The founder of St. Paul's, in his statutes, 1518, prescribed what Latin authors he would have read in the school. He recites, in the first place, the Latin version by Erasmus of his _Precepts_ and the _Copia Verborum_ of the same Dutch scholar. He then proceeds to enumerate some of the early Christian writers, whose piety was superior to their Latinity, Lactantius, Prudentius, and others. But while he does not say that Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, and Terence are to be used, he utterly eschews and forbids such classics as Juvenal and Persius, whom he evidently indicates when he speaks of "Laten adulterate which ignorant, blinde foles brought into this worlde, and with the same hath dystained and poysonyd the olde Laten speche and the veray Romayne tongue which in the tyme of Tully and Salust, and Virgill, and Terence, was usid,"--which is so far reasonable from his standard; but he adds incongruously enough: "whiche also sainte Jerome, and sainte Ambrose, and saint Austen, and many holy doctors lernid in theyre tymes." Whereby we are left at liberty to infer that these holy doctors were on a par with Virgil and Sallust, Cicero and Terence. What sort of Latin would be current now if all the great writers had perished, and we had had only the works of the Fathers as text-books? We all have pretty similar beginnings, as the _prima stamina_ of a man and any other vertebrate are said to be undistinguishable to a certain point; and as St. Jerome learned his accidence of Donatus, so Virgil got his rudiments. But much as we owe to St. Jerome, it was a mischievous error to adopt him or such authors as Lactantius in a public school, where the real object was to instil a knowledge of the Latin language in its integrity and purity. It was a mischievous error, and it was, at the same time, a perfectly natural one. We are not to blame Colet and his coadjutors for having been so narrow and so biassed; but it must always be a matter of regret and surprise that St. Paul's, and all our other training institutions, public and proprietary, should, down to the present era, have been under the sway and management of men whose intellectual vision was as contracted and oblique as that of Colet, without the excuse which it is so easy to find for him.