A still earlier trust is the Grammar School, which goes back to 1515, when it had as its founder Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter. The school drew revenues from the mills on the Irk in the days when that stream ran in limpid purity into the Irwell. It has a high reputation for scholarship. Educationally Manchester owes much also to a citizen of the present century--John Owens, who died in 1846, having left £100,000, to which an equal sum was added for the foundation of the college that bears his name. Manchester has thus been generously helped in the matter both of elementary and of secondary education. And she has had the further satisfaction of mounting the next step in the ladder of learning, having obtained in 1880 a Royal Charter for the founding of Victoria University, of which Owens is one of the colleges, others being the Yorkshire College at Leeds and the University College at Liverpool. Chetham College possesses a finely selected library of 30,000 volumes, housed in a picturesque range of old buildings. And in this connection it is interesting to note that Manchester was the first borough to take advantage of the Free Libraries Act. To-day she has free libraries and reading rooms in every part of the city where they seem needed, in addition to a great central reference library containing about 200,000 volumes. Salford is equally well equipped in this respect; and in both places technical training has kept pace with other forms of instruction. [Illustration: VICTORIA AND BLACKFRIARS BRIDGES (_p. 252_).]