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Updated: June 9, 2025
From the process of text-book manufacturing also spring the endless number of compendiums and abstracts with which our schools are deluged, mental power diluted, and the pockets of the parents unnecessarily taxed for the support of large publishing houses, not for the education of their children.
Compendiums, abridgments, and compressments of scientific lore, rapidly succeed each other in their pretensions to public favor; and it is now a point of competition amongst authors and publishers to give the greatest quantity of valuable information for the least money.
They remain one of those disappointing stormclouds that give out more thunder than lightning. The proof of advancing knowledge is the improvement in compendiums and school books. There are three which must be mentioned. In the middle of the century Lavallée wrote a history of France for his students at the Military College.
Woe to the native professor who strays from the path of orthodoxy. From the late Prince Ito's grossly misleading "Commentary on the Japanese Constitution" down to school compendiums, the absurd dates are everywhere insisted upon.
What becomes of the specialist? What of those formidable compendiums in which the multitudinous activities of man are kept so jealously apart? The mind boggles at the monstrous vision of its own conclusions. But, after all, does it matter to me? I am not an historian of art or of anything else.
Studies like history, when pursued, were taken in homoeopathic doses from small compendiums; and it was adequate to know that Charlemagne lived somewhere in Europe about a thousand or so years ago. Yet even this was rather advanced work and exposed the woman to be damned by the report that she was educated. Ability to cook was not despised and pastry schools were not uncommon.
The De doctrina Christiana is the prose counterpart of Paradise Lost and Regained, a caput mortuum of the poems, with every ethereal particle evaporated. In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered students in the universities not to insist too long upon compendiums, but to study the Scriptures, and to bestow their time upon the fathers and councils.
The very character of the authorship of the time, its love of compendiums and abridgements of such scientific and historical knowledge as the world believed it possessed, its dramatic performances or mysteries, the commonplace morality of its poets, the popularity of its rimed chronicles, are proof that literature was ceasing to be the possession of a purely intellectual class, and was beginning to appeal to the nation at large.
Later she records that a new teacher has arrived "to relieve Deborah of some of her bodily labors," that "he is a stern-looking man," and that she was "somewhat mortified that she could not give him the desired definition of compendiums."
The works of Thucydides and Tacitus are not like our compendiums of history, which merely touch on great affairs, since want of space precludes any elaboration. Tacitus treats of a comparatively short epoch, Thucydides of a much shorter one: both histories are brief. Thucydides and Macaulay are examples of extremes.
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