I. Of independent tracts intended for the use of our early schools, there were several either anonymous or written by persons whom we do not recognise as writers of more than a single production. In the former category is placeable the small piece published three or four times by Wynkyn de Worde about 1509, under the title of _Parvula_ or _Longe Parvula_. It is a series of rules for translation and other exercises in the form of question and answer, thus:-- "Q. What shall thou do whan thou hast an englysshe to make in latyn? "A. I shal reherse myne englysshe ones, twyes, or thryes, and loke out my pryncypal, & aske ȳ questyon, who or what." A second publication is the _Milk for Children_ of John Holt, of Magdalen College, Oxford, who had the honour of numbering among his pupils Sir Thomas More. One of the most interesting points about the little book to us nowadays is that it is accompanied by some Latin hexameters and pentameters and an epigram in the same language by More. The latter has the air of having been sent to Holt, and inserted by him with the heading which occurs before it, where the future Chancellor is termed "disertus adolescentulus." A decided singularity of this volume is the quaint device of the author for impressing his precepts on those who read his pages or attended his academy by arranging the cases and declensions on woodcuts in the shape of outstretched hands. Besides his _Milk for Children_ and the _Parvulorum Institutio_, to the latter of which I have already referred, Holt appears to me the most likely person to have compiled the tract called _Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione_, a small grammatical manual based on that of his predecessor or even colleague at Magdalen School; and this may be the work to which Knight points where he says that Holt put forth an Accidence and Grammar concurrently with his other tract, though the biographer of Dean Colet errs in placing Stanbridge after Holt in chronological sequence. Another of the miscellaneous unofficial pieces, answering very nearly to the mediæval _Nominale_, has no other title than _Os, Facies, mentum_, and is a Latin poem descriptive of the human form, first printed in 1508, with an interlinear English gloss. It begins thus:-- a mouthe a face a chyne a toth a throot a tonge Os facies mentū dens guttur lingua a berde a browe abrye a forhede tēples a lype Barba supercilium ciliū frons tēpora labrū roffe of the mouth palatum There is nothing, of course, on the one hand, recondite, or, on the other, very edifying in this; but it is a sample of the method pursued in these little ephemerides nearly four centuries ago.