_William._ O!--_vocativo_, O! _Evans._ Remember, William; focative is _caret_. _Quickly._ And that's a good root. _Evans._ 'Oman, forbear. _Mrs. Page._ Peace! * * * * * _Quickly._ You do ill to teach the child such words.--He teaches him to hick and to hack, which they'll do fast enough of themselves. Fie upon you! _Evans._ 'Oman, art thou lunatics? hast thou no understandings for thy cases, and the numbers of the genders? Thou art as foolish Christian creatures as I would desires. _Mrs. Page._ Prithee, hold thy peace. _Evans._ Show me now, William, some declensions of your pronouns. _William._ Forsooth, I have forgot. _Evans._ It is _qui_, _quæ_, _quod_; if you forget your _quis_, your _quæs_, and your _quods_, you must be preeches. Go your ways, and play; go. _Mrs. Page._ He is a better scholar than I thought he was. _Evans._ He is a good sprag memory. Farewell, mistress Page. _Mrs. Page._ Adieu, good Sir Hugh." The _Sententiæ Pueriles_ was a collection of brief sentences from many authors, including moral and religious passages intended for the use of the boys on Saints' days. The Latin Grammar studied by William was certainly Lilly's, the standard manual of the time, as long before and after. The first edition was published in 1513, and one was issued as late as 1817, or more than three hundred years afterward. In _The Taming of the Shrew_ (i. 1. 167) a passage from Terence is quoted in the modified form in which it appears in this grammar. There are certain people, by the way, who believe that Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon. Can we imagine the sage of St. Albans, familiar as he was with classical literature, going to his old Latin Grammar for a quotation from Terence, and not to the original works of that famous playwright? In _Love's Labour's Lost_ (iv. 2. 95) Holofernes quotes the "good old Mantuan," as he calls him, the passage being evidently a reminiscence of Shakespeare's schoolboy Latin. The "Mantuan" is not Virgil, as one might at first suppose (and as Mr. Andrew Lang, who is a good scholar, assumes in his pleasant comments on the play in _Harper's Magazine_ for May, 1893), but Baptista Mantuanus, or Giovanni Battista Spagnuoli (or Spagnoli), who got the name Mantuanus from his birthplace. He died in 1516, less than fifty years before Shakespeare was born, and was the author of sundry _Eclogues_, which the pedants of that day preferred to Virgil's, and which were much read in schools. The first Eclogue begins with the passage quoted by Holofernes. A little earlier in the same scene the old pedant gives us a quotation from Lilly's Grammar. Other bits of Latin with which he interlards his talk are taken, with little or no variation, from the _Sententiæ Pueriles_ or similar Elizabethan phrase-books. THE NEGLECT OF ENGLISH.