning; Then father aeneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie.

You me bid, O Princesse, too scarrifie a festered old soare, How that the Troians wear prest by Grecian armie."

Here it was the idiosyncrasy of the Briton which reduced a translation to a burlesque, and disregarded the canons of his own language, as well as taste and propriety in diction. For the entire work is cast in a similar mould, and is heterodox in almost every particular; some pa.s.sages are too grossly absurd even for an Irishman who had spent most of his life in Belgium or Holland.

XX.

Origin and spirit of Phonography--William Bullokar the earliest regular advocate of it--Charles Butler--Dr. Jones and his theory examined.

I. The phonetic system of orthography, which may be regarded as empirical and fallacious, only forms part of such an inquiry as the present by reason of the presence in our earlier literature of a few books which were apparently designed, more or less, for educational purposes.

The fundamental theory of the promoters of this principle, both in former times and in our own, seems to have been that the sound should govern the written character, and that all laws of philology and grammar should defer to popular p.r.o.nunciation. It is, of course, begging the question, in the first place; and one of the warmest enthusiasts on the subject admits that the very p.r.o.nunciation, which is the product of sound, and on which he relies, differs in different localities.

The writers on behalf of phonetics possessed, no doubt, their own honest convictions; but they have at no period succeeded in carrying with them any appreciable number of disciples. Between 1580 and 1634, William Bullokar and Charles Butler endeavoured at various dates to establish their peculiar creed; but it never gained footing or currency, and its influence has left no trace on our language, except in the literary or calligraphic essays of persons unable to read and write, or in one or two isolated cases where the new heresy for the moment infected a man like Churchyard, the old soldier-poet, for on no other hypothesis can we explain the uncouth spelling of his little poem on the Irish Rebellion of 1598, which is an orthographical abortion, out of harmony with the usual style of the author, and surpa.s.sing in foolishness the wildest suggestions of the professed adherents and supporters of the doctrine.

Bullokar published his large Grammar in 1580, and his Brief one in 1586; and he also put forth in 1585 a version of aesop's Fables, the t.i.tle of which is a curiosity:--"aesopz Fablz in Tru Ortography with Grammar-Notz.

Her-vntoo ar also iooined the Short Sentencz of the Wyz Cato: both of which Autorz are translated out-of Latin intoo English by William Bullokar.

Gev' G.o.d the praiz That teacheth all waiz.

When Truth trieth, Erroor flieth."

Butler became a convert in later life to the views previously entertained and promulgated by Bullokar, bringing out a third edition of his _History of Bees_ in 1634, adapted to the new standard; and in his _English Grammar_, published a twelvemonth before, he enunciated the same orthographical dogmas. He was of Magdalen College, Oxford, and prepared, as early as 1600, a Latin text-book on Rhetoric for the use of his College. This was more popular and successful than his phonetic excursus, and is quoted even still now and again, because it contains a slight allusion to Shakespear.

But perhaps the most strenuous and elaborate attempt to reform us in this particular direction was made by Dr. Jones, who drew up a _Practical Phonography_, "Or the New Art of Rightly Spelling and Writing Words by the Sound thereof," for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Queen Anne, somewhere before 1701, in which year he communicated the fruit of his researches to the public. His description of the art as a new one must be interpreted by his ignorance of the previous labours of Bullokar and Butler, and as a proof that the proposal had met with no response; and the fact that the Doctor's own volume is almost unknown may be capable of a similar explanation.

I have no means of judging what kind of reception was accorded to Dr.

Jones at the time; but the tone of that gentleman's Preface was certainly not propitiatory or diffident; for he freely speaks of the miserable ignorance of the world and of his own condescension to the undertaking, in order to remove or enlighten it; and yet, from another point of view, he addressed himself to the task of inst.i.tuting a grammatical code based on that very ignorance of which he complains. For you have not to travel beyond the introductory remarks to stumble on the following directions for the p.r.o.nunciation and _ergo_ the spelling of half-a-dozen familiar words and proper names:--_Aron_, _baut_ (bought), _Mair_, _Dixnary_, _pais_ (pays), and _Wooster_; and at the same time on the very threshold of his text he allows "that English Speech is the Art of signifying the Mind by human Voice, as it is commonly used in England, (particularly in London, the Universities, or at Court)."

Dr. Jones was a learned and well read medical man, and the monument of his erudition and scholars.h.i.+p lies before me in the shape of this portentous volume of 144 pages, which, if the young Duke had not died from another cause, might have proved fatal to him and to his royal mother's hopes of a successor in the Stuart line.

That our national p.r.o.nunciation is slovenly and against philological laws, n.o.body will probably deny; but it would not be an improvement or a gain to corrupt our written language by levelling it down to our spoken one.