Before considering Mulcaster’s contributions to the theory and art of education strictly so-called, it will be well to glance at his influence in the more general aspects of learning and literature. He must be credited with an important share in the movement towards the dethronement of Latin in favour of the vernacular tongues, as the medium of communication in subjects hitherto held to belong exclusively to the domain of the learned class. The initiative in this matter goes back, of course, to the time of Dante, but even with the examples of Italy, France, and Spain to suggest the change, it was a distinct and difficult task to work it out for our own language. Mulcaster was not the first Englishman to write a book in his native tongue which everyone would have expected to be written in Latin. Sir Thomas More, in some of his historical and controversial works, Roger Ascham, and a few other writers of lesser note, had anticipated him in practice, and had been more successful in attaining a lucid and graceful style, but it may fairly be claimed that Mulcaster was the first to give a reasoned justification of the course he followed and recommended, and to further the end in view by taking definite steps to elaborate the means. Nor is it only for his service in helping to establish a canon of literary English, and show the way to others by using it himself to the best of his ability, that acknowledgment is due. It was a still more conspicuous merit to see clearly, and to enforce by these means, the truth that the increase of learning, and the methods by which it may be furthered, are subjects of interest not to any limited class alone, but to every member of the community. There may be comparatively little present value in his judgments as to the proper content of the English vocabulary, and the forms of spelling which he thought should be made authoritative, but at least it is noteworthy that, at a time when linguistic science was at a rudimentary stage, he had reached a singularly just conception of the essential nature of a language, and the conditions of its growth and decay. The interesting allegory where he traces the process by which speech came to be represented by written symbols, proves him to have grasped the idea, only in later times fully understood, that language, as a product of human activity, shares in all the features characteristic of organic development.