A more obscure and repellent series of grammatical dissertations can hardly be imagined; yet Sulpicius holds a high rank among the promoters of modern education, as the precursor of all those, such as Robert Whittinton, John Stanbridge, and William Lily, who, after the revival of learning and the institution of the printing-press, prepared the way for improved methods and more enlightened preceptors. His followers naturally went beyond him; but Sulpicius was doubtless as much in advance of his forerunners as Richard Morris is in advance of Lindley Murray. After the restoration of letters, Sulpicius seems to have been the pioneer in re-erecting grammar into a science, and formulating its rules and principles on a systematic basis. In enumerating the aids to learning which the English received from the Continent, we must not overlook Alexander Gallus, or Alexander de Villâ Dei, a French Minorite and school-teacher of the thirteenth century, who reduced the system of Priscian to a new metrical plan, doubtless for the use of his own pupils, as well as his personal convenience and satisfaction. The _Doctrinale_ of Alexander, which is in leonine verse, circulated more or less in MS. during his life, and was one of the earliest books committed to the press, as a fragment on vellum with the types of Laurence Coster of Haarlem establishes. It was repeatedly published abroad, but does not really seem to have ever gained a strong footing among ourselves, since three editions of it are all that I can trace as having come from London presses, and of these the first was in 1503. It did not, in fact, command attention till we were on the eve of a great reform in our school-books; and while in France, if not elsewhere abroad, it preserved its popularity during two or three centuries, till it was supplanted by the Grammar and Syntax of Despauterius about 1515, here in a dozen years it had run its course, and scarcely left even the marks of its influence behind. IV. But the prototype of all the grammatical writers and teachers of early times in this as well as other countries was ÆLIUS DONATUS, a Roman professor of the fourth century, who probably acquired his experience from Priscian and the other works published under the Empire upon his favourite science, and who had the honour to number Saint Jerome among his disciples. Donatus is the author of a System of Grammar in three parts, and of a series of Prefaces and Scholia to Terence; and his reputation became so great and was so widely diffused, that a _Donatus_ or _Donet_ was a well-understood synonym for a Primer, and John of Basing even christens his Greek Grammar, compiled about 1240, _Donatus Græcorum_. Langland, in his _Vision concerning Piers Ploughman_, written a century later, says-- "Thaune drowe I me amonges draperes my donet to lerne;"