Educational Text-book

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 234, 1 July 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

Educational Text-book

It is not always remembered that John Milton was once a schoolmaster, writes A. C. R. Carter, in the “Dally Telegraph.” A reminder was provided in the sale of the second, portion of the Leicester Harmsworth library at Sotheby’s, in the form of that “Tractate of Education” on eight pages, issued ou June 5, 1644. This first edition is the rarest of all Milton’s works, only eight having survived. It now fetched £llO (Scribner’s). The copy which appeared in the Brltwell sale, 1925, went to America at £205.

As a schoolboy at St. Paul’s Milton regularly did “home-work” up to midnight, thereby injuring his eyesight, which ultimately caused blindness. To read this curriculum again is to be amazed at its horrific scope. Quite early a pupil of Milton was expected to be grounded in a knowledge of tbe Socratic Discourses, Plutarch’s Lives, the writings on agriculture of Cato, Varro and Columella, all the historic physiology of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and a “like access” to Vitruvius, to Seneca's natural questions, to Mela, Pliny, Celsus and Solinus. The rare treatise has no mention of the printer’s name or address, but it was published by Thomas Underhill.