The opposition to it is not strong; the children of the humbler classes freely avail themselves of it, and that with the full consent of their parents. Nor is the conscientious objection of much force in the case of schools which are only day schools, and in which the rudiments alone are taught; this is not the case of education of the higher kind, in which this objection is perhaps decisive; and it cannot be said that the National Schools have, in any sense, impaired the religion of the Irish people.[185] I pass from elementary to schools of a secondary kind in Ireland. The Diocesan Schools of Elizabeth were nearly all secondary schools; but they were never numerous, and have all but disappeared. The two first Stuarts made an attempt to establish secondary education in Ireland on a larger scale. They founded the 'Free Royal Schools,' as they have been called, now seen at Armagh, Cavan, Dungannon, Portora, and Raphoe; they endowed them with lands perhaps worth in our day, L6000 a year; they looked forward to a time when they might rival Eton, Winchester, and the great public schools of England. Erasmus Smith established three considerable 'grammar schools,' and granted valuable estates for their support; a tolerably large number of secondary schools was also founded, from time to time, by benefactors of the dominant race in Ireland: of these Kilkenny College, a seminary created by the House of Ormond, which reared Swift and Berkeley, was the most conspicuous. These schools, though often nominally open to different creeds, became, nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, under the Protestant ascendency, supreme in the land, restricted to the young of the Protestant caste; they felt the effects of monopoly, and of the corruption prevailing in the State; the education they afforded was, for the most part, bad; their governing bodies and masters were often grasping and selfish. After the relaxation of the penal code, the Irish Catholics began to found secondary schools; their exertions were, in a high degree, praiseworthy; and though these schools received no support from the State, some of them have done really excellent work. A number, too, of secondary schools were established in Ulster, for the most part for Presbyterian uses; some of these are sectarian, some open to all faiths; some have, others have not, received assistance from the State; in several the education given has been, on the whole, good. A few secondary schools--St. Columba is much the best--have also been founded within the last century, usually for the benefit of the late Established Church of Ireland.