II. But books of instruction and for employment in schools continued, down to the days of THOMAS RUDDIMAN, to be at once scarce and unsatisfactory, insomuch that, side by side with these and other unrecovered productions, it was found possible and convenient to keep in print the old text-books of Stanbridge, of which editions continued to be issued at intervals both here and in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century. Ruddiman may be considered as the apostle of scholastic education and literature in Scotland; and as he was not born till 1674, this amounts to a proposition that his country was at least two centuries behind England in knowledge and culture. Even Ruddiman was brought up at the parish school, and was, moreover, for some time a parochial teacher. But, partly by force of character and partly by good fortune, he extricated himself from his early associations, and became the Lily of the North. His _Rudiments of Grammar_ were published in 1714, when he was already in middle life; they were little more than the St. Paul's Primer calculated for the meridian of Edinburgh; but they proved eminently successful, and encouraged him to proceed with that more important philological enterprise the _Institutions of Latin Grammar_, which, like the disquisition of Alexander Hume recently mentioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece of authorship. But, notwithstanding the useful labours of Ruddiman, his country, from political and other agencies, remained yet for a considerable length of time in a very stagnant condition, nor had any sensible improvement been achieved in the educational machinery of that portion of the empire within the recollection of those still living. Mental training and culture, as they are now understood, are the growth of the last half century. But the cost of such accomplishments as were taught at Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews was lower than in England, and the standard higher than in Ireland; and from both countries pupils were often sent in former days to complete their education, where their parents could not have afforded the means to maintain them at Oxford or Cambridge. From a hundred to a hundred and thirty years since, the fees at Glasgow University did not exceed £20 a year, and a frugal lad found seven or eight shillings a week sufficient for his board and lodging.