The preceding extract points to a sphere of life which was wont to conclude its preparatory stage with the Grand Tour and an initiation into the profligacy of all the capitals of Europe; but we see that it deals with a case in which a tutor took a youth almost, as it were, from his nurse's apron-strings, and does not merely indicate a finishing course. The volume from which the passage comes has a promising title, and might have been intensely interesting and truly important; but it was written by some dry and pedantic scribbler, and, like Osborne's _Advice to a Son_, 1656, and many other treatises of a cognate character, is a tissue of dulness and inanity. It is characteristic of the whole that portraits of Jeremiah and Zedekiah are selected as appropriate graphic embellishments. From a woodcut on the back of the title-page of a _Grammatica Initialis_, or Elementary Grammar, 1509, we form a conclusion as to the ancient Continental method of instruction. This engraving portrays the interior of a school, apparently situated in a crypt; the master is seated at his desk with a book open before him, and above it a double inkstand and a pen, both of primitive fabric. The teacher is evidently reading aloud to his four scholars, who sit in front of him, a passage from the volume, and they repeat after him, parson-and-clerk-wise. They learn by rote. They have no books before them. They represent a stage in the teaching process before the science of reading from print or MS. had been acquired by the scholar, and copies of school-books were multiplied by the press. There was no preparation of work. The quarter wage included no charge for books supplied. The teaching was purely oral. So it was probably throughout. It was thus that Stanbridge, Whittinton, Lily, and their followers conducted their schools, long after the cradle at Magdalen had been reinforced by other seminaries all over the country. There is no written record of this fashion of communicating information from the master to the pupil, so diametrically opposed to modern ideas, but conformable to an era of general illiteracy; it is a sister-art, which lends us a helping hand in this case by admitting us to what may be viewed as an interior coeval with Erasmus and More. The modern school-holidays appear to have been formerly unknown. In the rules for the management of St. Paul's and Merchant Taylors', for instance, where a vacation is called a _remedy_, no such indulgence was permitted save in cases of illness; and it is curious that in the account which Fitzstephen gives of the three seminaries already established in London in the reign of Henry II. the boys are represented as spending the holy days (rather than holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and disputations.