Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/144

 order to repeat “L’Oraison Dominicale, la Confession de Foy qu'on appelle le Symbole et puis les dix commandemens de la Loy.” All the boys must learn how to sing, and a master especially appointed for the purpose must teach them how to intone the Psalms.

In the general organisation of the institution, we find one remarkable piece of common-sense. The Principal (who is controlled by the Rector of the University) is not to be the stern and academic personage generally connected with the term “headmaster.” “Que le principal, estant de moyen scavoir pour le moins, soit surtout d’un esprit debonnaire et non point de complexion rude ni apre; afin qu’il donne bon exemple aux enfants en toute sa vie, et aussi qu’il puisse porter tant plus doucement le travail de sa charge.” With its “debonnaire” headmaster and with Maturin Cordier, grown grey in the service of the young, to expound his Colloquies in person, the Genevan school must have been imbued with a genial spirit rare indeed in this age of pretentious grammarians and flogging pedagogues.

In the lowest of the eight classes, into which the school was divided, the boys learned their A B C. In the seventh, they read Latin and conjugate and decline “selon la formation qui en est dressée”; the sixth is chiefly devoted to Latin grammar, of a more advanced kind.

The fifth class brings the boys on to the rudiments of syntax and the Bucolics of Virgil. In the fourth, Cicero’s letters and some Ovid may be read, but the special task is the elements of Greek. In the next class Greek grammar is continued, and the Æneid and Cæsar’s Commentaries are read. On reading that in the second class the pupils, who have only recently commenced Greek, are to study Xenophon, Polybius, Homer, and Hesiod, one is inclined to wonder if this scheme could ever have been actually enforced. At the same time dialectic, rhetoric, and syllo-