That Textor's description of the cruelty exercised by the pedagogues of his age was not overcharged, Macropedius himself might be quoted to prove, even when he is vindicating and recommending such discipline as Dr. Parr would have done. I wish Parr had heard an expression which fell from the honest lips of Isaac Reid, when a school, noted at that time for its consumption of birch, was the subject of conversation; the words would have burnt themselves in. I must not commit them to the press; but this I may say, that the Recording Angel entered them on the creditor side of that kind-hearted old man's account. Macropedius, like Textor, composed dramatic pieces for his pupils to represent. The latter, as has been shown in a former chapter, though he did not exactly take the Moralities for his model, produced pieces of the same kind, and adapted his conceptions to the popular facts, while he clothed them in the language of the classics. His aim at improvement proceeded no farther, and he never attempted to construct a dramatic fable. That advance was made by Macropedius, who in one of his dedicatory epistles laments that among the many learned men who were then flourishing, no Menander, no Terence was to be found, their species of writing, he says, had been almost extinct since the time of Terence himself, or at least of Lucilius. He regretted this because comedy might be rendered useful to persons of all ages, _quid enim plus pueris ad eruditionem, plus adolescentibus ad honesta studia, plus provectioribus, immò omnibus in commune ad virtutem conducat?_