The copious storehouse of equivalent phrases in Latin composition shews us in what wide vogue that language was in England at this period, as there is no corresponding facility offered for persons desirous of enlarging their English vocabulary. The influence of the scholars of France, Italy, Holland, and Germany long kept our vernacular in the background, and retarded the study of English by Englishmen; but the uprise of a taste for the French and Italian probably gave the first serious blow to the supremacy of the dead tongues, as they are called, and it became by degrees as fashionable for gentlemen and ladies to read and speak the languages in which Molière and Tasso wrote as the hybrid dialect in which erudite foreigners had been used to correspond and compose. Whittinton styles himself on the title-pages of several of his pieces _laureatus_ and _protovates Angliæ_. In one place he speaks of being "primus in Angliâ lauri coronam gestans," and elsewhere he professes to be _magister grammatices_. As Warton and others have speculated a good deal on the real nature and import of the dignity which this early scholar claimed in regard to the laurel crown or wreath, it may be worth noting that Wood furnishes the annexed explanation of the point:-- "In the beginning of the year 1513, he supplicated the venerable congregation of regents under the name and title of Robert Whittington, a secular chaplain and a scholar of the art of rhetoric: that, whereas he had spent fourteen years in the study of the said art, and twelve years in the informing of boys, it might be sufficient for him that he might be laureated. This supplication being granted, he was, after he had composed an hundred verses, which were stuck up in public places, especially on the door or doors of St. Mary's Church [Oxford], very solemnly crowned, or his temples adorned with a wreath of laurel, that is, decorated in the arts of grammar and rhetoric, 4 July the same year." The biographer of Colet is undoubtedly correct in supposing that the ancient poet-laureatship was nothing more than an academical degree, and that in this sense, and in no other, Skelton bore that designation, as well as Bernardus Andreas, who was tutor to Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII. It also appears from the account of the decoration of Whittinton that he had commenced his qualification for a schoolmaster as far back as 1499, which is reconcilable with the date assigned to his birth (1480). V. Educational tracts produced by other writers--_Parvula_--Holt's _Milk for Children_--Horman's _Vulgaria_ and its singular curiosity and value--The author's literary quarrel with Whittinton--The contemporary foreign teachers--Specimen of the Grammar of Guarini of Verona (1470)--Vestiges of the literature current at Oxford in the beginning of the sixteenth century--The printed works of Johannes de Garlandia.