But the irreconcilable diversity of opinions, which has always prevailed, respecting etymology, syntax, pronunciation, and other cardinal points, militated against the success on any very grand scale of an official Primer; and the Tudors, arbitrary and absolute as they were in all questions of political significance, were not prompted by the feeling of the time to resort in such a case as this to penal and peremptory legislation. The eighteenth century saw Lily's Grammar still more or less in vogue under the name of the original author, not to speak of the obligations of its successors to it; but the Tudor book, constructed in some measure out of it, and ushered into existence under the most auspicious and powerful patronage, sank after a not very robust or influential life of six decades (1540-1600) into complete oblivion. Our great Elizabeth has been dead near three hundred years, and no genuine popular demand for mental improvement has yet come from the people. In the sixteenth century--in the Queen's time and in her father's--the spirit which promoted education was based either on political or commercial motives. The universities and schools reared a succession of preceptors who deserted the monastic traditions, and to whom learning was a mere vocation. One large class of the English community sought to acquire the accomplishments which might be serviceable in the Government and at court; another limited its ambition to those which would enable them to prosper in trade or in the wars. V. A class of school-book destined for special use, besides those enumerated in another place, presents itself in the shape of grammatical works dedicated by their authors, not to particular institutions, but to particular localities or parts of the Empire. Edward Buries, who kept school at East Acton in Cromwell's day, accommodated his plan to the requirements of adults, but at the same time announces that it is printed for the advantage of the schools in the counties of Middlesex and Hertford, which strikes us as at once a curious limitation and a sanguine proposal, unless Buries was a Hertfordshire man. This was in 1652. A later writer was more catholic and ambitious in his flight; for in 1712 John Brightland projected a Grammar of the English tongue "for the use of the schools of Great Britain _and Ireland_,"--a fact more particularly noticeable, because it is the first hint of any scheme comprehending the Emerald Isle. I allude elsewhere to the early Accidence drawn up for Scotland by Alexander Hume; and in 1647 the interests of the rising generation in Wales were specially considered by the unnamed introducer of a simplified Latin Primer _in usum juventutis Cambro-Britannicæ_, which aimed at a monopoly of the Principality without prejudice to persons beyond the border.