Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/168

 Ascham continued in the various offices he held under Mary, and was installed anew in the office of the queen's private tutor. He read Greek with her until his death, and sometimes played chess with her. On 5 Oct. 1559 the queen bestowed on him the prebend of Wetwang in York Cathedral, to which he was admitted on 11 March 1559-60. But a long lawsuit followed, apparently with the former holder of the preferment, who had been deprived for nonconformity, and he only won the case in 1566, after the queen had bidden the archbishop of York to give him his assistance (Epist. ii. lxxv.), and thus enjoyment of the emoluments of the office was long delayed. In 1562 a second son was born to him, and he christened him Sturm after his friend at Strasburg (Epist. ii. xxxviii.). 'Household griefs' were still oppressing him. The death of his wife's father in 1669 left her mother almost destitute, and he mortgaged his farm at Walthamstow in her behalf. He made few friends at the court, with which he was always out of sympathy; and although Sir William Cecil still offered him aid in suits for advancement, the Earl of Leicester, who had been well disposed to him as a young man, and stood godfather to his third son Dudley in 1564 (Epist. lix.), apparently contrived later that his connection with the queen should give him no very substantial advantage (Epist. ii. lxxv.). Before 1567 he borrowed a small sum of money of the queen, the repayment of which she generously excused (cf. Epist. ii. lxxxvi.), and about the same date he received, on the death of his mother-in-law, a lease of Wicklyford parsonage. His severest trouble for the last nine years of his life was his own ill-health and the fear that he should leave his wife and children wholly unprovided for. After hinting to many noblemen from 1559 onwards that his official services deserved a fuller recognition than they had received, in 1567 he boldly applied to the queen to make some permanent provision for his family (Epist. ii. lxxxvii.). In a half-humorous tone he reminded her of the favour shown him by her father, brother, and sister, and asked her as his friend to intercede in his behalf with herself as queen. He had never solicited any previous favour, except a gift of venison to make some friend merry. He expected death very soon, and pathetically entreated her to enable him to settle twenty pounds a year on each of his sons. No answer to this appeal is extant, and no favourable one seems to have been given. In the course of the following year his son Sturm died, and he sent his wife soon afterwards, while temporarily absent from her, a very touching letter of condolence (Epist. ii. xcviii.)

But between 1563 and the date of his death Ascham found some relief from his cares in the composition of his 'Scholemaster.' In 1563, the year of a plague, Ascham dined at Windsor with Sir William Cecil, and among the guests were Sir Richard Sackville and his friends Haddon and Astley. After dinner Ascham was informed that certain scholars had run away from Eton for fear of a flogging, and the conversation turned on educational discipline, in which Ascham strongly condemned corporal punishment. Sir Richard Sackville was so well impressed with Ascham's remarks that he offered to educate Ascham's son with his own under a master instructed in Ascham's system, and others of the company begged him to write a practical treatise on education. He at once set to work, chiefly with a view to the bringing up of his own children. He freely confessed that his method was borrowed mainly from Sturm and from his old tutor Cheke, who had died in 1657, and whose memory he believed he might best honour by putting posterity in possession of the secrets of his teaching. For five years he was filling in a plan of the work, of which he sent a sketch to Sturm in the last letter he ever wrote, about December 1568. Of the greater portion, which he had then completed, the first book contained, with many autobiographical reminiscences, a general disquisition on education, arguments in favour of alluring a child to learning by gentleness rather than by force, a statement of the evils attendant on foreign travel, and an account of the immoral training acquired by young men at court. The second book detailed Ascham's method of teaching Latin by means of a 'double translation,' which subsequent writers on education have invariably praised. He advised the master in the first place to explain in general terms the meaning of a selected passage, and afterwards to let the pupil construe it and parse each word in two successive lessons. After an interval the child was to write out his translation, and after a further interval was to turn his translation back into Latin. The teacher should then show him how the various constructions employed corresponded with, and were explained by, examples in the grammar-book. The first reading-book Ascham recommended was Sturm's selection from Cicero, and the second a play of Terence. The advance to more difficult authors was to be gradual, and the boy was not to attempt to speak Latin until he was master of the grammar. Ascham added remarks on Latin prosody, which he looked forward to seeing adopted in English verse, and criticised the style of many Latin authors.