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Page 22
THE FIRST SCHOOLMASTER OF BOSTON.
By Elizabeth Porter Gould.
When Agassiz requested to go down the ages with no other name than
"Teacher," he not only appropriately crowned his own life-work, but
stamped the vocation of teaching with a royalty which can never be
gainsaid. By this act he dignified with lasting honor all those to whom
the name "Teacher," in its truest meaning, can be applied.
In this work of teaching, one man stands out in the history of New
England who should be better known to the present generation. He was a
benefactor in the colonial days when education was striving to keep her
lamp burning in the midst of the necessary practical work which engaged
the attention of most of the people of that time. His name was Ezekiel
Cheever. When a young man of twenty-three years, he came from
London--where he was born January 25, 1614--to Boston, seven years after
its settlement. The following spring he went to New Haven, where he soon
married, and became actively engaged in founding the colony there. Among
the men who went there the same year was a Mr. Wigglesworth, whose son,
in later years, as the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, gave an account of
Mr. Cheever's success in the work of teaching, which he began soon after
reaching the place. "I was sent to school to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, who at
that time taught school in his own house, and under him in a year or two
I profited so much through y'e blessing of God, that I began to make
Latin & to get forward apace."
Mr. Cheever received as a salary for two or three years twenty pounds;
and in 1643, while receiving this salary, his name is sixth in the list
of planters and their estates, his estate being valued only at twenty
pounds. In the year following, his salary was raised to thirty pounds
a year. This probably was an actual necessity, for his family now
consisted, besides himself and wife, of a son Samuel, five years old,
and a daughter Mary of four years. Ezekiel, born two years before, had
died. This son, Samuel, it may be said in passing, was graduated at
Harvard College in 1659, and was settled as a clergyman at Marblehead,
Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty-five, having been
universally esteemed during his long life.
Besides being the teacher of the new colony, Mr. Cheever entered into
other parts of its work. He was one of the twelve men chosen as "fitt
for the foundacon worke of the church." He was also chosen a member of
the Court for the plantation, at its first session, and in 1646 he was
one of the deputies to the General Court. It is supposed that during
this time he wrote his valuable little book called The Accidence. It
passed through seventeen editions before the Revolution. A copy of the
eighteenth edition, printed in Boston in 1785, is now in the Boston
Athen�um. It is a quaint little book of seventy-two pages, with one
cover gone, and is surely an object of interest to all loving students
of Latin. A copy of the tenth edition is found in Harvard College, while
it has been said that a copy of the seventh is in a private library in
Hartford, Connecticut. The last edition was published in Boston in 1838.
In a prospectus, containing commendations of the work from many eminent
men of learning, the Honorable Josiah Quincy, LL.D., president of
Harvard College, said of it: "A work which was used for more than a
century in the schools of New England, as the first elementary book for
learners of the Latin language; which held its place in some of the most
eminent of those schools, nearly, if not quite, to the end of the last
century; which has passed through at least twenty editions in this
country; which was the subject of the successive labor and improvement
of a man who spent seventy years in the business of instruction, and
whose fame is second to that of no schoolmaster New England has ever
produced, requires no additional testimony to its worth or its merits."
A copy of this edition is now in the library of the Massachusetts
Historical Society. Dr. David W. Cheever, of Boston, a descendant of the
schoolmaster, also has one in his possession.
There is another old book in the Boston Athen�um, published in 1757,
containing three short essays under the title of Scripture Prophecies
Explained. The first one is "On the Restitution of All Things"; the
second is "On St. John's First Resurrection"; and the third, "On the
Personal Coming of Jesus Christ, as Commencing at the Beginning of the
Millenium described in the Apocalypse." These were written by Mr.
Cheever, but at what time of his life there seems to be some doubt. They
indicate his religious zeal, which at this time in New Haven was put
forth for the good of the church. Although he was never ordained to the
ministry, yet he occasionally preached. In 1649, however, he dissented
from the judgment of the church and elders in regard to some cases of
discipline, and for some comments on their action, which seemed to them
severe, they brought charges against him. Two of the principal ones
were: "1. His unseemly gestures and carriage before the church, in the
mixed assembly;" and "2. That when the church did agree to two charges
(namely, of assumption and partiality), he did not give his vote either
to the affirmative or the negative."
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