Philosophy, meaning Aristotle, had come in to disturb the peace and the sufficiency of the old ‘seven arts.’
[280] William Everett, M.A., 1865.
[281] It has been said that senior wranglers are hidden in country rectories and are never heard of again. In a hundred and sixty years (1747-1906) there have been eight senior wranglers who could be placed in the first rank as mathematicians and physicists:
| Herschell 1813 Airy 1823 Stokes 1841 Cayley 1842 | Adams 1843 Todhunter 1848 Routh 1854 Rayleigh 1865 |
Paley, in 1763, was the first distinguished senior wrangler. On the other hand Colenso Whewell and Lord Kelvin were second wranglers, so was the geometrician Sylvester; de Morgan and Pritchard were fourth wranglers; the learned Porteous was tenth wrangler, Lord Manners (Lord Chancellor of Ireland) was 5th, Lord Ellenborough (Lord Chief Justice) 3rd, Lord Lyndhurst (Lord Chancellor) second.
[282] Another distinguished Oxonian, and East Anglian, Grosseteste, attempted in the xiii c. the re-introduction of Greek into England; but the foreign linguists whom he invited to St. Albans left no successors.
[283] The west countryman Grocyn (b. 1442) who learnt his Greek in Italy and returned to teach it in Oxford was, chronologically, the first English classical scholar since the revival of learning.
[284] “All students equally contributed to his” (Croke’s) “lectures, whether they heard or heard them not.” Fuller.
[285] Revivers of Greek in Cambridge.
First period: Early patrons of Greek learning, and the group round Erasmus.