If the saying of Plato may be applied to another sphere, not very far removed from civil government, we may believe that education will never be rightly practised until either teachers become philosophers, or philosophers become teachers. It is certainly remarkable how seldom in the history of educational progress there has arisen any writer whose authority was based alike on the power of the abstract thinker to rise above the conditions of the immediate present into the atmosphere of pure reason, and on the instinct of the professional worker, whose conceptions of what is possible have been chastened by direct experience of the actual. Of the five classical English writers who have made any noteworthy contribution to educational thought, all but one have failed to gain a lasting influence, through the limitation in their outlook caused by deficient practical knowledge. Ascham’s experience was too exclusively academic and courtly to suggest much to him beyond questions of method in the advanced teaching of Latin and Greek. Milton’s vision, restricted by his short and partial attempt at instructing a few selected boys, narrowed itself to one school period of one rank of society of one sex, and his genius could not save him from wild extravagance in his ideas of the acquirements possible for the average scholar. The suggestions of Locke, while in one aspect they were more comprehensive, are yet essentially those of a theorist, who had never faced the difficulty that the upbringing of a child by a private tutor is possible only to the merest fraction of any population. Herbert Spencer, as the heir of previous centuries, has naturally been able to command a wider view, but even those who have gained most from his book, must have felt that owing to his highly generalised mode of treatment he has at many points failed to grapple with the problems that chiefly beset the professional teacher. A little experience, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing, and it may be that those writers, all of whom claim to have made trial of the actual work of education, would have been more convincing if they had written from an avowedly detached standpoint. Richard Mulcaster alone holds the vantage-ground of being at once a thinker and a practical expert in matters of education. Nor does this mean only that his right to speak with authority will for that reason be more readily admitted; the evidence of his fuller equipment for the task may be seen through the whole texture of his writings. He had not Ascham’s ease in expression and charm of manner, nor Milton’s commanding intellect and power of utterance, nor the fearlessness and philosophic grasp of Locke, nor the encyclopædic knowledge and acumen of Herbert Spencer, but he had beyond them all two essential gifts that will in the end give him a unique place in the history of our educational development--a clear insight into the realities of human nature, and an enlightened perception of the conditions