Charactery, or the art of shorthand, was introduced into the Nonconformist schools as a taught subject for the sake of enabling youths or others to take notes of sermons and lectures; and some of the discourses from the pulpit in the time of Elizabeth purport to have been printed from shorthand notes. Dr. Bright, who was the writer of a work on Melancholy long antecedent to Burton's, procured an exclusive right in 1588 to publish a system which he had invented for this purpose, and which we find described by him as "an art of short, swift, and secret writing." He set in motion an idea which met with such numerous imitators and improvers, that a catalogue of the publications on Tachygraphy down to the present date forms a volume of respectable dimensions. Bright was nearly a century before the more celebrated Rich, who flourished about the Restoration of the Stuarts, and whose cypher was adopted by Pepys in the composition of his diary. III. The public schools were not the first in emulating and continuing the policy which Gerbier had laboured so hard and so long to establish. On a less expensive and ostentatious scale certain private academies adopted the idea of supplementing the subjects taught in the great foundations by some, at least, of the manly or elegant arts which had figured in the old Bethnal Green prospectus. At the end of a Musical Entertainment, prepared in 1676 for recitation by some school-boys in the presence of certain persons of quality, the master favours us with some particulars of the subjects which pupils might take up in his establishment, and it is also inferable that the hours of study extended to at least five o'clock in the evening. He says in a kind of postscript to the printed tract:-- "The Arts and Sciences taught and practis'd in the Academy are these. _All sorts of Instruments, Singing and Dancing. French and Italian. The Mathematicks. Grammar, Writing and Arithmetick. Painting and Drawing. Fencing, Vaulting and Wrastling._" This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Academy was evidently one designed more particularly for the children of noble or wealthy people. He adds:-- "Or any young Gentleman design'd for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language. "Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish'd by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment." This is altogether worth attention. It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the name or locality of the college where all these advantages and temptations (in the way of buying your Songs of the King's own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centuries ago.