Those painted cards and blocks, of which I have spoken, had been designed to teach the child to read Latin. The thing was not so surprising in those days as it would be in ours. As a matter of fact, it was as short a step towards the “unknown from the known” (the safest of pedagogic principles) to teach a child, whose mother-tongue was the speech of Lombardy, to read Latin, as to teach him or her to read Italian. So the children learned to read Latin very young indeed. Unless Cecilia was an exception, they learned to read Greek very young, too. The practice was to translate Greek into Latin. Later on, the pupils took up the study of Grammar. The rules of Latin Grammar were deduced from a careful study of the works of Virgil and Cicero, while those of Greek were formulated while the pupils studied Homer and Demosthenes. The barbarous system, from which we are just emerging, which made the study of grammatical rules precede all else, was the unfortunate discovery of the century following Vittorino’s. History was studied in the pages of Sallust, Valerius Maximus, and Livy. Vittorino’s practice was to make his pupils read aloud, insisting on good pronunciation and artistic delivery. He made them learn off by heart, too, the best passages of the poets, orators, and philosophers. And so the children had faultless models to hand, when it was time for them to address themselves to original composition. To balance any tendency this practice might have had to make his pupils adopt other people’s thoughts ready-made, he put them through a very thorough course of mental gymnastics. He aimed, with these exercises, to win for his pupils rather strength and vigour of mentality than subtilty. “I want to teach them to think, and not to split hairs,” expresses a pedagogic maxim of his, of which all his biographers have taken note. He made the youngsters propose difficulties to him, or raised them himself for them, and helped them to solve them. The Mathematical training given in the “Casa Giocosa” was the best in all Italy. At none of the Universities were Mathematics taught in a manner so profitable, or their educative value so fully realised. When the children were a little older they took part in certain oratorical exercises, the idea of which the master had borrowed from the “Schools of Rhetoric” of Antiquity. Many of these boys would, in the years to come, be employed in Diplomatic Missions, and nothing could more fittingly prepare them for such work than these “Disputations.”