The universal and unchanging aim of the ecclesiastical authority is manifestly temporal, and Henry VIII. and his coadjutors, and their immediate successors in the foundation of Protestantism, acted wisely in making it part of their scheme to furnish the realm with public seminaries based on an improved footing in the earliest endowed grammar schools, which set the example to private individuals and corporate bodies. These schools, which, as we know, had been preceded--and doubtless suggested too--by that at Magdalen College, Oxford, and others framed on a humbler scale or (like the City of London and St. Paul's) under different auspices, opened the way to a partial secularisation of teaching throughout England. The preceptors employed were more often than not academical, unbeneficed graduates with a certain clerical bent; but the Statutes laid down rules for the management of the Charity and for the limitation of the subjects to be taught; and the scheme was assuredly at the outset, and continued down to the last thirty or forty years--in fact, within the recollection of the present writer--so narrow and imperfect, that it supplied what would now be regarded as the mere groundwork of a genteel education. III. But a farther and still more important step toward the emancipation of scholastic economy and discipline from Church control was taken when, first in Scotland, and subsequently, and also in a more limited degree, in England, after the union of the kingdoms, proprietary establishments were opened for boys or girls only, or for boys and girls, where the religious instruction, instead of being, as under the archaic conventual and Romish system, the primary feature, became a mere item on the prospectus, like Geography or History. This was the commencement of an entrance upon modern lines, and struck a fatal blow at the monastic and academical ideas of instruction, by widening the bias and range of studies, and liberating the intellect from religious trammels. The success and multiplication of these new institutions obliged the old endowments to reform themselves, and to meet the demands of the age; and the pressure was augmented, of course, by the concurrent rise of large public gymnasia of a novel stamp, as well as by the development of some of the already existing institutions conformably to the great changes in political and social life. The proprietary system, which had started by adopting, as a rule, the mixed method, or rather by the reception of pupils of both sexes under the same roof, was eventually, and, except so far as dame-schools were concerned, finally modified in favour of the dual plan, and independent colleges for young gentlemen and for young ladies were the result.