PART II. CHAP. V. The young regent incurred, of course, a large amount of hostile criticism, but he probably felt more than compensated by the cordial praise and increased regard of his old instructor1. Sir Robert Rede founds the Rede lectureships. A.D. 1518. Sense of the importance of Greek controversy respecting Nov. Inst. In the same year, the foundation of the Rede lectureships gave additional sanction to the new learning. Sir Robert Rede, who, at the time of his death, was lord chief justice of the Common Pleas, had formerly been a fellow of King's Hall; and in his will, he bequeathed to the university certain revenues, payable by the abbey at Waltham, of the annual value of £12. This sum he directed to be divided among three lecturers, appointed by the university, in philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. In the mean time, Fisher's zeal in behalf of the study the study of of Greek appears not only to have remained unabated, but to duced by the have been considerably enhanced by his sense of the growing Erasmus's importance of a knowledge of the language, as he watched the controversy that was agitating both the universities in connexion with the Novum Instrumentum. That great event in literature had indeed aroused not a few to a perception of the value of the study; and Colet, while bewailing his own ignorance, declared that not to know Greek was to be nobody. In the year 1516, Erasmus returned, for a short time, to England. He was everywhere received with marked expressions of respect and consideration. Both king and cardinal appear to have held out to him tempting inducements to remain. Warham, whose deeds, as usual, went beyond his words, made him a munificent present. The grateful scholar, with his usual impulsiveness, Erasmus again visits England. Aristotelem publice per biennium publicis in scholis, non ex spinosis realium et nominalium (quorum tum altercationes academiam perturbabant) subtilitatibus, sed ex ipsis fontibus proponebat. Quo nomine multis factus invisior, at Erasmo, eruditissimo illi ingeniorum censori, carissimus est effectus.' MSS. Tenison (quoted by Knight, p. 147). Compare the similar course pursued by Melanchthon at almost exactly the same time at Wittenberg. On being appointed professor there, he found the nominalists and realists filling the university with their disputes. He proposed to them that they should apply themselves to the joint pursuit of truth in those books which they quoted but had not read,' gave each of them a Greek and a Latin grammar, and established peace. Nisard, Etudes sur la Renaissance, p. 448. • Cooper, Annals, 1 301. PART II. declared in a letter to a friend, that Britain was his sheet- CHAP. V. anchor, his only refuge from beggary'. He does not appear to have visited Cambridge; but writing from London at the close of the year to Berus, he again bears testimony to His testithe remarkable and decisive change that had come over the change at Cambridge. spirit of the university, and encourages his correspondent by the assurance that he will, ere long, witness a like change at Paris. mony to the pires to a Greek. It was during his stay at Rochester on this occasion, Fisher asthat his patron gave convincing proof of his sense of the knowledge of value of Greek, by announcing his wish, though then fiftytwo years of age, to receive instruction in the language; and there is still extant an amusing correspondence between Erasmus, More, and Latimer, on the subject. It appears that the former two were endeavouring to prevail on Latimer to become Fisher's Greek master. The triumvirate however Embarrassall betray an uncomfortable foreboding that the undertaking, friends. as likely to end in failure, would probably prove less agreeable than might be desired. They seem to have thought that the good bishop himself only half apprehended the difficulties of the enterprise, especially to one of his advanced years; 'Expertus disces quam gravis iste labor,' ment of his was the sentiment that doubtless often rose to their lips, but regard and reverence checked its utterance. Moreover, was there not the encouraging precedent of Cato, to be pleaded in justification? The pressure put upon Latimer was not slight, but he backed out of the engagement by Latimer dedeclaring that he had not opened either a Greek or Latin taking the classic for the last eight years, and he advised that an structor. instructor should be sought in Italy. It appears indeed 1 Jortin, I 110. 2 Videbis eas ineptias magna ex parte explodi. Cantabrigia mutata: hæc schola detestatur frigidas illas argutias, quæ magis ad rixam faciunt quam ad pietatem.' Erasmi Opera, ш 1573, 1574. 4 Sed cum octo aut novem annos in aliis studiis ita sim versatus, ut vix ullam interim paginam, vel Græ- clines under office of in CHAP. V. Cambridge also in want of Greek. more than doubtful whether Fisher ever acquired the knowledge he so much coveted1. Shortly after this, Erasmus left England for Louvain. In the following year Ammonius was carried off by the sweating sickness; and in the year after that, Colet also was taken from the world. In them Erasmus lost his two dearest friends, and he never again visited the English shores. In the mean time, the university was, like its chancellor, of a teacher lacking a teacher of Greek; and it was especially desirable that when the whole question of this study was, as it were, on its trial, the chief representative of such learning at Cambridge should, like Erasmus, be one whose eminence could not be gainsaid. Bryan and Bullock, though young men of parts, do not appear to have acquired a decisive reputation as Grecians; and the friends of progress now began to look somewhat anxiously round for a successor to the great scholar who had deserted them some three years before. The battle was still undecided. No chair of Greek had, as yet, been established in the university; while of the unabated hostility and unscrupulousness of the opposite party, Oxford, just at this time, had given to the world a notable illustration. Violent op position to the study at Oxford, As we have before had occasion to observe, the tendencies of the sister university were more exclusively theological than those of Cambridge, and the result was naturally a correspondingly more energetic resistance to a study, which, as it was now clearly understood, was likely, if it gained a permanent footing, completely to revolutionise the traditional simum?......Quapropter si vis ut pro- tem, veluti in cunis relinquas.' Erasmi Opera, III 294-5. Erasmus and More, it may be added by way of explanation, had wanted Latimer to undertake the office of tutor for a month, just as an experiment. 1 The sole evidence in favour of the affirmative adduced by Lewis (161), the presence of a Greek quotation on the title page of the bishop's treatise against Luther,-can hardly be considered satisfactory. PART II. of CORPUS LEGE at Ox theology of the schools. It was exactly at this time, more- CHAP. V. over, that a bold declaration of policy, on the part of one of the chief supporters of Greek at Oxford, had roused the apprehensions of their antagonists to an unwonted pitch. In the year 1516, bishop Fox had founded the college of Foundation Corpus Christi. Though at the time still master of Pem- CHRISTI COLbroke, his Oxford sympathies predominated, or he perhaps ford, 1516. thought, that with so powerful a patron as Fisher, Cambridge had little need of his aid. In the following year, he drew up the statutes for the new foundation, which, while conceived in the same spirit as those already given by Fisher at Cambridge, by whom indeed they were subsequently adopted in many of their details, in his revision of the statutes of St. John's College, in the year 1524,-were also found to embody a far more bold and emphatic declaration in favour of the new learning. The editor and translator of bishop Fox's statutes has indeed not hesitated to maintain, Bp. Fox's that Fox was the true leader of reform at Oxford at this period, and that Wolsey was little more than an ambitious and inconstant improver upon his hints'. It is certain that few Oxonians, at that day, could have heard with indifference that at Fox's new college,-besides a lecturer on the Latin classics and another on Greek,-there was also to be a 1 The Foundation Statutes of Bishop Fox for Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford, A.D. 1517. Translated into English, with a Life of the Founder. By R. M. Ward, Esq., M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, etc. 1843, p. xli. 2 The first lecturer, who is to be 'the sower and planter of the Latin tongue,' the statute directs' to manfully root out barbarity from our garden, and cast it forth, should it at any time germinate therein.' He was required to read Cicero's Epistles, Orations, or Offices, Sallust, Valerius Maximus, or Suetonius Tranquillus; next,-Pliny, Cicero de Arte, De Oratore, the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian; next,-Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Juvenal, Terence, or Plautus.' He was also to read 'privately in some place of our college, to be appointed by the president, to all of the household who wish to 3. But the second herbalist of our Statutes. not only lecturer on the Latin CHAP. V. third lecturer,-whose special task it was to be, not only to PART II. familiarise the minds of the students with those very Greek He appoints fathers whom so many were violently denouncing, but also to discourage the study of those medieval theologians who then occupied so considerable a space in all the college libraries, and whose authority was regarded as only inferior to that of St. Augustine himself. With that fondness for metaphor which characterises the language of many of our thers and to early college statutes, Fox spoke of his college as a garden, classics, and another on the Greek, but also a lecturer in is expressly enjoined to read the Greek fa discard the mediæval commenta tors. of the students as bees, and of his lecturers as gardeners. 'Lastly,' he accordingly goes on to say, 'there shall be a third gardener, whom it behoves the other gardeners to obey, wait on, and serve, who shall be called and be the Reader in Sacred Divinity, a study which we have ever holden of such importance, as to have constructed this our apiary for its sake, either wholly or most chiefly; and we pray, and in virtue of our authority command, all the bees to strive and endeavour with all zeal and earnestness, to engage in it according to the statutes. This our last and divine gardener is, on every common or half-holiday throughout the year, beginning at two o'clock in the afternoon, publicly to teach and profoundly to interpret, in the hall of our college during an entire hour, some portion of Holy Writ, to the end that wonder-working jewels which lie remote from view may come forth to light... But in alternate years, that is, every other year, he is to read some part of the Old Testament and some part of the New, which the president and major part of the seniors may appoint; and he must always in his interpretation, as far as he can, imitate the dorus, or some other approved Greek the divine Plato or some Greek theologian. Also, thrice every week, and four times only, at his own option, during the excepted periods of the vacation, he shall read privately in some place of our college, to be assigned for the purpose by the president, some portion of Greek grammar or rhetoric, and also of some Greek author rich in various matter, to all of the household of our college who wish to hear him.' Statutes, by Ward. |