| Inspired by Linacre to start for Italy to learn Greek. | {3. Grocyn b. Bristol 1442. New and Exeter Colleges, Oxford. The first to lecture on Greek. {4. William Latymer, educated at Padua, but afterwards a fellow at Oxford. {5. William Lily, b. Hants. 1468, learnt Greek at Rhodes and Rome. |
6. Colet, b. 1466. At Oxford and Paris; learnt Greek in Italy.
7. Thomas More, b. 1480. Learnt Greek with Linacre and Grocyn.
8. Richard Pace.
[286] Namely “in King’s Hall, King’s, S. John’s and Christ’s Colleges, Michaelhouse, Peterhouse, Gonville, Trinity Hall, Pembroke Hall, Queens’, Jesus, and Buckingham Colleges, Clare Hall and Benet College.” Royal Injunctions of 1535.
[287] The ancient pronunciation of Latin (so far as it can be recovered) has been taught, as an alternative, at Cambridge for the last 25 years, and has of late been widely adopted there, as elsewhere. Perhaps at the bottom of the preference for English Latin there lies the notion that without it Latin would no longer be the English scholar’s second tongue. The simple retort is that with it Latin is no longer (has not been for centuries) a common medium, the second tongue, of European scholars. Anglicised Greek is due to Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith, though it was promptly abolished at the time by Stephen Gardiner then chancellor of the university, and opposed also by Caius. “Nor mattereth it if foreigners should dissent, seeing hereby we Englishmen shall understand one another,” so Fuller explains the position.
[288] Paley continued to keep his traditional hold on Cambridge through the divinity paper in the “Little Go” which is based upon the “Evidences for Christianity.” On the other hand logic has recaptured the place which Aristotle held in the general curriculum by being admitted, since 1884, as the alternative subject for Paley’s “Evidences.”
[289] Lord Maynard of Wicklow (S. John’s College) endowed a professor of logic at Cambridge in the reign of James I., with £40-50 a year.
For university activity in philosophy in the xvii c. see chapter v. pp. 284-90.
[290] One must not forget, however, that both the remarkable men who planted the study of the experimental sciences in Cambridge were distinguished ‘classics’ as well as scientists.