The scheme of education drawn up by our first Reformers was stamped by the liberality of men who had learned from experience that tyranny and superstition derive their chief support from ignorance. Almost all the knowledge which books could supply at the time was locked up in the learned languages; and so it was necessary that these languages even the common people should acquire. It was appointed, therefore, “that young men who purposed to travail in some handicraft for the good of the commonwealth, should first devote ane certaine time to Grammar and the Latin tongue, and ane certaine time to the other tongues and the study of philosophy.” Even long after the enactment, when we had got authors of our own in every department of literature, and a man could have become learned, if knowledge be learning, simply as an English reader, an acquaintance with Latin formed no unimportant part of a common Scotch education. Our fathers pursued the course which circumstances had rendered imperative in the days of their great-grandfathers, merely because their great-grandfathers had pursued it, and because people find it easier to persist in hereditary practices than to think for themselves. And so the few years which were spent in school by the poorer pupils of ordinary capacity, were absurdly frittered away in acquiring a little bad Latin and a very little worse Greek. So strange did the half-learning of our common people (derived in this way) appear to our southern neighbours, that there are writers of the last century who, in describing a Scotch footman or mechanic, rarely omit making his knowledge of the classics an essential part of his character. The barber in Roderick Random quotes Horace in the original; and Foote, in one of his farces, introduces a Scotch valet, who, when some one inquires of him whether he be a Latinist, indignantly exclaims, “Hoot awa, man! a Scotchman and no understand Latin!”