It is necessary to take into account the state of opinion on matters of learning and on the general conduct of life, in the England of Queen Elizabeth’s day, before we can appreciate the significance of our author’s thought. We must place ourselves in the atmosphere of the Renascence and the Reformation, for although these great movements, which represented the intellectual and moral aspects in the awakening of modern Europe, had been some time in progress, and had even given place to reaction in the countries of their birth, their full influence did not reach our shores till towards the close of the sixteenth century. The phase of English national life represented by Mulcaster is that immediately preceding the great expansion of conscious mental activity to which voice was so memorably given by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and their contemporaries. The prestige of Elizabeth, depending as it did so largely on the secure establishment of the Protestant faith, had not yet reached the height it attained through the final repulse of Spanish aggression, but yet the power of the crown retained much of the absolute sway over individual freedom that had been built up and impressed on the popular imagination by the earlier Tudors. It was not a time either of revolt or of reaction. The more galling forms of political and intellectual despotism had already disappeared in the general overthrow of the medieval _régime_, and it was a more pressing question how to maintain existing charters of liberty than how to extend them. This conservative temper is to be discerned in all the purely English writers of the period, though in the northern part of Britain Knox and his companions were troubling the waters of controversy in a more strenuous fashion.