On the question of the position and standing of the teacher Mulcaster’s contentions were scarcely more timely and just for his own generation than they are for the present time. Though certain ranks of the teaching profession have never been without social consideration, it remains true that teachers as a whole were long regarded as an inferior order of the clergy, who did not reach the goal of their ambition until they had succeeded in leaving their first calling, to take the more tranquil and dignified position of a cure of souls. As he puts it--“The school being used but for a shift, from which they will afterwards pass to some other profession, though it may send out competent men to other careers, remains itself far too bare of talent, considering the importance of the work.” It was only natural that the profession should suffer from this want of independence, in the general esteem, and therefore in its substantial rewards, but the claim which our author puts forward for greater public consideration, is obviously based, not on any petty resentment on behalf of himself or his fellows, but on broad general grounds of social advantage. He had a high sense of the importance of the teacher’s task for the national welfare, and he was anxious on all grounds that those most fitted to fulfil it with success, should in the first place be induced to enter the profession by the prospect of adequate recognition, and in the second place have sufficient opportunity of training to enable them to do justice to it. “I consider that in our universities there should be a special college for the training of teachers, inasmuch as they are the instruments to make or mar the growing generation of the country ... and because the material of their studies is comparable to that of the greatest profession, in respect of language, judgment, skill in teaching, variety in learning, wherein the forming of the mind and exercising of the body require the most careful consideration, to say nothing of the dignity of character which should be expected from them.” Mulcaster, it will here be seen, has good grounds to offer for magnifying his office, and striving to win a place of honour for it in the social economy. Subsequent experience has tended to suggest that his effort to gain greater consideration for his profession was more utopian than could perhaps have appeared to his contemporaries. There are certain general reasons why in a country like ours the teaching profession cannot be expected to reach the solidarity that belongs, for example, to the profession of medicine or of law. The wide economic differences in our civilisation inevitably perpetuate distinctions of rank, which are nowhere more clearly shown than in the choice of schools. It is natural and right that parents should be no less concerned about the companionship they provide for their children than about the quality of the teaching, and since a free and compulsory education