At the period when the school at Magdalen was established by Bishop Waynflete, the teachers in our own country and on the Continent were working on nearly parallel lines, just as the religious service-books printed at Paris and Rouen were made, by a few subsidiary alterations, to answer the English use; and indeed in the case of the grammatical system of Sulpicius an impression was executed at Paris in 1511 for Wynkyn de Worde, and imported hither for sale, without any differences or variations from the text employed in the Parisian gymnasium and elsewhere through the French dominions. It was not till the English element in these books gained the ascendancy, having been introduced by furtive degrees and by way of occasional or incidental illustration, that a marked native character was stamped on our school-books. Ultimately, as we know, the Latin proportion sensibly diminished, and even a preponderant share of space was accorded to the vernacular. I have spoken of Ælius Donatus as an author whose Grammar enjoyed a long celebrity and an enormously wide acceptance, down from his own age to the date of the revival of learning. It was used throughout the Continent, in England, and in Scotland. But prior to our earliest race of native grammarians and philologists, there were several labourers in this great and fruitful field, who began, towards the latter end of the fifteenth century, to cast off the trammels of the Roman professor, and to set up little systems of their own, of course more or less built upon Donatus. Such an one was Guarini of Verona, whose _Regulæ Grammaticales_ were originally published at Venice in 1470, and are regarded as one of the earliest specimens of her prolific press. These rules were frequently reissued, and I have before me an edition of 1494. The book, which consists only of twenty-two leaves or forty-four pages, begins with describing the parts of speech, then takes the various sorts of verbs, and follows with the adverbs, participles, and so forth. There is a set of verses on the irregular nouns, and a second headed _Versus differentiales_ or synonyms; and some of the illustrations are given in Italian. The section on diphthongs forms an Appendix. I merely adduce a cursory notice of Guarini to keep the student in mind of the collateral progress of this class of learning abroad, while our own men were developing it among us with the occasional assistance of foreigners. Perhaps I may just copy out the following small specimen, where the glosses are in the writer's vernacular:-- "Largior ris per donare e p̱ essere donato Experior ris per p̱uare e per essere p̱uato Ueneror ris per honorare e p̱ essere honorato Moror ris per aspectare e p̱ eēre aspectato Osculor ris per basare e p̱ essere basiato."