Alice Morse Earle

The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes, but it serves in hands which know how to use it to determine the places of more important bodies.

—A. de Morgan, 1847.

When any scholar could advance beyond hornbook and primer he was ready for grammar. This was not English grammar, but Latin, and the boy usually began to study it long before he had any book to con. A bulky and wretched grammar called Lilly's was most popular in England. Locke said the study of it was a religious observance without which no scholar was orthodox. It named twenty-five different kinds of nouns and devoted twenty-two pages of solid print to declensions of nouns; it gave seven genders, with fifteen pages of rules for genders and exceptions. Under such a rÉgime we can sympathize with Nash's outburst, "Syntaxis and prosodia! you are tormentors of wit and good for nothing but to get schoolmasters twopence a week."

It was said of Ezekiel Cheever, the old Boston schoolmaster, who taught for over seventy years, "He taught us Lilly and he Gospel taught." But he also wrote a Latin grammar of his own, Cheever's Accidence, which had unvarying popularity for over a century. Cheever was a thorough grammarian. Cotton Mather thus eulogized him:—

There was brought forth at his death a broadside entitled The Grammarian's Funeral. A fac-simile of it is here given. Josiah Quincy, later in life the president of Harvard College, wrote an account of his dismal school life at Andover. He entered the school when he was six years old, and on the form by his side sat a man of thirty. Both began Cheever's Accidence, and committed to memory pages of a book which the younger child certainly could not understand, and no advance was permitted till the first book was conquered. He studied through the book twenty times before mastering it. The hours of study were long—eight hours a day—and this upon lessons absolutely meaningless.

The custom was in Boston—until this century—to study through the grammar three times before any application to parsing.

Far better wit than any found in an old-time jest book was the sub-title of a very turgid Latin grammar, "A delysious Syrupe newly Claryfied for Yonge Scholars yt thurste for the Swete Lycore of Latin Speche."

The first English Grammar used in Boston public schools and retained in use till this century, was The Young Lady's Accidence, or a Short and Easy Introduction to English Grammar, design'd principally for the use of Young Learners, more especially for those of the Fair Sex, though Proper for Either. It is said that a hundred thousand copies of it were sold. It was a very little grammar about four or five inches long and two or three wide, and had only fifty-seven pages, but it was a very good little grammar when compared with its fellows, being simple and clearly worded.

The fashion of the day was to set everything in rhyme as an aid to memory; and even so unpoetical a subject as English Grammar did not escape the rhyming writer. In the Grammar of the English Tongue, a large and formidable book in fine type, all the rules and lists of exceptions and definitions were in verse. A single specimen, the definition of a letter, will show the best style of composition, which, when it struggled with moods and tenses, was absolutely meaningless.

The spelling of that day was wildly varied. Dilworth's Speller was one of the earliest used, and the spelling in it differed much from that of the British Instructor. A third edition of The Child's New Spelling Book was published in 1744. Famous English lesson-books known among common folk as "Readamadeasies," and book traders as "Reading Easies"—really Reading made easy—belied their name. Some had alphabets on two pages because "One Alphabet is commonly worn out before the Scholar is perfect in his Letters." It is interesting to find "Poor Richard's" sayings in these English books, but it is natural, too, when we consider Franklin's popularity abroad, and know that broadsides printed with his pithy and worldly-wise maxims were found hanging on the wall of many an English cottage.

Not until the days of Noah Webster and his famous Spelling Book and Dictionary was there any decided uniformity of spelling. Professor Earle says the process of compelling a uniform spelling is a strife against nature. Certainly it took a long struggle against nature to make spelling uniform in America. In the same letter, men of high education would spell the same word several different ways. There was no better usage in England. The edition of Milton's Paradise Lost printed in 1688 shows some very grotesque spelling. Therefore it is not strange to find a New York teacher advertising to teach "writeing and spilling."

To show that a fetich was made of spelling seventy-five years ago, I give this extract from a Danbury school notice:—

"The advantages that small children obtain at this school may be easily imagined when the public are informed that those who spell go through the whole of Webster's spelling book twice a fortnight."

The teaching of spelling in many schools was peculiar. The master gave out the word, with a blow of his strap on the desk as a signal for all to start together, and the whole class spelled out the word in syllables in chorus. The teacher's ear was so trained and acute that he at once detected any misspelling. If this happened, he demanded the name of the scholar who made the mistake. If there was any hesitancy or refusal in acknowledgment, he kept the whole class until, by repeated trials of long words, accuracy was obtained. The roar of the many voices of the large school, all pitched in different keys, could be heard on summer days for a long distance. In many country schools the scholars not only spelled aloud but studied all their lessons aloud, as children in Oriental countries do to-day: and the teacher was quick to detect any lowering of the volume of sound and would reprove any child who was studying silently. Sometimes the combined roar of voices became offensive to the neighbors of the school, and restraining votes were passed at town-meetings.

The colonial school and schoolmaster took a firm stand on "cyphering." "The Bible and figgers is all I want my boys to know," said an old farmer. Arithmetic was usually taught without text-books. Teachers had manuscript "sum-books," from which they gave out rules and problems in arithmetic to their scholars. Abraham Lincoln learned arithmetic from a "sum-book" of which he made a neat copy. A page from this sum-book is here given in reduced size. Too often these sums were copied by the pupil without any explanation of the process being offered or rendered by the master. The artist Trumbull recalled that he spent three weeks, unaided in any way, over a single sum in long division.

A manuscript sum-book in my possession is marked, "Sarah Keeler her Book, May ye 1st, A.D. 1773, Ridgbury." There are multiplication examples of fifteen figures multiplied by fifteen, and long division examples of a dividend of quintillions, chiefly in sevens and nines, divided by a mixed divisor of billions in eights and fives—a thing to make poor Sarah turn in her grave. There are Reductions Ascending and Reductions Descending and Reductions both Ascending and Descending at the same time, as complicated as the computations of the revolutions of the celestial spheres. There are miserable catch-examples about people's ages and others about collections of excises, with "Proofs," and still others about I know not what, for there are within their borders mysterious abbreviations and signs, like some black magic. Sainted Sarah Keeler! a melancholy sympathy settles on me as I regard this book and all the extended sums you knew, and think of the paths of pleasantness of the present pupils of kindergartens; and wonder what kind of a mathematical song or game or allegory could be invented to disguise these very "plain figures."

Sometimes a zealous teacher would write out tables of measures and a few blind rules for his scholars. This amateur arithmetic would be copied and recopied until it was punctuated with mistakes.

Many scholars never saw a printed arithmetic; and when the master had one for circulation it was scarcely more helpful than the sum-book. One of the most ancient arithmetics was written by the mathematician Record, who lived from the year 1500 to 1558. He is said to have invented the sign of equality =, but there is nothing in his book to indicate this fact. The terms "arsemetrick" and "augrime" are used in it, instead of arithmetic. Many curious and obsolete rules are given, among them, "The Golden Rule," "Rule of Falsehood," "The Redeeming of Pawnes of Geams," "The Backer Rule of Thirds." Here is a simple problem under the latter:—

"I did lend my friend ³/₄ of a Porteguise 7 months upon promise that he should do as much for me again, and when I should borrow of him, he could lend me but ⁵/₁₂ of a Porteguese, now I demand how long time I must keep his money in just Recompence of my loan, accounting 13 months in the year."

Rhyme is used in this book, in dialogues between the master and scholar. Copies of Cocker's Arithmetick are said to be very rare in England, but I have seen several in America. An edition was published in Philadelphia in 1779. The frontispiece of English and American editions shows the picture of the mathematician surrounded by a wreath of laurel with the droll apostrophe:—

"Ingenious Cocker," as one would say "Most noble Shakespeare!" It is hard indeed to idealize or write poetical tributes to one by the name of Cocker. It gives us a sense of pleasant familiarity with any one to know that he is "well acquaint" with one of our intimate friends, so I feel much drawn to ingenious Cocker by knowing that he was well known of Sam Pepys. He was a writing master, and did some mighty fine engraving for Pepys, who calls him ingenuous, not ingenious. It is rather a facer to learn from the notes in the Diary that Cocker had nothing whatever to do with his Arithmetic, which was a forgery by John Hawkins.

The age that would rhyme a grammar would rhyme an arithmetic, and Record's example was followed and enlarged upon. Thomas Hylles published one in 1620, The Arte of Vulgar Arithmiteke, written in dialogue, with the rules and theorems in verse. This is an example of his poesy:—

"The Partition of a Shilling into his Aliquot Partes.

In 1633 Nicholas Hunt added to his rules and tables an "Arithmetike-Rithmeticall or the Handmaid's Song of Numbers," which rhymes are simply unspeakable. These attempts did not end with the seventeenth century. In 1801 Richard Vyse had a Tutor's Guide with problems in rhyme.

The earliest date of the old rhyme,—

is given by Halliwell as 1633. I have found it in an old arithmetic printed in London in 1596. The lines beginning "Multiplication is vexation," are not an outburst of modern students. They are found in a manuscript dated 1570 circa.

After the Revolution, in new and zealous Americanism, text-books by American authors outsold English books. The blue-backed spelling book of Noah Webster drove Perry and Dilworth from the field. Bingham and Webster took advantage of the need of suitable school-books and divided the field between them. Webster's Spelling Book outstripped Bingham's Child's Companion, but Bingham's Readers, such as The American Preceptor and The Columbian Orator held their ground against Webster's. Not one of Bingham's books proved a failure. The Columbian Orator contained seven extracts from speeches of Pitt in opposition to the measures of George III., it had speeches by Fox and Sheridan, part of the address of President Carnot at the establishment of the French Republic, and the famous speech of Colonel BarrÉ on the Stamp Act.

Nicholas Pike of Newburyport, Massachusetts, wrote an arithmetic that routed the English books of Cocker and Hodder. It was studied by many persons now living. It had three hundred and sixty-three barren rules, and not a single explanation of one of them. Many of them would now be wholly unintelligible to scholars, though no more antiquated than are the methods; for instance, this rule in Tare and Trett:—

"Deduct the Tare and Trett. Divide the Suttle by amount given; the Quotient will be the Cloff which subtract from the Suttle the Remainder will be the Neat."

"The Little Reader's Assistant," by Noah Webster