Altogether, Erasmus must have done very much toward the advancement of a taste for Hellenic culture in our country, and his biographer apprises us that he exhorted the physicians of his time to study that language as more necessary to their profession than to any other. Yet the knowledge of the tongue was very sparingly diffused in England at and long after that time; and Turner, in the dedication of his Herbal to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, complains of the ignorance of the apothecaries of his day even of the Latin names of the herbs which they employed in their pharmacopœia. The illustrious and erudite Dutchman did, doubtless, what he could, and made several of the classics more familiar and intelligible by new editions, with some of which he connected the names of English scholars and prelates; but the time had not arrived for any general movement. II. Knight, in his Life of Dean Colet, enumerates several of the schools which were founded shortly before the Reformation. "This noble impulse of Christian charity," says he, "in the founding of grammar schools, was one of the providential ways and means for bringing about the blessed reformation; and it is therefore observable, that, within thirty years before it, there were more grammar schools erected and endowed in England than had been in three hundred years preceding: one at Chichester by Dr. Edward Scory, bishop of that see, who left a farther benefaction to it by his last will, dated 8th December, 1502: another at Manchester by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who died 1519: another at Binton in Somersetshire, by Dr. Fitzjames, Bishop of London, and his brother, Sir John Fitzjames, lord chief justice of England: a fourth at Cirencester in Gloucestershire, by Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham: a fifth at Roulston in Staffordshire, by Dr. Robert Sherborne, bishop of St. David's, predecessor to Dr. Colet in the deanery of St. Paul's: a sixth at Kingston-upon-Hull, by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely: a seventh at Sutton Colfield in Warwickshire, by Dr. Simon Harman (_alias_ Veysey), bishop of Exeter: an eighth at Farnworth in Lancashire, by Dr. William Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, born there: a ninth at Appleby in Westmoreland, by Stephen Langton, bishop of Winchester: a tenth at Ipswich in Suffolk by cardinal Wolsey: another at Wymbourn in Dorsetshire, by Margaret, countess of Richmond: another at Wolverhampton in Staffordshire, by Sir Stephen Jennings, mayor of London: another at Macclesfield, by Sir John Percival, mayor of London: as also another by the lady Thomasine his wife at St. Mary Wike in Devonshire, where she was born: and another at Walthamstow in Essex by George Monnox, mayor of London, 1515: besides several other schools in other parts of the kingdom." Knight concludes by saying that "the piety and charity of Protestants ran so fast in this channel, that in the next age there wanted rather a regulation of grammar schools than an increase of them."