The Bishop, however, who through Erasmus was recommended to William Latymer, one of the foremost Philhellenists of the day, could not persuade that scholar to enter on the task, as he considered the prelate too old to acquire the language; and Knight tells us that, in order to escape from the application, he advised Fisher to send for a professor out of Italy.
Englishmen, even at a later period than this, occasionally went to Florence or elsewhere to learn Greek; but Erasmus made himself, with the assistance of Linacre, tolerably proficient in it, on the contrary, during his first visit to England in the time of Henry the Seventh (1497-8), and was sufficiently versed, at all events in the rudiments, to give lessons to others while he remained at Cambridge. Doubtless he did so in aid of his expenses.
“In Cambridge,” observes Knight, “Erasmus was the first who taught the Greek grammar. And so very low was the state of learning in that University, that (as he tells a friend) about the year 1485, the beginning of Henry the Seventh’s reign, there was nothing taught in that public seminary besides Alexander’s Parva Logicalia (as they called them), the old axioms of Aristotle, and the questions of John Scotus.”
Erasmus himself was for some time Greek Reader at Cambridge, and was contemporary there with Richard Croke, of King’s College, who did valuable service in promoting the cause of classical learning at that University, and published several tracts relating to the Greek literature and tongue, including Introductiones ad Linguam Græcam and Elementa Grammaticæ Græcæ—the earliest attempts to place before students in a handy form the alphabet of the subject.
At Oxford it was an Italian, Cornelius Vitellius, who became the first Greek professor, and William Grocyne, who with Latymer and Linacre was the earliest Greek scholar in England, was among his pupils.
It is to be suspected that, while a man of genius like Erasmus could scarcely have failed to make something of whatever he seriously undertook, his conversance with Greek was always comparatively superficial, and it is merely an additional piece of evidence how little the language was cultivated at Cambridge at that epoch, that he was enabled to earn money as a teacher of it.
It was not apparently till 1524 that Greek type was introduced into our printing-offices. Linacre’s book De Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis, published in that year, is generally received as containing the first specimen found in any production of the English press. The Greek alphabet occurs in the Primer of 1548.
II. Florence, Rome, Padua, and Rhodes were four great centres whither foreigners were then accustomed to resort for the study and mastery of Greek. In the Life of Dean Colet it is shown how he travelled in Italy, and met with two of his countrymen at Florence, Grocyn and Linacre, and with a third at Rome, Lily, afterwards the famous grammarian, who, after learning Greek at Rhodes, had proceeded to Rome to render himself equally adept in Latin, so that, when he finally settled in London, he had served a laborious apprenticeship and taken unusual pains to become an instructor of others.
Colet himself, it is to be noted, displayed in earlier life a bent towards theology and the Fathers, though he had scanty sympathy with the survivals whom he found around him, both at home and abroad, of the monastic schoolmen and expounders of the old divinity.
“He had observed these schoolmen,” says his biographer indeed, “to be a heavy set of formal fellows, that might pretend to anything rather than to wit and sense, for to argue so elaborately about the opinions and the very words of other men: to snarl in perpetual objections, and to distinguish and divide into a thousand niceties: this was rather the work of a poor and barren invention than anything else.”