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As he went about he could easily take up his hornbook once in a while and say over to himself the letters and the rows of syllables. Sometimes especially if he had been obedient and had studied well he was given a hornbook made of gingerbread; and then, of course, he would find that the tiresome lines of letters had all at once become very attractive.
If left to myself, I should infallibly have let this chance slip. Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting twenty years teaching infants the hornbook, turning silk dresses and making children's frocks.
If he had not piped so stridently, we should not have had half so much sport; yet small largess does the miserable minstrel get for tooting tunelessly. Let us honor the brave who fall in the battle of print. 'Twas a noble ambition, after all, which caused our asinine friend to cloak himself in that cast leonine skin. Who would be always reciting from a hornbook to Mistress Minerva?
In this poem we have, at least, the first proof of that graphic power in which Burns has never been excelled, and in it we have the earliest mention of his Bonnie Jean. In his next poem, Death and Dr. Hornbook, his command of language and artistic phrasing are more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire sparkle and flash from every line.
That the drama had these three stages seems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to fix the limits of any one of them, and all three are sometimes seen together in one of the later Miracles of the Wakefield cycle. Dekker's Gull's Hornbook has an interesting chapter on "How a Gallant should behave Himself in a Playhouse."
He relied much on Villeroy, a political hack certainly, an ancient Leaguer, and a Papist, but a man too cool, experienced, and wily to be ignorant of the very hornbook of diplomacy, or open to the shallow stratagems by which Spain found it so easy to purchase or to deceive.
When her education had proceeded no further than the hornbook, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself. Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet tempered man can well be. He loved his daughter dearly; but it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them.
No Sunday school had been invented. The dame who hobbled along in spectacles, dropping a low curtsey to the "quality," taught the hornbook and the primer to a select few of the progeny of the farmers and artisans, and the young ladies would no more have thought of assisting her labours than the blacksmith's.
"You perceive, my dear guardian, that the boy must be loyal; for he offers, here, perfume, that is patronized by no less than two royal dukes: do suffer me to place a box aside, for your especial use: you consent; I see it in your eye. And, Captain Borroughcliffe, as you appear to be forgetting the use of your own language, here is even a hornbook for you! How admirably provided he seems to be.
Thus was Amber instructed and amused: and thus, with nature for his hornbook, and art for his primer, did the little parlour of Edward Forster expand into the "universe." " they boast Their noble birth: conduct us to the tombs Of their forefathers, and from age to age Ascending, trumpet their illustrious race."
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