Succeeded by Cheke. 26. Cheke, successor of Smith as lecturer in Greek at Cambridge, was appointed the first royal professor of that language in 1540, with a respectable salary. He carried on Smith’s scheme, if indeed it were not his own, for restoring the true pronunciation, in spite of the strenuous opposition of bishop Gardiner, chancellor of the university. This prelate, besides a literary controversy in letters between himself and Cheke, published at Basle in 1555, interfered, in a more orthodox way, by prohibiting the new style of speech in a decree which, for its solemnity, might relate to the highest articles of faith. Cheke however in this, as in greater matters, was on the winning side; and the corrupt pronunciation was soon wholly forgotten.
Ascham’s character of Cambridge. 27. Among the learned men who surrounded Cheke at Cambridge, none was more deserving than Ascham; whose knowledge of ancient languages was not shown in profuse quotation, or enveloped in Latin phrase, but served to enrich his mind with valuable sense, and taught him to transfer the firmness and precision of ancient writers to our own English, in which he is nearly the first that deserves to be named, or that is now read. He speaks in strong terms of his university. “At Cambridge also, in St. John’s college, in my time, I do know that not so much the good statutes as two gentlemen of worthy memory, Sir John Cheke and Dr. Redman, by their only example of excellency in learning, of godliness in living, of diligence in studying, of counsel in exhorting, by good order in all things, did breed up so many learned men in that one college of St. John’s at one time as I believe the whole university of Louvain in many years was never able to afford.”[668] Lectures in humanity, that is, in classical literature, were, in 1535, established by the king’s authority in all colleges of the university of Oxford where they did not already exist; and in the royal injunctions at the same time for the reformation of academical studies a regard to philological learning is enforced.[669]
[668] Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the Life of Ascham by Grant, prefixed to the former’s Epistles, he enumerates the learned of Cambridge about 1530. Ascham was himself under Pember, homini Græcæ linguæ admirabili facilitate excultissimo. The others named are Day, Redman, Smith, Cheke, Ridley, Grindal (not the archbishop), Watson, Haddon, Pilkington, Horn, Christopherson, Wilson, Seton, et infiniti alii, excellenti doctrinâ præditi. Most of these are men afterwards distinguished in the church on one side or the other. This is a sufficient refutation of Wood’s idle assertion of the superiority of Oxford; the fact seems to have been wholly otherwise. Ascham himself, in a letter without date, but evidently written about the time that the controversy of Cheke and Gardiner began, praises thus the learning of Cambridge. Aristoteles nunc et Plato, quod factum est etiam apud nos hic quinquennium, in sua lingua a pueris leguntur. Sophocles et Euripides sunt hic familiariores, quam olim Plautus fuerat, cum tu hic eras. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, magis in ore et manibus omnium tenuntur, quam tum Titus Livius, etc. Ibid. p. 74. What then can be thought of Antony Wood when he says, “Cambridge was in the said king’s reign overspread with barbarism and ignorance, as ’tis often mentioned by several authors?” Hist. and Antiq. of Oxford, A.D. 1545.
[669] Warton, iii. 272.
Wood’s account of Oxford. 28. Antony Wood, though he is by no means always consistent, gives rather a favourable account of the state of philological learning at Oxford in the last years of Henry VIII. There can, indeed, be no doubt that it had been surprisingly increasing in all England through his reign. More grammar schools, it is said by Knight, were founded in thirty years before the Reformation, meaning, I presume, the age of Henry, than in three hundred years preceding. But the suddenness with which the religious establishment was changed on the accession of Edward, and still more the rapacity of the young king’s council, who alienated or withheld the revenues designed for the support of learning, began to cloud the prospect before the year 1550.[670] Wood, in reading whom allowance is to be made for a strong, though not quite avowed bias towards the old system of ecclesiastical and academical government, inveighs against the visitors of the university appointed by the crown in 1548, for burning and destroying valuable books. And this seems to be confirmed by other evidence. It is true that these books, though it was a vile act to destroy them, would have been more useful to the English antiquary than to the classical student. Ascham, a contemporary protestant, denies that the university of Cambridge declined at all before the accession of Mary in 1553.
[670] Strype, ii. 258. Todd’s Cranmer, ii. 33.
Education of Edward and his sisters. 29. Edward himself received a learned education, and, according to Ascham, read the ethics of Aristotle in Greek. Of the princess Elizabeth, his favourite pupil, we have a similar testimony.[671] Mary was not by any means illiterate. It is hardly necessary to mention Jane Grey and the wife of Cecil. Their proficiency was such as to excite the admiration of every one, and is no measure of the age in which they lived. And their names carry us on a little beyond 1550, though Ascham’s visit to the former was in that year.
[671] Of the king he says: Dialecticam didicit, et nunc Græcè discit Aristotelis Ethica. Eo progressus est in Græca lingua, ut in philosophia Ciceronis ex Latinis Græca facillime faciat, Dec. 1550. Ascham, Epist. iv. Elizabeth spoke French and Italian as well as English; Latin fluently and correctly; Greek tolerably. She began every day by reading the Greek Testament, and afterwards the orations of Isocrates, and tragedies of Sophocles. Some years afterwards, in 1555, he writes of her to Sturm: Domina Elizabeth et ego una legimus Græcè orationes Æschinis et Demosthenis περι στεφανου Illa prælegit mihi et primo aspectu tam scienter intelligit non solum proprietatem linguæ et oratoris sensum, sed totam causæ contentionem, populi scita, consuetudinem et mores illius urbis, ut summopere admireris, p. 53. In 1560 he asserts that there are not four persons, in court or college (in aula, in academia), who know Greek better than the queen.
Habemus Angliæ reginam, says Erasmus long before of Catherine, feminan egregiè doctam, cujus filia Maria scribit bene Latinas epistolas. Thomæ Mori domus nihil aliud quam musarum est domicilium. Epist. Mxxxiv.