A Boy Named
Thomas Howland

Episode 04 covered who ran the grammar school and what philosophy stood behind it. This episode covers what was actually inside it: the books, in order, that a boy worked through for years before Latin and Greek were considered settled enough to risk a college examination on him.

Cotton Mather's funeral sermon for Ezekiel Cheever, already cited in Episode 04 for what it says about Cheever the man, also describes exactly what he taught, in verse Mather composed himself as his former student.

In five lines, Mather names the actual sequence: Lily's grammar first, then Sententiae Pueriles (a collection of moral maxims for memorization), then Cicero's Offices, then Ovid's Metamorphoses, and finally Virgil, with the Book of Psalms ("David") held up as the destination the whole classical course was meant to arrive at. Latin literacy and religious instruction were not separate tracks. They were the same five years.

Cheever taught from his own notes for seventy years but never published a textbook himself. After his death in 1708, his assistant and successor Nathaniel Williams compiled those notes into a printed grammar, published in Boston in 1709 as A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, immediately known simply as Cheever's Accidence. Its subtitle credited the source directly: "compiled in that most easy and accurate Method, wherein the Famous Mr. Ezekiel Cheever Taught... by Seventy years Experience."

The book went through twenty-three editions before its last printing in 1838, a century and a quarter after the man it was named for had died. Eighty pages, three units: the parts of speech, syntax, and a vocabulary list. For most of that run it was, alongside the Bible, the closest thing early America had to a standardized textbook.

The actual book. The title page of the 1724 third edition, held by the Library of Congress's Rare Book and Special Collections Division. A child's hand has written a name across the top, tangled into the printed title itself: Thomas Howland.
Read the Library of Congress's account at blogs.loc.gov →

Until the 1950s, the book was credited to Cheever outright. A 1951 article by classicists John Latimer and Kenneth Murdock made the case that Williams, not Cheever, actually compiled the printed text, working from Cheever's notes after his death. The Library of Congress now lists it accordingly, Cheever as the source and inspiration, Williams as the compiler. Cheever's own notes, in turn, leaned heavily on a sixteenth-century English grammar.

William Lily's A Short Introduction of Grammar was first published in England in 1509 and authorized by Henry VIII in 1542 as the required Latin grammar for every school in the country, a position it held for roughly three centuries. Cheever's own Accidence drew its definitions and models almost entirely from Lily's text. The two books, the English original and the American adaptation, circulated side by side in colonial schoolrooms for decades.

A documented four-stage curriculum from Philadelphia's Latin Academy in 1756 shows how consistent this sequence was across the colonies, not just in Boston. The constancy held for the entire eighteenth century.

A boy entering at the first stage would not reach Horace, the final and most advanced author on the list, for several years. Every step was layered on the last: nothing was dropped, only added to.