Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/124



With Lily, as with the continental educationists, a colloquial knowledge of Latin was highly prized—

For the boy who prompts in class a terrible punishment is threatened—

Comenius’ complaint that the beginner in Latin was compelled to learn the unknown through the medium of the unknown, does not apply with very much force to England. As early as 1495 we find a black-letter treatise, Pervula by name, giving the rules of syntax in English. Nothing could be simpler or more explicit than the proposition with which it starts. “What shalt thou doo when thou hast an englyssh to be made in latyne? I shall reherse myn englysshe fyrst ones, twyes, or thryes, and loke out my princypal verbe and aske hym this question, who or what. And that worde that answeryth to the questyon shall be the nominatyf case to the verbe.”

In English is also the curious Grammar and Syntax by M. Holt, entitled Lac Puerorum. On the subject of gender Holt exercises a rare restraint and only inflicts one page on the learner; but his pent-up passion for analysis bursts forth when he comes to the moods, and he introduces us to “the shewynge mode,” the “biddynge mode,” “the askynge mode,” “the wysshynge mode,”