y the Speaker of the Commons, that the number of such places of
education had been reduced by a hundred, in consequence of the
suppression of the religious houses. Still it must often have happened
(thickly scattered as the monasteries were) that the child lived at an
inconvenient distance from any one of them; mothers, too, might not have
liked to trust less robust children to the clumsy care of a fraternity;
and probably little was learned in these academies after all. Erasmus
makes himself merry with the studies pursued in them; and it is
remarkable that no sooner did the love of learning revive, than the
popularity of the monasteries declined. For thirty years before the
Reformation, there were few or no new religious foundations, whilst
schools, on the other hand, began to multiply in their stead; a fact
which sufficiently marks the state of public opinion with regard to the
monasteries as places of education--for education began now to be the
desire of the day. Schools, therefore, in the present acceptation of the
term, in Cranmer's boyhood there were scarcely any; and it was the
crying want of them in London that induced Dean Colet to establish that
of St. Paul's, which, under the fostering care of Lily, the first
master, not only became so distinguished in itself, but set the example,
and prepared the way, by its rules and its grammar, for so many others
which followed in its wake. Edward VI.; with the natural feeling of a
boy fond of knowledge, and himself a proficient for his years, was aware
of the evil, and projected the remedy. Colet might be his model--but he
was embarrassed in his means by courtiers, who were for ever uttering
the cry of the horse-leech's daughters; and, besides, his days were soon
numbered. Cranmer, who perhaps remembered the obstacles in his own way,
and who certainly foresaw the great calamity of an ignorant clergy,
pressed for the establishment of a school in connexion with every
cathedral--a school, as it were, of the prophets--where boys intended
for holy orders might be brought up suitably to the profession they were
about to adopt, and where the bishops might ever find persons duly
qualified to serve God in the church. But Cranmer was overruled, and a
measure, which might have helped to catch up the church before it fell
into that abyss of ignorance which seems to have immediately succeeded
the Reformation, (the natural consequence of a season of convulsion and
violence,) was unhapp