CHAPTER XXIII.
ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE.
A.D. 1473 TO 1550.
The revival of polite letters in this country may be considered as dating from the foundation of Magdalen College, in 1473. Not only was it the most perfectly constituted college in the realm, but its great founder had amply provided for the cultivation of humane literature; and at the period of his death, Grocyn, the future restorer of Greek studies at Oxford, was Divinity Professor, and Wolsey and Colet were among his pupils. Oxford at this time presented a spectacle which seems to have struck the imagination of all her foreign visitors. Three hundred halls and grammar-schools, besides her noble colleges and religious houses, furnished means of education to a far larger number of students than resort thither at the present time. The English universities, though admitting the new learning, still adhered to the scholastic philosophy—a fact which formed the groundwork of those charges brought against them by some of their contemporaries, and re-echoed by Wood, of being behind their time. It is not very easy to determine what was the precise state of the English schools at the opening of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, it is clear that the revival of classical literature found plenty of enthusiastic supporters among English scholars; and, if we are to draw any conclusions as to the nature of English education of this time from Sir John Elyot’s treatise of “The Governor,” we should be disposed to think that children of the upper classes were then expected to begin their classical studies while still in their cradles. A nobleman’s son, he says, should have none about him, not even his nurses, who cannot speak pure and eloquent Latin. At the very least, their English should be clean, polite, perfect, and articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or syllable. At seven, a boy is to begin his Greek and Latin grammars together; and at twelve he is supposed to have so completely made the Latin tongue his own that he need no more apply himself to its study, but confine his labours to Greek. The whole treatise, which is in many respects valuable and interesting, proves that the writer had imbibed that tiresome form of classical enthusiasm which wears you out with its illustrations from the ancients. Even the necessity of religion is supported by an appeal to the examples of Romulus and Numa Pompilius, though, accidentally, we are allowed to peep into the old Catholic nursery, and see the children “knelyng in thir games before ymages, and holdyng up thir litel white handes, movyng thir mouths as if they were praieing, or going and singyng, as it were in procession.” This treatise, published in 1531, plainly infers that at that time a noble youth was expected to begin his studies very early, and to aim at something more than the name of a scholar. On the other hand, there was a certain prejudice in favour of foreign academies, which induced those who in all ages make it their business to follow the fashion, to undervalue Eton and Oxford, and to consider you a Goth or a rustic if you had not graduated in some Italian university. The mediæval spirit which still hung about the cloisters of Oxford was quite out of harmony with the prevailing tastes; and undoubtedly those same cloisters sheltered many worthy Conservatives of the old school who clung to Aristotle and Oxford Latin, and thought very little of the new-fangled Platonists.
Hence, those who desired to imbue themselves with classic literature generally found their way to Italy, and the rage for a foreign education had become so excessive that Barclay introduces an allusion to it in his “Ship of Fooles:”—
One runneth to Almayne, another to France,
To Paris, Padwy, Lombardy, or Spayne,
Another to Bonony, Rome, or Orleans;