The glimpse which we here obtain of a small private seminary in a Shropshire village a hundred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education. From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr. Lempriére, whose name the lad transformed into Dolounghpryée, was a visitor at the school; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792. It was still in use at Merchant Taylors' in 1850. The proprietary establishments for boys, which spread themselves by degrees over the land, formed a valuable succedaneum to the Edward and other endowed schools, and useful nurseries for pupils who aimed at more than elementary learning. But they at the same time proved a source of emulation and material improvement; and during the last fifty years the distance between the two systems has sensibly decreased. The great charities and other ancient foundations like St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Eton, Harrow, have only maintained their relative superiority by reforming and extending their prospectus; and there is scarcely a country town at the present moment without one or more private seminaries, where a better education is given than was within the reach of our grandfathers at any of the large public schools of the metropolis. Even in the time of Carlisle, who wrote in 1818, some of the principal institutions in the provinces were treading closely on the heels of Christ's Hospital and other endowments, and one or two, as at Dorchester, at Abingdon, and at Witton near Chester, seem to have been on a more liberal and enlightened footing. XII. Educational condition of SCOTLAND--Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters--Buchanan and other early writers on grammar--Thomas Ruddiman and his important contribution to the spread of elementary teaching--Decline of culture during the Civil War. I. When we turn to Scotland, we find the compendium of the Grammar of Ælius Donatus, of which I have already furnished some account, in use there from time almost immemorial. It appears that the Scotish seminaries adopted this favourite class-book in common with those of England at least as far back as the time of Andrew of Wyntown, who was nearly contemporary with Langland and Chaucer. In his _Original Chronicle of Scotland_ he speaks of the Barnys (bairns) lering Donate at their beginning of Grammar; which is a very interesting and important piece of testimony in its way, since there is so little to enable us to form an opinion of the rise and growth of elementary learning in North Britain, although there may be just sufficient light cast incidentally or indirectly on the subject to lead us to judge that Scotland, if not indeed the North generally, was in this respect, as in others, far behind the Southern English.