Now, in this little rhetorical sketch of Jouvancy's, we may take note of two features, one pedagogical, the other historical. The distinctively pedagogical cast is put upon these private studies, in as much as they are magisterial, being pursued with express reference to the Master's chair. The historical feature, to be noted here, is common to the Jesuit educational literature in general; which, in its many departments, marked several epochs and, as a whole, made an era in education.
Thus, at the time of the _Ratio Studiorum_, there were indeed several guides of the very first rank, in the path of a literary formation. They were three in number, Cicero, Quintilian, and Aristotle. From these the Professor of Rhetoric had to derive his matter and make clear his method. The _Ratio_ names them as his text-books for the Precepts.[166] From these sources the literary activity and experience of many generations of Professors, in several hundred colleges of the Order, tended to mark out the best line to follow, for the attainment of literary perfection. The literary course, in which they themselves were proximately formed for the duties of teaching, served but to organize the matter, and to digest it. The numberless pedagogical text-books, issued before Jouvancy, and after him, exhibit the progress of the movement during the several centuries. And, at present, the system may be seen in its most developed form, if one consults the newest guides, like Father Kleutgen's _Ars Dicendi_, or Father Broeckaert's _Le Guide du Jeune Littérateur_. But, long before our day, the most ordinary systems of literary instruction have embodied the method; and the commonest text-books have it.
A similar epoch was made, as early as 1572, by the Grammar of Father Emmanuel Alvarez, _De Institutione Grammatica Libri Tres_, a work adopted by the _Ratio_, then republished in editions so numerous as to baffle all calculation, translated either entire, or in part, into thirteen languages; while one portion, well-known in our times as a "Latin Prosody," is credited to divers authors or publishers.[167] The latest editions of this Grammar, issued in different languages, are of the last twenty-five years. This era of development in grammar superseded the subtleties and metaphysical abstractions of mediæval methods.[168]