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“No sooner are the organs of the brain

Quick to receive and stedfast to retain

Best knowledges, but all’s laid out upon

Retrieving of the curse of Babylon.

...

And he that is but able to express

No sense in several languages

Will pass for learneder than he that’s known

To speak the strongest reason in his own.”[9]

§ 11. One of the scholars of the Renascence, Hieronymus Wolf, was wise enough to see that there might be no small merit in a boy’s silence: “Nec minima pueri virtus est tacere cum recte loqui nesciat” (Quoted by Parker). But this virtue of silence was not encouraged by Sturm, and he determined that by the age of sixteen his pupils should have a fair command of expression in Latin and some knowledge of Greek.[10] Latin indeed was to supplant the mother tongue, and boys were to be severely punished for using their own language. By this we may judge of the pernicious effects of following Sturm. And it is a mistake to suppose that the unwisdom of tilting at the vernacular was not so much Sturm’s, as of the age in which he lived. The typical English schoolmaster of the century, Mulcaster, was in this and many other ways greatly in advance of Sturm. To him it was plain that we should “care for that most which we ever use most, because we need it most.”[11] The only need recognized by Sturm was need of the classical languages. Thus he and his admirers led the unlucky schoolboy straight into that “slough of Despond”—verbalism, in which he has struggled ever since;