At the "Sign of the Golden Fleece"

Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
CHAP.
THE chief concern of this story is with the beginnings of our English Testament. The Latin Vulgate was the only version of the Scriptures known in Europe until the early part of the sixteenth century.
The sack of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, and the break-up of the old Greek Empire, had driven many learned Greeks to take refuge in Italy, where they became teachers, not merely of their own language, but of the subjects that had long been taught in the schools and colleges of Constantinople.
But the key to these various branches of knowledge lay in the Greek tongue, and this gradually became known at the different universities of Europe, through those who learned it in Italy, and thus it became the insignia of the new learning.
Among those who studied under the Greek masters in Italy was Erasmus, a young Dutchman, who had been so disgusted with what he was compelled to see and hear among the drunken, brutal monks, his companions in the monastery where he was a novice, that he was glad to leave and become secretary to the Bishop of Cambray. He had already distinguished himself as a Latin scholar but the Greek tongue opened a new world of learning, which he was not slow to conquer.
He became a tutor at the University of Paris, and had several English pupils, through whose influence he came to Oxford, where he met another famous Greek scholar, Grocyn, who was most anxious that the new language and learning should be extended in England.
A little later Erasmus became a lecturer on Greek at Cambridge, while at the same time he laboured industriously at the work of translating the ancient Greek authors into modern Greek or Latin.
At last he gave the world the New Testament in Greek and Latin, that men might judge for themselves in the matter of priestly pretensions founded on the Vulgate. It was essentially a book for the learned, but prepared the way for that which was to follow—the English New Testament.