at that time done. The dignitaries and more wealthy ecclesiastics of the
reformed Church bestirred themselves and founded some schools. Many
tradesmen, who had accumulated fortunes in London, (then the almost
exclusive province of commercial enterprise,) retired in their later
years to the country-town which had given them birth, and gratefully
provided for the better education of their neighbours, by furnishing it
with a grammar-school. And even the honest yeoman, a person who then
appears to have appreciated learning, and often to have brought up his
boy to the church, united in the same praiseworthy object. In such cases
application was usually made to the Queen for a charter, which was
granted with or without pecuniary assistance on her own part; and
whoever will examine the dates of our foundation schools, will find a
great proportion of them erected in that glorious reign.

Thus it came to pass (to revert to our text), that Cranmer was sent to
college in his fourteenth year, Oxford and Cambridge being at that time
the substitutes for the schools which have succeeded them, and being
considered the two great national receptacles for all the boys in the
country. There they were subjected to corporal punishment. The statutes
were framed with a reference to the habits of mere boys; it is
forbidden, for instance, in one of the Cambridge statutes, to play
marbles on the senate-house steps; and the number of the students was so
enormous (still for the same reason), that Latimer, in one of his
sermons, speaks of a decrease in those of his own time, to the amount of
no less than ten thousand.--_Quarterly Review_.

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A TRUE STORY OF MAGIC IN THE EAST.