In Scotland, the influence of Knox and his supporters favoured the early institution of parochial schools throughout the country, where a class and range of instruction prevailed which, combined with native religious tendencies, had the effect of increasing, in comparison with England, the average of educated intelligence without developing much breadth of thought or much intellectual refinement. The aims of the parish schools are humble, and beyond its limited possibilities there are its impediments and its snares. In addition to schools, the friends of education in the North, as early as the reign of William III., commenced an agitation for the establishment of parochial libraries even in the Highlands. The movement was set on foot by certain ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and its basis and scope would have been narrow enough if the idea had been realised. But nothing beyond a discussion and some correspondence seems to have resulted at the moment. Nor do we, even as time goes on, find much information obtainable on this part of the subject. But both the systems and the books employed were for some centuries of foreign origin; and the grammatical publications of an Aberdeen man, John Vaus, whose name seems to be the earliest on the roll of native authors, were, so far as we at present know, without exception published, as well as written, in France, to which Scotland perhaps owed, among other matters, her adoption of the Continental law of Latin pronunciation. Vaus grounded his _Rudiments_, printed at Paris repeatedly about 1520, on the old _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus, which bespeaks a backwardness of information, since at this date Lily's Grammar was already in use in the South, and even the systems of Whittinton and the other disciples of the Magdalen School method had been almost completely discarded there, except, perhaps, as occasional auxiliaries. At a later period, the eminent Scotsman Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody, and two others of his countrymen, Andrew Symson and James Carmichael, reduced to a simpler plan the principles of elementary learning and the outlines of etymology. The first explicit attempt to produce a grammar in Scotland for the special use of that country is due, however, to Alexander Hume, who is known to us not only as an educational reformer, but as a philological student. His _New Grammar for the Use of the Scotish Youth_, 1612, was a popular compendium founded on Lily; it seems to have met with limited and brief acceptance, and his tract on the _Orthography and Congruity of the British Tongue_, which was a literary essay intended rather for the closet (to use the old-fashioned parlance), remained till lately in MS.