After this, the development of scholarship was comparatively easy. Men like Vives, Vergara, who published a Greek grammar, praised by many of the scholars of the time and thoroughly appreciated by Scaliger, and Sanchez, who was professor of Greek at Salamanca when he was but thirty-one, carried on the New Learning. Sanchez' text-book on Latin syntax called "The Minerva" came to be more used throughout Europe than almost any other. Haase declared that he had done more for Latin grammar than any of his predecessors, and Sir William Hamilton, the English philosopher, even held that the study of "Minerva" with the notes of the editors was more profitable than that of Newton's "Principia." Sandys notes that "it is at any rate written in good Latin and the author shows a familiarity with the whole range of Latin literature as well as Aristotle and Plato."
After this, indeed, grammar, the science of language, came to a great extent to be under the domination of Spanish minds. Nuñez, or as he is known by his Latin name Nunnesius of Valencia, who studied in Paris and was professor of Greek at Barcelona, was the author of an interesting little Greek grammar which, according to Sandys, differs little from those now used in schools. With the coming of the Jesuits, Emmanuel Alvarez produced the Latin grammar in which for the first time the principles of the language were formally laid down and the fancies of ancient grammarians laid aside. It became the text-book in all the Jesuit schools, has often been reprinted since, is the foundation of all our modern Latin grammars and is said by experienced teachers to surpass all its successors. Spain did not neglect other phases of scholarship, however. Agostino, after graduation at Salamanca, taught law at Padua and at Florence, became a member of the Papal Tribunal in Rome, studying the inscriptions and ancient monuments as well as the manuscripts of the old city. Later he became the Bishop of Lerida and then Archbishop of Taragona. He published a treatise on Roman Laws, often reprinted, but his masterpiece in classical archaeology was his [{541}] book on coins, inscriptions and other antiquities, published originally in Spanish and attracting wide, popular attention.
Portugal follows in scholarship the rest of the peninsula and owed its initiative to contact with Italian sources. Resende taught Greek at Lisbon and Evora and counted among his pupils the famous Achilles Statius, whose career comes mainly after the conclusion of Columbus' Century, though he was twenty-six before the century closed and his scholarship is a product of our period. He won his high reputation in Rome by a work on ancient portraits and by commentaries on the "Ars Poetica" of Horace, when he was not yet thirty, and confirmed this by subsequent fine work on Catullus and Tibullus. He was associated with Muretus in an edition of Propertius, and his studies on the "Illustrious Men of Suetonius" attracted the attention of the learned world of his time and was highly praised by Casaubon. The Jesuit Father Alvarez, whose grammar I have already mentioned, though of Spanish extraction, lived in Portugal and was educated and taught there. The University of Coimbra took on renewed vigor just at the end of Columbus' Century and its classical school became famous especially under the Jesuits. The University became noted for its Teachers' College, for graduates who purposed to follow teaching as a vocation, and for its opportunities for the training of the teaching religious orders.
England was often looked upon at the beginning of the Renaissance as so distant from the centres of culture on the Continent that very little was expected of her in scholarship. Of course, the same thing was more or less true with regard to Germany, not because of distance in space, but of speech. The peoples of the Latin languages felt a brotherhood to each other which they did not share with the Germans or English, whose speech it must be confessed, somewhat after the narrow fashion of the Greeks of the older times towards all nations not Greek in origin, they considered barbarous. It is always true that nations quite fail to understand each other, and our own attitude toward Italy at the present time, though the civilization and culture of the world owes more to Italy than to all the other nations of modern history put together, is typical of this constant tendency to national misunderstanding. [{542}] The Italians were very much surprised to have pupils from England rather early in Columbus' Century, and still more surprised apparently to have them succeed admirably. They soon came to appreciate them highly, and such men as Linacre, John Free and Caius were even made teachers at Italian universities. Over and over again, the Italians expressed their gratification at the spread of scholarship among the English and their congratulations on their success in the New Learning. The congratulations were amply deserved.
Bishop Creighton, in his "Early Renaissance in England," [Footnote 50] says that the first English humanist was Lord Grey of Codnor, who went from Balliol College to Cologne, which was famous at the time for its general culture and education, but as he desired to get classical culture more particularly, he stole away to Florence at night lest his going should be hampered by the many friends that he had made at Cologne. He found much of interest at Florence, ordered a library there and then went to Padua, where he studied for a time. He was attracted to Ferrara, however, by the reputation of Guarino, and from there went to Rome, where the scholarly Nicholas V nominated him Bishop of Ely. One of the next of the great English scholars was John Free, a physician, whose expenses during his Italian trip were paid by Lord Grey, and who had no less success among the Italian scholars. The scholarly doctor was appointed Bishop of Bath in 1465, but died before his consecration.
[Footnote 50: Cambridge University Press, 1895.]
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Italy's welcome for these students from Britain, "which is situated outside the world," was the absolutely unprejudiced way in which they were chosen to important posts in the University in competition with the Italians. Reynold Chicheley, who studied at Ferrara under Guarino, became Rector of the universities there. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, compelled to leave England by political conditions at the beginning of the latter half of the fifteenth century, went to Venice and to the Holy Land and studied Latin at Padua, visited the aged Guarino at Ferrara, as Sandys in his "History of Classical Scholarship" tells us, and heard Argyropulos lecture on Greek. The Latin oration [{543}] which he delivered in the presence of Pope Pius II (AEneas Sylvius) is said to have drawn tears of joy from the eyes of the Pope because of the feeling of satisfaction that classical scholarship was now a world possession.
Erasmus, who was certainly in a position to judge both because of his own scholarship and his many years of residence in England, wrote a letter in December, 1499, to a friend in Italy in highest praise of English scholarship. It is a panegyric of his English friends, but it is a glorious tribute:
"I have found in England . . . so much learning and culture, and that of no common kind, but recondite, exact and ancient, Latin and Greek, that I now hardly want to go to Italy, except to see it. When I listen to my friend Colet, I can fancy I am listening to Plato himself. Who can fail to admire Grocyn, with all his encyclopaedic erudition? Can anything be more acute, more profound, more refined, than the judgment of Linacre? Has nature ever moulded anything gentler, pleasanter, or happier, than the mind of Thomas More?"
In England, as elsewhere, the Reformation worked sad havoc on education. The confiscation of educational endowments and the suppression of monasteries and the scattering of their libraries almost put an end to scholarship in England. The descent in education continued until the end of the eighteenth century. Only in the past hundred years has England begun to recover lost ground.