beef amongst four, a few potage made of the same, with salt and oatmeal, and nothing else:--at five in the evening they had a supper not much better than the dinner; and, before they went to bed, which was at nine or ten, being without fire, “they were fain to walk or run up and down half an hour to get a heat on their feet.” Such was the condition of what students there were in Cambridge in the days of Edward the Fifth.[486] Now this declension in the means of national instruction was the more calamitous because it happened at a moment when the thirst for knowledge was becoming intense, and when it was more than commonly desirable that it should be slaked from cisterns of wholesome waters. Of this our reformers were aware; but again they were baffled, both they and their king. The larger benefices were, indeed, charged with the support of one scholar at the university for every hundred pounds of their annual value: but this was a very limited provision for the wants of the times.[487] The chantry lands would have furnished a considerable, perhaps a sufficient, fund for the purpose, and Edward did so apply them in part, and would gladly have done so more extensively; but they were devoured by the nobles, and the moment for royal endowments went by. Happy would it have been, had it been otherwise. Such grammar schools as he would have planted over England would have been found “seminaries of sound learning,” and (what was the first consideration of the founder) “of _religious_ education.” They might have raised up a more literate clergy. They might have checked, perhaps, the rising extravagances of the Puritans. They might have sustained the church by the direction they would have given to public opinion; and dispersed the storm which already threatened, by conducting, quietly and not unfruitfully, to the earth, the fierce elements with which the political and religious atmosphere was already so heavily charged. For they would have been the natural feeders of the church of England; the visitor, probably one of its prelates; the teachers, its more learned ministers; the prayers, those of its services; the catechism, its manual of doctrines--that which Dean Nowell composed in Latin, and which was afterwards translated into Greek by Dr. Whitaker, his nephew, for the express use of such schools, having been approved in convocation, and been acknowledged to speak the authorised language of the reformers. A few such schools King Edward did establish, as we have said; but in numbers quite inadequate to the demands of the nation, which must have been abandoned to gross ignorance, and to the delusions of every theological empiric (which was in a great degree the case after all), but for the many private foundations, still however very insufficient, by which the reign of Elizabeth, who incorporated them, was distinguished. For these, the country was indebted to the generous efforts not of ecclesiastics only,