For example, the figment of the four senses of a passage the literal, the metaphorical, the allegorical, the anagogical-which Grammar and Dialectic jointly endeavored to exhibit, gave way to a desire to find out what the author's words meant to a plain intelligence. To Vittorino, Grammar and Rhetoric, combined, implied the critical scholarship of Greek and Latin, a facility in composition in either language, and a power of entering into and absorbing the spirit of the literature, history, and thought of the ancient world. Dialectic, instead of dominating all other subjects, . . . sank into a comparatively insignificant place. All was rational, objective, in method; the aim was erudition, and not speculation, as a means of adorning and moralizing life. The essential foundation of education was Letters.1

Daily physical exercise was required of all. In this, Vittorino 'aimed rather at strengthening the frame, inducing habits of hardiness, and power of bearing fatigue, than at any special athletic skill.'2 Although he placed less emphasis upon martial exercises than did Milton, his ideal of bodily culture was in part derived from that of the Greeks and the Romans.3

As the whole aim of Vittorino's teaching was the complete and harmonious development of life, so with him as with Milton the secular part of education was throughout accompanied by the inculcation of Christian principle.

Reverence, piety, and religious observance formed the dominant note of Vittorino's personal life. The dignity of human life was with him based upon its relation to the Divine. Hence the transparent sincerity of his religious teaching; the insistence upon attendance at the ordinances of the Church; the inculcation of forgiveness and humility. .. Part of the religious instruction he himself took every day. Apart from the light that is thus thrown upon his personality, what is of chief interest in this aspect of Vittorino is its relation to his Humanism. This was with him no nominal reconciliation between the new and the old. Christianity and Humanism were the two co-ordinate factors necessary to the development of complete manhood. There is no 1 Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre, p. 38. 2 Ibid., P. 66. 3 Ibid., p. 65.

reason to suppose that Vittorino was embarrassed by a sense of contradiction between the classical and the Christian ideals of life. To him, and to men of his temper since, the thought and morals of the ancient world were identified with the ethical precepts of the Stoics and the idealism of Plato; and it was easy for them to point to the consistency of this teaching with the broader aspects of the Christian life.1

On the whole, Vittorino's school, as 'the great typical school of the humanities,' was the first modern prototype of Milton's Academy. The likeness, to be sure, consists more in organization, general aim, and underlying spirit than in the details of curriculum and method.

Of early humanistic treatises on education, the De Tradendis Disciplinis, by the Spanish courtier and scholar, Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), is undoubtedly for us the most important. In this work, Vives, more fully perhaps than any previous writer, interprets and adapts for the Renaissance the doctrines of Quintilian-the main classical authority on humanistic education— and with them combines the principles of Christianity. He also assumes a critical attitude toward mediæval education, and especially toward the scholastic philosophy-the attitude that is so prominent in Milton's Tractate, of which, indeed, Vives' work has been plausibly suggested as the immediate source.2

As a representative of humanism Vives is the more convincing because he occupies the position of a convert. His utterances may be taken as evincing serious and reasoned judgments rather than opinions merely acquired from other persons. His earlier education, obtained at the Academy or University in his native city of Valencia, was not such as to dispose him favorably toward the new learning, which at this time (1507-8) had but recently found an advocate in that part of Spain, and met with much opposition from several scholars, among them Vives' own teachers. In 1509, at the age of seventeen, Vives entered the University of Paris.

1 Ibid., p. 67.

2 See below, p. 14.

Here in the course of his studies took place his conversion to humanism. The controversy between its advocates and those of dialectic-a dispute that was especially vigorous at Paristurned upon the value of reading the classics, as opposed to the settling of all questions by the method of debate. The warmth of Vives' championship of reading, and his relentless exposure of the obscurities and barbarisms of the dialecticians, seem wellnigh prophetic of Milton in the Tractate.1 Probably in 1514 Vives settled at Bruges, where he became the pupil of Erasmus. The cordial friendship which sprang up between them lasted with but one interruption until Erasmus' death. It was at Erasmus' suggestion that Vives undertook his most important piece of editorial work (on St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei). Vives differed from Erasmus, however, in his attitude toward scholarship. Erasmus' outlook was cosmopolitan, and his devotion to learning never was threatened by the promptings of immediate and local civic duty. Vives, on the other hand, from a period rather early in his residence at Bruges, was more clearly conscious of the important part that the new learning had to play in social and civic reform. He wrote a treatise on the question of poor-relief in his adopted city, and in other ways manifested the conviction that scholarship should immediately lead to practical results. That this phase of devotion to learning is also to be found in Milton the Tractate itself offers evidence enough.

In 1522 Vives made his first visit to England. He found a hearty welcome at the Court of Henry the Eighth, and on a second visit became the tutor of the Princess Mary, for whose benefit he composed a plan of studies. Thus he shared with Ascham, among others, the work of teaching in the royal household. During his residence in England Vives was a frequent and intimate guest at the house of Sir Thomas More, where he met a number of distinguished scholars. He also visited Oxford, where rooms were set apart for him, and where for a time he held a lectureship. 1 Watson, Vives on Education, p. lvii.

THE TRACTATE AS A HUMANISTIC DOCUMENT

Until 1528 Vives annually spent several months in England. In that year, by reason of his avowed sympathy with Queen Catharine on the question of the divorce, he was compelled to leave the country for good and all.

2

Until recently the importance of Vives in the history of education doubtless has been generally underestimated. Of two of our standard text-books on the subject, one dismisses Vives with a brief paragraph;1 the other barely mentions him. And yet, as we have seen, Vives for some time was a distinguished member of the group that contained such men as Erasmus, More, Linacre, Elyot, and Tunstall. Moreover, in his writings one can trace educational ideas that are more commonly associated with the name of Ascham, Mulcaster, Bacon, or Comenius.5 Watson says:

In the early part of the 19th century [Vives] almost dropped out of notice. The explanation probably is to be found in the educational influences connected with the French Revolution. The world entered into a new economic and educational order, not less than into a revolution of political ideas. Without doubt, the old educational thinkers who had survived to the second half of the 18th century-let us say, John Milton or John Locke, in England, or Rabelais and Montaigne, in France were absolutely submerged in the whirlpool of change.

One term in which Vives' contemporaries expressed their esteem of him is especially significant.

Vives was often called the second Quintilian. In an age in which the return to antiquity was the only way to recapture the intellectual enthusiasm which could make further progress possible, there could be no higher compliment paid to an educationist than to compare him on equal terms with the greatest of the Roman thinkers and critics on education. Nor must it be forgotten that it was only in 1416 that Poggio discovered in the Abbey of St. Gall

1 Graves, A History of Education, p. 166.

2 Monroe, A Text-book in the History of Education, pp. 350, 470.

3 Watson, Vives on Education, p. lxxvi.

Ibid., pp. xxxiv-xxxv.

5 Ibid., p. cliv.

• Ibid.,

p. xxv.

13

MSS. of Quintilian's Oratorical Institutions, lost, in a complete form, for so many centuries. When the printing-press multiplied copies of this precious complete work, it became 'the code' of the best educationists of the age. But if the term 'second Quintilian' were to be taken in the sense of reproducing the views of Quintilian or of authors of antiquity solely, a sense in which it was certainly not meant by the 16th century, it would be an inadequate description of Vives, and we should lose part of its complimentary import. For Vives was to the Europe of his time what Quintilian had been in the first century [of the Christian era] to Rome. He was the modern Quintilian, prepared to incorporate what was best and permanent in humanity from the ancients, but to use the ancient writers as a starting-place, and not as a goal, in education and in all other 'arts' and branches of knowledge. 1

De Tradendis Disciplinis, Vives' chief educational work, was first published at Antwerp in 1531, the only English edition appearing at Oxford in 1612. In this work Watson has traced some interesting parallels to Milton's Tractate.2 The more notable ones may be summarized as follows:

Both writers declare that the end of learning is the knowledge of God. They also agree that this knowledge is best attained through the study of the visible creation, and that language is but a means or instrument of knowledge, not an end in itself." Both writers criticize the scholastic method, that of disputation, although Vives would use it with caution; and both give a prominent place to reading. Each writer sketches a curriculum that is encyclopædic in extent; the two curricula coincide in many details-notably in the study of nature." Each describes in outline an ideal academy, and the two plans are similar in most

1 Watson, Vives on Education, p. ci.

2 Watson, 'A Suggested Source of Milton's Tractate Of Education,' The Nineteenth Century 66 (1909). 607.

3 See below, p. 52; Watson, Vives on Education, p. 28.

* See below, p. 52; Vives on Education, p. 168.

'See below, p. 53; Vives on Education, pp. 90, 163. See below, p. 54; Vives on Education, p. 177.

7 See below, pp. 57-8; Vives on Education, pp. 166 ff.