To those who know little or nothing of Mulcaster such a claim will seem extravagant, and it will naturally be doubted whether any writer who deserves to be put upon so high a pedestal, could possibly have remained so long in neglect. It may be rejoined that in a subject like education many factors have a part in the making of reputations. It is no mere coincidence that the authors named above, whose views on education are so much more widely-known than those of Mulcaster, all gained their chief fame in some other sphere of thought; we read what they have to say on this subject because it comes from writers who have caught the world’s ear in some field of more general interest. This advantage is naturally to be associated with gifts of expression such as Mulcaster unfortunately possessed only in a very limited degree, though his deficiency is due much more to the rudimentary condition of English prose in general in the sixteenth century, than to any lack of clear thinking on his own part. It is true, indeed, that no fine sense of harmony in sound can be credited to a writer who perpetrates such a sentence as--“I say no more, where it is too much to say even so much in a sore of too much.” But even if Mulcaster had spoken with the tongue of an angel, he would probably have remained a voice crying in the wilderness, for the time was not yet come. The ultimate value of Rousseau’s message to the world in the realm of education was far less, but his unique powers of persuasive eloquence, the fame he had achieved in other ways, and the ripeness of the time, combined to give the later writer an extraordinary influence. When Mulcaster’s judgments and suggestions are studied from the vantage-ground of the present, and in a form that divests them of adventitious difficulties of understanding, they will be recognised as giving him a place of high importance, not only in the chain of historical succession, but in the final hierarchy of educational reformers.
It is necessary to take into account the state of opinion on matters of learning and on the general conduct of life, in the England of Queen Elizabeth’s day, before we can appreciate the significance of our author’s thought. We must place ourselves in the atmosphere of the Renascence and the Reformation, for although these great movements, which represented the intellectual and moral aspects in the awakening of modern Europe, had been some time in progress, and had even given place to reaction in the countries of their birth, their full influence did not reach our shores till towards the close of the sixteenth century. The phase of English national life represented by Mulcaster is that immediately preceding the great expansion of conscious mental activity to which voice was so memorably given by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and their contemporaries. The prestige of Elizabeth, depending as it did so largely on the secure establishment of the Protestant faith, had not yet reached the height it attained through the final repulse of Spanish aggression, but yet the power of the crown retained much of the absolute sway over individual freedom that had been built up and impressed on the popular imagination by the earlier Tudors. It was not a time either of revolt or of reaction. The more galling forms of political and intellectual despotism had already disappeared in the general overthrow of the medieval _régime_, and it was a more pressing question how to maintain existing charters of liberty than how to extend them. This conservative temper is to be discerned in all the purely English writers of the period, though in the northern part of Britain Knox and his companions were troubling the waters of controversy in a more strenuous fashion.