No English was taught in the Stratford school then, or for many years after. It is only in our own day that it has begun to receive proper attention in schools of this grade in England, or indeed in our own country. It is interesting, however, to know that the first English schoolmaster to urge the study of the vernacular tongue was a contemporary of Shakespeare. In 1561 Richard Mulcaster, who had been educated at King's College, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford, was appointed head-master of Merchant-Taylors School in London, which had just been founded as a feeder, or preparatory school, for St. John's College, Oxford. In his _Elementarie_, published in 1582, he has the following plea for the study of English:-- "But because I take upon me in this Elementarie, besides some friendship to secretaries for the pen, and to correctors for the print, to direct such people as teach children to read and write English, and the _reading_ must needs be such as the writing leads unto, therefore, before I meddle with any particular precept, to direct the reader, I will thoroughly rip up the whole certainty of our English writings so far forth and with such assurance as probability can make me, because it is a thing both proper to my argument and profitable to my country. For our natural tongue being as beneficial unto us for our needful delivery as any other is to the people which use it; and having as pretty and as fair observations in it as any other hath; and being as ready to yield to any rule of art as any other is; why should I not take some pains to find out the right writing of ours as other countrymen have done to find the like in theirs? and so much the rather because it is pretended that the writing thereof is marvellous uncertain, and scant to be recovered from extreme confusion, without some change of as great extremity? "I mean therefore so to deal in it as I may wipe away that opinion of either uncertainty for confusion or impossibility for direction, that both the natural English may have wherein to rest, and the desirous stranger may have whereby to learn. For the performance whereof, and mine own better direction, I will first examine those means whereby other tongues of most sacred antiquity have been brought to art and form of discipline for their right writing, to the end that, by following their way, I may hit upon their right, and at the least by their precedent devise the like to theirs, where the use of our tongue and the property of our dialect will not yield flat to theirs. "That done, I will set all the variety of our now writing, and the uncertain force of all our letters, in as much certainty as any writing can be, by these seven precepts: "1. _General rule_, which concerneth the property and use of each letter. "2. _Proportion_, which reduceth all words of one sound to the same writing. "3. _Composition_, which teacheth how to write one word made of more.