metrical composition; and it has the merit of being
both shorter and also more correct. It was first printed at Venice by
Wendelin of Spires (_c._ 1470), and after a moderate success in Italy,
twenty-three editions in fourteen years, it was taken up in the North
and quickly attained great popularity. By 1500 more than 160 editions
had been printed, of the whole or of various parts, and in the next
twenty years there were nearly another hundred, before it was
superseded by more modern compositions, such as Linacre's grammar,
which held the field throughout Europe for a great part of the
sixteenth century. The number of Deventer editions of the _Doctrinale_
is considerable, mostly containing the glosses of Hegius and Zinthius,
which overwhelm the text with commentary; a single distich often
receiving two pages of notes, so full of typographical abbreviations
and so closely packed together as to be almost illegible. This very
fullness, however, probably indicates a change in the method of
teaching, which by quickening it up must indeed have put new life into
it; for it would clearly have been impossible to dictate such lengthy
commentaries, or the boys would have made hardly any progress.

Thirty years ago in England a schoolboy of eleven found himself
supplied with abridged Latin and Greek dictionaries, out of which to
build up larger familiarity with these languages. Erasmus at Deventer
had no such endowments. A school of those days would have been thought
excellently equipped if the head master and one or two of his
assistants had possessed, in manuscript or in print, one or other of
the famous vocabularies in which was amassed the etymological
knowledge of the Middle Ages. Great books are costly, and scholars are
ever poor. The normal method of acquiring a dictionary was, no doubt,
to construct it for oneself; the schoolboy laying foundations and
building upon them as he rose from form to form, and the mature
student constantly enlarging his plan throughout his life and adding
to it the treasures gained by wider reading. A sure method, though
necessarily circumscribed, at least in the beginning. We can imagine
how men so rooted and grounded must have shaken their heads over
'learning made easy', when the press had begun to diffuse cheap
dictionaries, which spared the younger generation such labour.

Though they were scarcely 'for the use of schools', it will repay us
to examine some of the mediaeval dictionaries whic