Among the doctrines of Comenius to which his expositors have attached special importance may be numbered the following: that the earliest teaching should be given in the vernacular; that the first subjects taught should be such as give scope to the child’s activity; that knowledge should be communicated through the senses and put to immediate use; that examples should be taught before rules; that the arts should be taught practically; that in language-study grammar should accompany reading and speaking; that learning should be spontaneous and pleasant without undue pressure; that children should not be beaten for failure in study, but only for moral offences; and that education should follow in general the guidance of nature. These principles now rank among the commonplaces of educational method, and in so far as their acceptance has been furthered by the persuasive advocacy of Comenius the gratitude of the world is due to him; but why should Englishmen forget that they had all been proclaimed with unmistakable clearness in this country half a century earlier? Readers of the foregoing pages must be already convinced that the doctrines in question form an essential part of Mulcaster’s theory of education; but it may be worth while to recall in a connected form a few of the more striking passages in which they are expressed. On the use of the vernacular in the early years: “As for the question whether English or Latin should be first learned, hitherto there may seem to have been some reasonable doubt, although the nature of the two tongues ought to decide the matter clearly enough, ... but now ... we can follow the direction of reason and nature in learning to read first that which we speak first, to take most care over that which we use most, and in beginning our studies where we have the best chance of good progress, owing to our natural familiarity with our ordinary language, as spoken by those around us in the affairs of everyday life.” No particular quotation is needed to illustrate Mulcaster’s dependence for his elementary training on studies that called forth individual effort from the child, for the course he planned includes no other kind of occupation, but the following sentences may stand for a proof that he recognised the natural channels through which knowledge is acquired and utilised in the guidance of action: “Nature has ... given us for self-preservation the power of perceiving all sensible things by means of feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting. These qualities of the outward world, being apprehended by the understanding and examined by the judgment, are handed over to the memory, and afterwards prove our chief--nay, our only--means of obtaining further knowledge.... To serve the end both of sense-perception and of motion, nature has planted in the body a brain, the prince of all our organs, which by spreading its channels through every part of our frame, produces all the effects through which sense passes into motion.” On the point of subordinating rules to the imitation of examples, and learning the arts by practically engaging in them, Mulcaster writes: “Children know not what they do, much less why they do it, till reason grow into some ripeness in them, and therefore in their training they profit more by practice than by knowing why, till they feel the use of reason, which teaches them to consider causes.... When the end of any art is wholly in doing, the initiation should be short, so as not to hinder that end by keeping the learners too long musing upon rules.... We must keep carefully that rule of Aristotle which teaches that the best way to learn anything well which has to be done after it is learned, is always to be a-doing while we are a-learning.” To the question of the best method in linguistic study, Mulcaster was ready to apply this principle of learning directly through practice, and his sense of the proper place of grammatical knowledge is shown in the following passage: “Grammar in itself is but the bare rule, and a very naked thing.... In grammar, which is the introduction to speech, there should be no such length as is customary, because its end is to write and to speak, and in doing this as much as possible we learn our grammar best, when it is applied to matter and not clogged with rules. As for understanding writers, that comes with years and ripeness of intelligence, not by means of the rules of grammar.” It has already been seen that Mulcaster shared fully in the humaner views upon the treatment of children that were beginning to assert themselves in his day; but it is interesting to notice that he based his conviction not only on the general claims of sympathy, but also on grounds of purely educational expediency.