Another particular in which the Reformation was left incomplete, was in a provision for the sufficient education of the people. The demand, indeed, for education had not hitherto been great; few boys but such as were intended for ecclesiastics were made scholars; so that even Latimer reckons the sons of great laymen or esquires, as he calls them, interlopers in the universities.[482] The churchman, and no other, was the clerk; and the convent was in general the academy; it was so, at least, in a _hundred_ instances, if we understand an expression used by the speaker of the lower house, in the fourth year of Elizabeth, aright; who, in his address to the Queen laments the loss of such a number of places of education.[483] Schools, therefore, in the present sense of the word, there were few; not more than three, we believe, in all London. And when Dean Colet founded that of St. Paul’s on the eve of the Reformation, it was a thing regarded with some jealousy.[484] Hence it probably was, that the numbers sent to Oxford and Cambridge (the two great national schools, as they were then considered) were so extraordinary--thousands where there are now hundreds; and that the age of the students was so tender. For on the rapid multiplication of foundation schools throughout the country in the century after the Reformation, the character of the universities, we shall find, became changed; the number of students diminishing, in spite of an increasing population, and the age at which they entered greatly advanced. Milton’s is said to be the last instance of corporal punishment in either university--a tradition which, whether true or false as to the individual, may serve to date the period of the transition from the past to the present system of academical education. But of the few schools that existed before the Reformation, some were seized and sold by the rapacious courtiers, particularly under the feeble reign of Edward; here was one channel of education cut off:--the convents were destroyed; here was another:--the universities were decayed; here was a third:--they were decayed, because the yeomen who might have been able to send their children to a school in the neighbourhood, if there had been one, were quite unable, from a disastrous change in their circumstances, to send them, as they often had done heretofore, to Oxford and Cambridge:[485] an education so remote, frugal as the times then were, being comparatively costly, and such as rendered even the ten groats which Jewel bestowed upon Hooker, when he called upon the good bishop on his way to his college on foot, not unwelcome. They were still further decayed from the same cause as the schools; powerful individuals intercepted and appropriated their revenues--accordingly very many students were actually unable to stay “for lack of exhibition and help,”--others did indeed stay, but in extreme penury. They rose in the morning between four and five o’clock; at ten they dined, having “a penny piece of