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EDUCATION

consideration  of  the  number  of  grammar  schools  in
existence  prior  to  the  Reformation  shows  that  there  were
more  schools  per  head  of  the  population  then  than  in  the
middle  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Thus,  Essex  possessed
sixteen  grammar  schools  for  ii,ooo  people,  and  Here-
fordshire was  almost  as  well  supplied  with  its  seventeen
schools  for  30,000  people.
Elizabethan  Reforms

Under  Elizabeth,  however,  an  attempt  was  made  to
remedy  a  deplorable  state  of  affairs.  It  is  indeed  mar-
vellous that  an  age  which  saw  the  second  great  Renaissance,
which  was  alive  to  all  the  wonders  of  the  New  Learning,
which  possessed  on  the  Continent  such  great  educational
leaders  and  reformers  as  Luther,  Melanchthon,  Erasmus,
John  Sturm  of  Strassburg,  Wolfgang  Ratke,  and,  toward
the  end  of  this  period,  John  Amos  Comenius,  an  age
which  saw  the  spread  of  this  learning,  under  the  leadership
of  More  and  Colet,  to  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  and  thence
outward  to  the  schools  of  England,  should  have  been  the
one  which  experienced  the  blight  of  ignorance  spreading
over  the  land.  But  it  was  so,  and  with  this  evil  Elizabeth
and  her  ministers  struggled  almost  in  vain.
