DONATUS, Aelius, a grammarian and rhetorician, who taught at Rome in the middle of the 4th century a,d., had the honour of numbering St Jerome among his pupils, and was the author of a number of professional works. We still possess his Ars grammatica, consisting of three parts, De Uteris, syllabis, pedibus et tonis, De octo partibus orationis, and De barbarismo, solecismo, schematibus, et tropis; tho larger portion of his commentary on Terence, in a greatly interpolated condition; and a few fragments of his notes on Virgil preserved and severely criticised by Servius. The first of these works, and especially the section De octo partibus, though possessing little claim to originality, and in fact evidently based on the same authorities which were used by Charisius and Diomedes, attained such popularity as a school-book that in the Middle Ages the writer’s name became a common metonymy for a rudimentary treatise of any sort, and bade fair to furnish as permanent an addition to the English vocabulary as has been obtained in French from the name of Calepinus. Avaricia, for example, in the Vision of Piers Plowman, tells how he “drowe among draperes his donet to learn;” and bishop Pecock published about 1440 a Donat into Christian Religion. On the introduction of printing the little book was one of the first rendered accessible by the new process, and editions were soon multiplied to such an extent that the bibliography of Donatus is nearly as intricate a subject as that of the Bible. Copies still exist, though in a mutilated condition, of impressions produced by the early wooden-block system, details about which may be found in Sotzmann’s “Aelteste Geschichte der Xylographie” in the Historische Taschenbuch for 1837. The Ars Grammatica is reprinted by Putsch in ...