[952] Hallam’s Constit. Hist. of Eng. i. 249.
[953] Peck’s Desiderata Curiosa, p. 270.
[954] Wood. Hist. and Antiq. of Oxford.
Greek Lectures at Cambridge. 42. In 1575, the queen having been now near twenty years on the throne, we find on positive evidence, that Greek lectures were given in St. John’s College, Cambridge; which, indeed, few would be disposed to doubt, reflecting on the general character of the age and the length of opportunity that had been afforded. It is said in the life of Mr. Bois, or Boyse, one of the revisers of the translation of the Bible under James, that “his father was a great scholar, being learned in the Hebrew and Greek excellently well, which, considering the manners, that I say not, the looseness of the times of his education, was almost a miracle.” The son was admitted at St. John’s in 1575. “His father had well educated him in the Greek tongue before his coming; which caused him to be taken notice of in the college. For besides himself there was but one there who could write Greek. Three lectures in that language were read in the college. In the first, grammar was taught, as is commonly now done in schools. In the second, an easy author was explained in the grammatical way. In the third was read somewhat which might seem fit for their capacities who had passed over the other two. A year was usually spent in the first, and two in the second.”[955] It will be perceived, that the course of instruction was still elementary; but it is well known that many, perhaps most students, entered the universities at an earlier age than is usual at present.[956]
[955] Peck’s Desiderata Curiosa, p. 327. Chalmers.
[956] It is probable that Cambridge was at this time better furnished with learning than Oxford. Even Wood does not give us a favourable notion of the condition of that university in the first part of the queen’s reign. Oxford was for a long time filled with popish students, that is, with conforming partisans of the former religion; many of whom, from time to time, went off to Douay. Leicester, as chancellor of the university, charged it, in 1582, and in subsequent years, with great neglect of learning; the disputations had become mere forms, and the queen’s lecturers in Greek and Hebrew seldom read. It was as bad in all the other sciences. Wood’s Antiquities and Athenæ, passim. The colleges of Corpus Christi and Merton were distinguished beyond the rest in the reign of Elizabeth; especially the former, where Jewel read the lecture in rhetoric (at an earlier time, of course), Hooker in logic, and Raynolds in Greek. Leicester succeeded in puritanizing, as Wood thought, the university, by driving off the old party, and thus rendered it a more effective school of learning.
Harrison, about 1586, does not speak much better of the universities; “the quadrivials, I mean arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, are now small regarded in either of them.” Description of Britain, p. 252. Few learned preachers were sent out from them, which he ascribes, in part, to the poor endowments of most livings.
Few Greek editions in England. 43. We come very slowly to books, even subsidiary to education, in the Greek language. And since this cannot be conveniently carried on to any great extent without books, though I am aware that some contrivances were employed as substitutes for them, and since it was as easy to publish either grammars or editions of ancient authors in England as on the Continent, we can, as it seems, draw no other inference from the want of them than the absence of any considerable demand. I shall therefore enumerate all the books instrumental to the study of Greek which appeared in England before the close of the century.
School books enumerated. 44. It has been mentioned in another place that two alone had been printed before 1550. In 1553 a Greek version of the second Æneid, by George Etherege, was published. Two editions of the Anglican liturgy in Latin and Greek, by Whitaker, one of our most learned theologians, appeared in 1569;[957] a short catechism in both languages, 1573 and 1578. We find also in 1578 a little book entitled χριοτιανισμου στοιχειωσις εις την παιδων ωθελειαν ἑλληνιστι και λατινιστι εκτεθεισα. This is a translation, made also by Whitaker, from Nowell’s Christianæ Pietatis Prima Institutio, ad Usum Scholarum Latine Scripta. The Biographia Britannica puts the first edition of this Greek version in 1575; and informs us also that Nowell’s lesser Catechism was published in Latin and Greek, 1575; but I do not find any confirmation of this in Herbert or Watts. In 1575, Grant, master of Westminster School, published Græcæ Linguæ Spicilegium, intended evidently for the use of his scholars; and in 1581 the same Grant superintended an edition of Constantin’s Lexicon, probably in the abridgment, under the name of the Basle printer Crespin, enriching it with four or five thousand new words, which he most likely took from Stephens’s Thesaurus. A Greek, Latin, French, and English lexicon, by John Barret or Baret, in 1580,[958] and another by John Morel (without the French), in 1583, are recorded in bibliographical works; but I do not know whether any copies have survived.
[957] Scaliger says of Whitaker, O qu’il etoit bien docte! Scalig. Secunda.