Richard Mulcaster, first head-master of Merchant Taylors' School, and for several years after his retirement from that position principal of St. Paul's, was the author of two works of comparatively slight interest and importance at the present day, whatever estimate may have been formed of them by some of his learned contemporaries. Of the two "fruits of his writing," as he terms them, he dedicated the earlier, "Positions," 1581, a kind of introduction to the matter, to Queen Elizabeth, and the other, "The First Part of the Elementary," 1582, to Lord Leicester, in two rather turgid and verbose epistles. But it is a question whether either production met with much applause on its appearance, though ushered into notice under such influential auspices; certainly they never grew popular or reached a second impression. They were both calculated for the guidance of teachers, like Ascham's _Schoolmaster_; but they present a stiff and didactic frigidity, which is absent in the famous and favourite manual of his predecessor, who knew how to make us the partakers of his own learning in a more agreeable manner than the professional pedagogue. I think it very possible that the very few readers which the publications of Mulcaster have found have arrived at the conclusion of their labour without being much wiser than when they embarked in it. But, of the two, I prefer very decidedly the _Positions_, which are written in a more natural style, and contain occasional passages of interest. This gentleman lived to see the close of the long reign of which he had witnessed the opening, and to write some dull verses upon the death of the Queen. II. The early teacher and his pupils enjoyed, when the typographical art had been applied to the production of educational works previously accessible in a limited number of MSS., the considerable advantage of books of reference for Latin, Greek, French, and eventually Italian and other tongues. Within a year of each other (1499-1500), the _Ortus Vocabulorum_ and the _Promptorius Parvulorum_ furnished our schools, so far as Latin was concerned, with two excellent lexicons, both formed out of the best compilations of the kind current abroad. These were the Ainsworth and Riddle of our ancestors, who resorted to them where the required information was not forthcoming in the Primer or the Delectus. Both these phrase-books passed through a series of reprints between the commencement and middle of the sixteenth century. The former purports to have been grounded on the _Catholicon_ of Balbus, 1460, the _Cornucopia_ of Perottus, the _Gemma Vocabulorum_, and the _Medulla Grammatices_, with additions by Ascensius. The _Promptorius_, or, as it is also called in some of the issues, _Promptuarium_, appears to be substantially identical with the _Medulla_.