The staff consisted at the outset of a head-master and three ushers, whose united emoluments were forty pounds a year, and the first chief teacher of the school was Richard Mulcaster. It appears that the earliest Probation-Day, as it was termed, was in November 1564, when Dean Nowell and others examined the ushers and the boys with a very gratifying result. These appositions were renewed in 1565, and probably still continue from year to year. They commenced in 1564 at eight o'clock in the morning, and so they did in my time. The practice of visitation by the Court on this day seems to have ceased in 1606. Alderman Sir Thomas White, some time subsequently to the foundation of the school by the Company, augmented the endowment, so as to enable the institution to develop itself, and enlarge its sphere of utility in connection with Oxford University and in other ways. White was a member of the Court when the scheme was adopted, but he was not, strictly speaking, as he has been usually termed and considered, the founder of Merchant Taylors'. We do not arrive, meanwhile, at any clear or complete notion of the books which were used at the school, but it is to be inferred that Lily's Grammar was the Latin text-book. In the rules made for Probation-Day in 1606-7, I find Æsop's _Fables_ in Greek, Tully's _Epistles_, and the _Dialogues_ of Corderius named as works in which the boys were to be tested. The subjects taken on this day were Greek, Latin, and dictation, writing being necessarily included. Neither Hebrew, nor arithmetic, nor the mathematics are enumerated; there are the six forms, but no monitors or prompters. The _School's Probation_ presents itself for the first time as a printed production, or at least as something compiled in book form, under the date of 1608. It is printed entire by Wilson; but he does not state, nor do I know, what original, whether printed or not, he employed.