^{Note 1 in page 495} The Englishe Scholemaister, teachinge all his Schollers of what Age soeuer the most easie short and perfect Order of distinct Readinge and true Writinge our Englishe Tonge (London, 1596), p. 32.

^{Note 2 in page 495} As shown in the writer's study, The Rise of Dictionary Authority in English, in preparation, this “Table” of Coote's was the principal source of the “first” English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (London, 1604).

^{Note 3 in page 496} Op. cit., pp. 32–33.

^{Note 4 in page 496} Ibid., pp. 35–36.

^{Note 5 in page 496} Thomas Hunt, Libellus Orthographicus: or, The Diligent School-boy's Directory. Being certain plain and profitable Dialogue-wise-placed Rules and Directions, for the better Understanding of (especially) the English-orthography (London, 1661), pp. 91–99.

^{Note 6 in page 496} Ibid., p. 98.

^{Note 7 in page 496} The Complete English Scholar (London, 1753), p. 499.

^{Note 8 in page 496} Rollo La Verne Lyman, English Grammar in American Schools before 1850 (Washington, D. C., 1922), pp. 43–55.

^{Note 9 in page 496} “Idea of the English School” (written 1750, printed 1751), in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York, 1905), iii, 21.

^{Note 10 in page 497} Ibid., p. 22.

^{Note 11 in page 497} Edwin M. Stone, The Life and Recollections of John Howland (Providence, 1857), p. 17.

^{Note 12 in page 497} Ibid., pp. 17–18.

^{Note 13 in page 498} New-Hampshire Spy, reprinted in American Poems, ed. Elihu Hubbard Smith (Litchfield, Conn., [1793]), pp. 208–209; also reprinted in The Columbian Muse (Philadelphia, 1794), p. 219, and in A Library of American Literature, ed. E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson (New York, 1888) iv, 129. The attribution to Biglow is from Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1800–1900) (New York, 1937), p. 24, note 3.

^{Note 14 in page 498} Letter of December 10, 1860, printed in the American Journal of Education, ed. Barnard, xiii (March, 1863), 131.

^{Note 15 in page 498} Webster himself wrote in A Grammatical Institute of the English Language ... Part i (Hartford, 1783), p. 9: “The proper sound of ti is that of sh. Then if we make three syllables of these words, they will stand thus, na-sh-on, mo-sh-on, and we have one syllable without any vowel and consequently without any sound. But they are not words of three syllables and are not considered as such, except in the old version of the psalms.” The change was made at the suggestion of Samuel Stanhope Smith of Princeton, according to Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster, Schoolmaster to America (New York, 1936), p. 55; cf. p. 64. Jeremiah Day, president of Yale College, recalled in a letter of August 15, 1865, printed in the American Journal of Education, ed. Barnard, xvi (March, 1866), 126: “When Webster's [spelling book] was first introduced, it excited much curiosity, especially his making a single syllable of tion.”

^{Note 16 in page 498} Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents (Augusta, Ga., 1835), p. 76. He thus described the method, ibid., footnote: “It was usual, when either of the vowels constituted a syllable of a word, to pronounce it and denote its independent character, by the words just mentioned, thus: ‘a by itself, a—c-o-r-n corn acorn,’—‘e by itself, e—v-i-1, evil,’ &c.”

^{Note 17 in page 499} F. Clement, The Petie Schole with an English Orthographic, wherein by rules lately prescribed is taught a method to enable both a Childe to reade perfectly within one moneth, & also the vnperfect to write English aright (London, 1587), pp. 13–15. From internal evidence it is clear that everything before p. 31 is to be dated 1576. This important work was called to my attention by Prof. T. W. Baldwin. Of the examples given by Clement, only imagine has the full cumulative form.

^{Note 18 in page 499} This point was again made by Warren Burton, The District School as It Was, ed. Clifton Johnson (first publ. Boston, 1833; ed. New York, 1928), p. 59, in describing the feelings of a girl who, with much pride, has reached the head of the spelling-class: “I pity you, poor girl; for James has an ally that will blow over your proud castle in the air. Old Boreas, the king of the winds, will order a snow-storm by and by, to block up the roads, so that none but booted and weather-proof males can get to school; and you, Miss, must lose a day or two, and then find yourself at the foot with those blockhead boys who always abide there.”

^{Note 19 in page 499} Am. Journal of Education, xiii, 131.

^{Note 20 in page 499} Recollections of a Lifetime (New York, 1856), i, 141.

^{Note 21 in page 500} “History of a Common School from 1801 to 1831,” in American Annals of Education, i (November, 1831), 509. The authorship and locale of this record (Spindle Hill, Conn.) are revealed by A. Bronson Alcott, New Connecticut (Boston, 1887), p. 129. It is erroneously attributed to A. Bronson Alcott in the Am. Journal of Education, ed. Barnard, xvi (March, 1866), 130–134.

^{Note 22 in page 500} Am. Annals of Education, i, 512. Cf. Warren Burton, op. cit., pp. 56–65.

^{Note 23 in page 500} George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York, 1894), pp. 105–106, where he speaks of this subject as “absorbing into itself most of the interest and enthusiasm of the schools.” The growing homage to Noah Webster's American Spelling-book abetted this tendency. As Clifton Johnson, Old-Time Schools and School-Books (New York, 1904), p. 172, has said of this period: “the pupil who could ‘spell down the whole school’ ranked second only to him who surpassed the rest in arithmetic.”

^{Note 24 in page 500} John P. Cowles, “Miss Z. P. Grant—Mrs. William B. Banister,” in the American Journal of Education, ed. Barnard, xxx (September, 1880), 613.

^{Note 25 in page 500} D. P. Thompson, Locke Amsden, or the Schoolmaster: a Tale (Boston, 1847), p. 38.

^{Note 26 in page 500} An anonymous poem in the Maine Farmer, cited in Richard Allen Foster, The School in American Literature (Baltimore, 1930), pp. 51–52.

^{Note 27 in page 501} An anonymous writer, quoted in William Mason Cornell, The Life and Public Career of Hon. Horace Greeley (Boston, 1872), p. 34.

^{Note 28 in page 501} A biographer, James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley (New York, 1855), pp. 42–43, states: “He spelt incessantly in school and out of school. He would lie on the floor at his grandfather's house, for hours at a time, spelling hard words, all that he could find in the Bible and the few other books within his reach. It was the standing amusement of the family to try and puzzle the boy with words, and no one remembers succeeding.”

^{Note 29 in page 501} Quoted ibid., p. 45.

^{Note 30 in page 501} Letter of April 14, 1845, printed in Horace Greeley, his First Autobiography (Brooklyn, New York, 1873), pp. xiii–xiv. He told the story again in his Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868), p. 44.

^{Note 31 in page 501} William Watts Folwell, The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer of Culture, ed. Solon J. Buck (Minneapolis, 1933), p. 15.

^{Note 32 in page 502} Benjamin Franklin Taylor, January and June (New York, 1854), pp. 255–260.

^{Note 33 in page 503} Knickerbocker, xxvii (March, 1846), 279.

^{Note 34 in page 503} Dean Dudley, Pictures of Life in England and America (Boston, 1851), pp. 247–248. Similar nostalgic comment is found in Ellen Chapman (Hobbs) Rollins (under pen-name of E. H. Arr), New England Bygones (Philadelphia, 1880), p. 209; and Mary B. Claflin, Brampton Sketches: Old-Time New England Life (New York, 1890), pp. 130–132.

^{Note 35 in page 503} James G. Leyburn, Frontier Folkways (New Haven, Conn., 1935), p. 3.

^{Note 36 in page 503} “Journal of Ebenezer Mattoon Chamberlain, 1832–35,” ed. Louise Fogle, in the Indiana Magazine of History, xv (September, 1919), 241. He used this method to get an audience for a discussion of his disciplinary problems, and he “gave a very serious and Yankee-like lecture.” For this reference and some others, I am indebted to the collections of Sir William Craigie's Dictionary of American English, under spelling-school.

^{Note 37 in page 504} This proviso throws light on the hold that Webster's spelling-book had on the public mind. As Harry R. Warfel says in Noah Webster, Schoolmaster to America, p. 76, the spelling bee “demanded a uniform arbiter throughout a county and even a state. Webster's book early was given this position, and although other books printed publick and honour, the contestants spelled the words public and honor.”

^{Note 38 in page 504} Western Clearings (New York, 1845), pp. 158–159.

^{Note 39 in page 504} Charles B. Johnson, Illinois in the Fifties (Champaign, Ill., 1918), pp. 104–105; Earnest Elmo Calkins, They Broke the Prairie (New York, 1937), p. 246, concerning Galesburg, Ill.

^{Note 40 in page 504} History of Emmet County and Dickinson County, Iowa (Chicago, Ill.: Pioneer Publ. Co., 1917), i, 101, where the procedure of a typical match is described. Miss Mamie Meredith has collected accounts from early days in Nebraska, as she notes in American Speech, xiii (February, 1938), 21, note 5.

^{Note 41 in page 505} Bret Harte, “The Spelling Bee at Angels,” in Writings (1896), xii, 184.

^{Note 42 in page 505} Ibid., pp. 184–187. Regarding the same locale, cf. a letter by Mrs. Roza Ingram Odell, in the New York Times, March 4, 1928, iii, 4f: “As a little school girl in a mining camp in California, when the old blue back spelling book was our authority, I participated in a ‘spelling bee’ when the boys were arranged on one side of the room and the girls on the opposite side. The teacher or some grown-up conducted the affair and alternated the words between the participants. On a word pronounced like ‘demean,’ after the usual three trials, I met my Waterloo. It really was not a disgraceful defeat, for how could a youngster of only 9 or 10 years know anything about ‘demesne’?”

^{Note 43 in page 505} Plain People (New York, 1929), p. 23.

^{Note 44 in page 505} Nation, xiv (January 18, 1872), 45a.

^{Note 45 in page 505} The Hoosier Schoolmaster, in Hearth and Borne, iii (Oct. 7, 1871), 788a. Eggleston was editor of the paper and wrote the installments week by week as needed.

^{Note 46 in page 506} Ibid. (October 14, 1871), 808b.

^{Note 47 in page 506} Ibid., p. 809a.—Phillips was an actual person of this very name in Eggleston's home town; and when the story, contrary to his expectation, was reprinted in the Vevay Reveille, Phillips was highly incensed to find it set down that “Except in this one art of spelling he was of no account,” and he went to the editor's office to thrash him. However, as Eggleston relates in the preface to the Library ed. of 1892 (New York, n. d.), p. 24: “As time passed on, Phillips found himself a lion. Strangers desired an introduction to him as a notability, and invited the champion to dissipate with them at the soda fountain in the village drug store. It became a matter of pride with him that he was the most famous speller in the world.” Cf. corroboration of this eventuality, with other details, in George Cary Eggleston, The First of the Hoosiers; Reminiscences of Edward Eggleston (Philadelphia, 1903), pp. 46–50, and his Recollections of a Varied Life (New York, 1910), pp. 34–35.

^{Note 48 in page 506} Hearth and Home, iii, 809b.—Eggleston recurred to the subject of spelling contests in later novels, The End of the World (New York, cop. 1872), p. 111; The Circuit Rider (New York, 1872), p. 30; and The Hoosier School-boy (first publ., 1883; New York, 1916), pp. 240–242.

^{Note 49 in page 506} It was not until this revival that the name spelling bee had much currency, the older terms being spelling school and spelling match. The word bee was reserved for convivial affairs, principally with apple, husking, logging, quilting, raising, and stone, as discussed by M. M. Mathews, Notes and Comments upon American English Made by British Travelers and Observers, 1770–1850 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1935), pp. 453–454; while the name spelling-school clothed the institution with the idea of educational improvement. Frank Luther Mott, in The Familiar Speech of the Iowa Pioneers (Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1919), p. 44, while noting that bee is a New England term and parly the Southernism, chooses the form spelling match, on the basis of personal information, as the regular Iowa term. Cf. mention in the New York Daily Tribune, February 13, 1880, p. 4c, of “an old-fashioned spelling match.” The derogatory phrase spelling-fight, used by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer (1876), is rightly classified by Robert L. Ramsay, in A Mark Twain Lexicon, “The University of Missouri Studies,” xiii, No. 1 (January, 1938), p. lxxviii (cf. p. 217) as a “nonce combination.” Eggleston was amused at the French translation, concourse d'épellalion, as he wrote in his preface of 1892 in The Hoosier Schoolmaster (New York, n.d.), p. 15, finding it “something more stately in its French dress.” English writers, curiously mistaking the American idiom, assumed that each of the contestants was a “bee.” Thus Tom Kershaw in The Spelling Bee (Manchester, 1876), p. 4, writes: “It was, however, agreed that the ‘bees’ should be allowed to retain their seats”; also, ibid., certain words “left only three ‘bees‘—two boys and a young lady.” Herbert W. Horwill, in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Oxford, 1935), pp. 24–25, reflects this background by writing that “it seems strange that the word bee should not be applied to an individual member of the gathering but to the gathering as a whole, for which hive would surely be a more appropriate metaphor.” If the word bee in America (Thornton and DAE, 1769 ff., in this sense) ever passed through the semantic stage postulated by the English, no record of it survives.

^{Note 50 in page 507} Times (London), April 16, 1875, p. 4d. In his presidential address before the American Philological Association, July 13, 1875, as printed in its Proceedings, 7th Ann. Session, p. 7, J. Hammond Trumbull spoke of “The ‘spelling matches’ which, last winter, became epidemic.”

^{Note 51 in page 507} Times (L.), April 16, 1875, p. 4d. As often recorded in England, the audience was somewhat unruly. As the correspondent reported: “Then a gentleman spelt ‘reseat’ for another word that was pronounced the same way (receipt), and the Committee ruling him out there was a great disturbance. The gentleman would not ‘go out,’ claiming that it was a ‘doubleheader,’ and that he spelt it right, and, on his appealing to the audience, the vast crowd, with an unanimous shout, decided that he should be kept in, and so he remained.” Later: “... a discussion arose about the pronunciation of the elocutionist who gave out the words. It was demanded that some one else should take his place, and there were hisses and cheers, dozens rising in the audience and arguing the question at once.” The words that overcame the last-surviving contestants were 6th, purview, 5th, testacious, 4th, distension, 3rd, infinitessimal (sic), and 2nd, hauser.

^{Note 52 in page 508} He told this story again in his Autobiography, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York, 1924), ii, 57–58, as a happening in 1869, concerning his sister-in-law, Mrs. Crane, but with the text-word as California.

^{Note 53 in page 508} The St. Louis Republican, May 23, 1875, as reprinted in the Missouri Historical Review, xxv (April, 1931), 532–533.

^{Note 54 in page 509} Quoted in the Times (London), Feb. 1, 1876, p. 10c.

^{Note 55 in page 509} New York Times, March 30, 1930, i, 24gh; also in Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York, 1927), ii, 125.

^{Note 56 in page 509} With America's linguistic welfare close to his aching heart, the editor of the Saturday Review, xli (January 8, 1876), 42b, stated: “The popularity of these competitions in the United States is one of the many fortunate circumstances of that country. It cannot be too often impressed on American speakers that when they come to write they must add a ‘g’ to the word which they call ‘fixins,’ and that they must not spell calculate with an ‘i.’ ”

^{Note 57 in page 509} The Common School System in Connecticut, a pamphlet of 16 pp., 1828, quoted in the American Journal of Education, ed. Barnard, v (1858), 145. Whittier's poem of 1870, “In School-Days,” in Writings (Cambridge, 1888), ii, 163, gives an incident in this exercise.

^{Note 58 in page 509} Homespun; or, Five and Twenty Years Ago (New York, 1867), p. 138.

^{Note 59 in page 510} George Cary Eggleston, The First of the Hoosiers; Reminiscences of Edward Eggleston, pp. 44–45.

^{Note 60 in page 510} Writing of March 27, 1906, in Mark Twain's Autobiography, ii, 257.

^{Note 61 in page 510} Writing of February 7, 1906, ibid., ii, 67–68. This practice was described by Clifton Johnson, Old-Time Schools and School-Books, pp. 172–174, as follows: “There were instances, too, where the spelling classes had prizes—possibly a half dollar for the oldest class, a quarter for the next, and a ‘nine-pence’ for the little ones. Each prize coin was drilled and hung on a string, and the winners in the afternoon spelling lessons were entitled to carry a coin suspended from their necks until the next morning, when these decorations were turned over to the teacher to be again contended for. A record was kept, and at the close of the term the child who had carried the coin home the greatest number of times was given permanent possession.”

^{Note 62 in page 510} Margaret. Miller, letter of January 27, 1927, in History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, vii (1929), 463.

^{Note 63 in page 510} Josephus Daniels, quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times, ii, 123–124.

^{Note 64 in page 510} Senator Simeon Fess, ibid., ii, 124.

^{Note 65 in page 510} Eugene Davenport, Professor Emeritus of Agriculture, University of Illinois, quoted ibid.; he wrote: “The class stood in a row with toes on the same crack of the floor, as the last ‘exercise’ of every school day. Beginning at the ‘head’ the teacher pronounced from the lesson to each in turn. If any one missed, the next tried and the next, down the line until some one, either through superior knowledge, or profiting by the trial and error of his less fortunate fellows, or else by hasty application of the principle of reductio ad absurdam, hit on the correct spelling, whereat he took his place up the line just above the one who first missed, horning everybody down one notch accordingly.”

^{Note 66 in page 510} Mrs. Mary Davison Bradford, Pioneers! O Pioneers! (Evansville, Wisconsin, 1937), pp. 170–181.

^{Note 67 in page 510} Boy Life on the Prairie (Revised ed.; New York, cop. 1899), pp. 340–341.

^{Note 68 in page 511} For instance, a Professor D. Jones of Kansas City issued a perpetual challenge to all comers, and on one occasion spelled 15,000 words, missing only 14, while his opponent missed 17. See the New York Times, February 12, 1922, vi, 10a. A Mrs. Mary Lewis Cole of Rochester, New York (ibid., January 15, 1936, p. 20a), “won national recognition” by her ability to spell words either backwards or forwards. In 1913 a bee held in Washington, D. C., by the National Press Club, attended by President W. Wilson, with David Houston, Secretary of Agriculture, as master of ceremonies, attracted widespread attention, and Senators Willis of Ohio and Poindexter of Washington were declared champions (ibid., March 23, 1930, x, 12h, and March 29, 1930, p. 12h).

^{Note 69 in page 511} William Crary Brownell, “The Academy and the Language,” in Proceedings of the Special Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters ... February 22, 1917, p. 19.

^{Note 70 in page 511} On this point Edwin E. Slosson, in The American Spirit in Education, “Chronicles of America,” ed. Allen Johnson, xxiv (New Haven, 1921), pp. 110–111, says: “The spelling bee was not a mere drill to impress certain facts upon the plastic memory of youth. It was also one of the recreations of adult life, if recreation be the right word for what was taken so seriously by every one. The spectacle of a school trustee standing with a blue-backed Webster open in his hand while gray-haired men and women, one row being captained by the schoolmaster and the rival team by the minister, spelled each other down is one that it would be hard to reproduce under a more centralized and less immediately popular form of school government.” On the social milieu in which spelling bees thrive, see B. A. Botkin, The American Play-Party Song (Lincoln, Neb., 1937), pp. 19–20, 361–381.

^{Note 71 in page 511} New York Times, March 2, 1924, ix, 4g; March 23, 1930, x, 12gh.

^{Note 72 in page 511} Cf. L. H. Vanhouten, “Stupidities of Spelling Bees,” in the Educational Review, lxxiii (March, 1927), 128. In an experiment by A. I. Gates and Frederick B. Graham, “The Value of Various Games and Activities in Teaching Spelling,” in the Journal of Educational Research, xxviii (September, 1934), 1–9, contrasting a group in the Brooklyn schools that used spelling matches with another that studied straight lists, it was found that there were no significant differences in the resulting efficiency in spelling, although the pupils enjoyed the games much more. There has been much comment on the uselessness of the ability to spell hard words “in an age becoming more and more oral.” See New York Times, November 28, 1933, p. 20d; and cf. February 25, 1930, p. 3d; May 31, 1934, p. 18d; February 17, 1937, p. 20d; etc.

^{Note 73 in page 512} As “one of the little band of despised and despairing classicists,” a correspondent of the New York Times, March 14, 1937, iv, 8e, wrote: “I see a ray of hope in the growing popularity of the old-fashioned spelling bee. Here is the utilitarian motive so long demanded as a justification for teaching Latin and Greek.” As he clinched his point by the fact that certain students were unable to spell noumenon, his “utilitarian motive” was rather weak. Another commentator (ibid., February 12, 1922, vi, 10a) rejoiced in the bees as “an antidote to jazz and frivolity.” This attitude must be discounted, however, as merely the perennial dither over the younger generation; for instance, in the Times (London), Feb. 1, 1876, p. 10c, Sir Charles Reed praised the spelling bees as “more healthy, useful, and elevating than the sensational amusements in which young people now indulge.”

^{Note 74 in page 512} Cf. George H. McKnight, “Conservatism in American Speech,” in American Speech, i (October, 1925), 1–17; George Philip Krapp, The English Language in America (New York, 1925) i, 58–59, 399; and Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language (New York, 1935), pp. 443–444.