We are scarcely entitled to plume ourselves on the elevation from which it is our privilege to look back on obsolete educational theories and principles. The change which we witness is of recent date and of political origin. It is within an easily measurable number of years that the democratic wave has loosened and shaken the direct clerical jurisdiction over our schools and our studies. What more significant fact can there be, in proof of the conservative bigotry of those who so long exercised control in schoolroom and college, that a primer compiled in the first quarter of the sixteenth century was still substantially the standard authority less than a hundred years since? When we regard a History of English Literature, and the works which either constitute its principal strength and glory, or even such as, rather from the circumstances connected with them than their own intrinsic importance, lend to it a certain incidental or special value, it becomes natural to inquire by what process or course of training the men and women whose names compose the roll of fame became, or were aided at least in becoming, what they were and remain? As for the women, they followed their studies at home under governesses and professors; and Ballard's volume on Learned Ladies will shew what was capable of accomplishment in a few isolated and conspicuous cases, before any scheme for the higher education of the sex had been broached. But it is with the men that I have more particularly to deal. Every eminent Englishman who has done more or less to augment and enrich our literary stores, and an infinitely greater number who have adopted other vocations, passed of course through the scholastic ordeal. They were sent to school, and perhaps to college; and they had books put into their hands, as our boys have books put into theirs--books written by the scholars of the time up to the knowledge and opinion of the time. With the fewest exceptions, the boy was the father of the man, and what he had himself acquired he was content to see his children acquire. There were centuries during which the lines of instruction and the scope of culture varied little. The greater part of our early English teachers came across the sea, or had been educated there; our best books were modelled on those of French or Roman grammarians, and the improvement in our system was due, when it came, to the _gymnasia_ and academies of the Continent. II. We all know that the Church in early times, before it became a conflicting and mischievous influence, did much valuable work toward the development and progress of literature and art, and was instrumental in preserving many monuments of ancient learning and genius, which might otherwise have perished. But the strong clerical element in the old social system operated beneficially on our English civilisation in another equally important way.