[565] Bayle, art. Sylvius.
Greek scholars in England. 30. We have the imposing testimony of Erasmus himself, that neither France nor Germany stood so high about this period as England. That country, he says, so distant from Italy, stands next to it in the esteem of the learned. This, however, is written in 1524. About the end of the present decennial period we can produce a not very small number of persons possessing a competent acquaintance with the Greek tongue, more, perhaps, than could be traced in France, though all together might not weigh as heavy as Budæus alone. Such were Grocyn, the patriarch of English learning, who died in 1519; Linacre, whose translation of Galen, first printed in 1521, is one of the few in that age that escape censure for inelegance or incorrectness; Latimer, beloved and admired by his friends, but of whom we have no memorial in any writings of his own; More, known as a scholar by Greek epigrams of some merit;[566] Lilly, master of St. Paul’s school, who had acquired Greek at Rhodes, but whose reputation is better preserved by the grammars that bear his name; Lupsett, who is said to have learned from Lilly, and who taught some time at Oxford; Richard Croke, already named; Gerard Lister, a physician, to whom Erasmus gives credit for skill in the three languages; Pace and Tunstall, both men well known in the history of those times; Lee and Stokesley, afterwards bishops, the former of whom published Annotations on the Greek Testament of Erasmus at Basle in 1520;[567] and probably Gardiner; Clement, one of Wolsey’s first lecturers at Oxford;[568] Brian, Wakefield, Bullock, and a few more, whose names appear in Pits and Wood, or even who are not recorded; for we could not without presumption attempt to enumerate every person who at this time was not wholly unacquainted with the Greek language. Yet it would be an error, on the other hand, to make a large allowance for omissions; much less to conclude that every man who might enjoy some reputation in a learned profession could in a later generation have passed for a scholar. Colet, for example, and Fisher, men as distinguished as almost any of that age, were unacquainted with the Greek tongue, and both made some efforts to attain it at an advanced age.[569] It was not till the year 1517 that the first Greek lecture was established at Oxford by Fox, bishop of Hereford, in his new foundation of Corpus Christi College. Wolsey, in 1519, endowed a regular professorship in the university. It was about the same year that Fisher, chancellor of the university of Cambridge, sent down Richard Croke, lately returned from Leipsic, to tread in the footsteps of Erasmus as teacher of Greek.[570] But this was in advance of our neighbours; for no public instruction in that language was yet given in France.
[566] The Greek verses of More and Lilly, Progymnasmata Mori et Lilii, were published at Basle, 1518. It is in this volume that the distich, about which some curiosity has been shown, is found: Inveni portum, spes et fortuna valete, &c. But it is a translation from the Greek.
Quid tandem non præstitisset admirabilis ista naturæ felicitas, si hoc ingenium instituisset Italia? si totum Musarum sacris vacasset? si ad justam frugem ac velut autumnum suum maturuisset? Epigrammata lusit adolescens admodum, ac pleraque puer; Britanniam suam nunquam egressus est, nisi semel atque iterum principis sui nomine legatione functus apud Flandros. Præter rem uxoriam, præter curas domesticas, præter publici muneris functionem et causarum undas, tot tantisque regni negotiis distrahitur, ut mireris esse otium vel cogitandi de libris. Epist. clxix. Aug. 1517. In the Ciceronianus he speaks of More with more discriminating praise, and the passage is illustrative of that just quoted.
[567] Erasmus does not spare Lee. Epist. ccxlviii. Quo uno nihil unquam adhuc terra produxit, nec arrogantius, nec virulentius, nec stultius. This was the tone of the age towards any adversary, who was not absolutely out of reach of such epithets. In another place, he speaks of Lee as nuper Græcæ linguæ rudimentis initiatus. Ep. cccclxxxxi.
[568] Knight says (apud Jortin, i. 45) that Clement was the first lecturer at Oxford in Greek after Linacre, and that he was succeeded by Lupsett. And this seems, as to the fact that they did successively teach, to be confirmed by More. Jortin, ii. 396. But the Biographia Britannica, art. Wolsey, asserts that they were appointed to the chair of rhetoric or humanity; and that Calpurnius, a native of Greece, was the first professor of the language. No authority is quoted by the editors; but I have found it confirmed by Caius in a little treatise De Pronuntiatione Græcæ et Latinæ Linguæ. Novit, he says, Oxoniensis schola, quemadmodum ipsa Græcia pronuntiavit. ex Matthæo Calpurnio Græco, quem ex Græciâ Oxoniam Græcarum literarum gratia perduxerat Thomas Wolseus, de bonis literis optime meritus cardinalis, cum non alia ratione pronuntiant illi, quam quâ nos jam profitemur. Caius de Pronunt. Græc. et Lat. Linguæ, edit. Jebb, p. 228.
[569] Nunc dolor me tenet, says Colet in 1516, quod non didicerim Græcum sermonem, sine cujus peritia nihil sumus. From a later epistle of Erasmus, where he says, Coletus strenue Græcatur, it seems likely that he actually made some progress; but at his age it would not be very considerable. Latimer dissuaded Fisher from the attempt, unless he could procure a master from Italy, which Erasmus thought needless. Epist. ccclxiii. In an edition of his Adages, he says, Joannes Fischerus tres linguas ætate jam vergente non vulgari studio amplectitur, Chil. iv. Cent. v. 1.
[570] Greek had not been neglected at Cambridge during the interval, according to a letter of Bullock (in Latin Bovillus) to Erasmus in 1516 from thence. Hic acriter incumbunt literis Græcis, optanque non mediocritur tuum adventum, et hi magnopere favent tuæ huic in Novum Testamentum editioni. It is probable that Cranmer was a pupil of Croke: for in the deposition of the latter before Mary’s commissioners in 1555, he says that he had known the archbishop thirty-six years, which brings us to his own first lectures at Cambridge. Todd’s Life of Cranmer, ii. 449. But Cranmer may have known something of the language before, and is, not improbably, one of those to whom Bullock alludes.
Mode of teaching in schools. 31. By the statutes of St. Paul’s school, dated in 1518, the master is to be “lerned in good and clene Latin literature, and also in Greke, iff such may be gotten.” Of the boys he says, “I wolde they were taught always in good literature both Latin and Greke.” But it does not follow from hence that Greek was actually taught; and considering the want of lexicons and grammars, none of which, as we shall see, were published in England for many years afterwards, we shall be apt to think that little instruction could have been given.[571] This, however, is not conclusive, and would lead us to bring down the date of philological learning in our public seminaries much too low. The process of learning without books was tedious and difficult, but not impracticable for the diligent. The teacher provided himself with a lexicon which was in common use among his pupils, and with one of the grammars published on the Continent, from which he gave oral lectures, and portions of which were transcribed by each student. The books read in the lecture-room were probably copied out in the same manner, the abbreviations giving some facility to a cursive hand; and thus the deficiency of impressions was in some degree supplied, just as before the invention of printing. The labour of acquiring knowledge strengthened, as it always does, the memory; it excited an industry which surmounted every obstacle, and yielded to no fatigue; and we may thus account for that copiousness of verbal learning which sometimes astonishes us in the scholars of the sixteenth century, and in which they seem to surpass the more exact philologers of later ages.
[571] In a letter of Erasmus on the death of Colet in 1522, Epist. ccccxxxv (and in Jortin’s App., ii. 315), though he describes the course of education at St. Paul’s school rather diffusely, and in a strain of high panegyric, there is not a syllable of allusion to the study of Greek. Pits, however, in an account of one William Horman, tells us, that he was ad collegium Etonense studiorum causa missus, ubi avide haustis litteris humanioribus, perceptisque Græcæ linguæ rudimentis, dignus habitus est qui Cantabrigiam ad altiores disciplinas destinaretur. Horman became Græcæ linguæ peritissimus, and returned, as head master, to Eton: quo tempore in litteris humanioribus scholares illic insigniter erudivit. He wrote several works, partly grammatical, of which Pits gives the titles, and died, plenus dierum, in 1535.