dom; and it seems that in these rougher northern climates he had some design of reproducing a faint resemblance of the gardens of Bellosguardo. On the lands of his monastery at Sheen, near Richmond, he built himself, long before his death, a magnificent mansion, whither, he said, he designed to retire in his old age, and amid a circle of intellectual friends enjoy the sweets of a philosophical and lettered ease. * This was a Pagan rather than a Christian ideal; it shows how far the contact with the genius of antiquity intoxicated the spirit even of a thoroughly good man; how disturbing, then, must have been its effects upon men of lower character!

In this age of strange excitement, when a new world, supposed to teem with wealth, had just been discovered in the West, when by the invention of printing thoughts were communicated and their records multiplied with a speed which must then have seemed marvellous, and when the astronomical theory of Copernicus was revolutionizing men's ideas as to the very fundamental relations between the earth and the heavens, unsettling those even whom it did not convince, there was a temporary forgetfulness even on the part of many Christian priests that this life, dignify it as you may, is, after all, a scene of trial not of triumph, and that, if Christianity be true, suffering is on earth a higher state than enjoyment, and poverty in one sense preferable to wealth. The Reformers seized on this weak point then noticeable in many of the clergy, and made out of it, to use a modern phrase, abundant controversial capital. Human learning, they said,—Luther himself originated the cry—was a waste of time as well as a dangerous snare;—art was a mere pandering to the passions; sinful man should be engrossed but by one pursuit, the pursuit of salvation-should study only one book, and that the Bible. When the Protestant party came into

* Flanagan's Church Hist. vol. ii. p. 11.

power under Edward VI., this spirit operated with prejudicial effect on the young plants of learning and culture which had begun to spring up at our universities. To take one well-known instance;-the ecclesiastical commissioners of Edward, in their visitation to Oxford, destroyed or removed a valuable collection, impossible to be replaced, of six hundred manuscripts of the classical authors, presented by Humphrey, the good duke of Gloucester, to that University. But when the Catholic hierarchy, acknowledging by their conduct that these censures contained some truth, and noticing also that the disproportionate attachment to the new studies was a frequent cause of unsettlement of faith, changed their tactics in some countries, and, discouraging the study of the Humanities, attempted to revive the old scholastic philosophy, then the charge was immediately reversed. Then the cry was, " You are trying to shut out enlightenment, to set up the barbarous scholastic, in preference to the Ciceronian, Latinity, -you are enemies of progress, of civilization, of the enlargement of the mind.”

This point will be illustrated presently. In connexion with the spread of learning in England, the name of Cardinal Wolsey must not be omitted. Shakspeare has described his services in language that cannot be amended: *

"This Cardinal,

Though from an humble stock, undoubtedly
Was fashioned to much honour from his cradle.
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading;
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not,
But, to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.
And though he were unsatisfied in getting,

(Which was a sin) yet, in bestowing, madam,
He was most princely. Ever witness for him

Those twins of learning, which he raised in yon

*Henry VIII. Act iv. Scene 2.

Ipswich and Oxford; one of which fell with him,
Unwilling to outlive the good that did it;
The other, though unfinish'd, yet so famous,
So excellent in art, and still so rising,

That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue."

Cambridge soon followed the example of Oxford in introducing the study of Greek. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII., Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith are mentioned in the annals of that university as having been especially active in promoting this study. Milton refers to this in one of his sonnets:

66

Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke,
Hated not learning worse than toad or asp,

When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek."

The sense of insecurity induced among all classes by Henry's tyranny in his later years, and the social confusion which prevailed in the following reign, interrupted the peaceful flow of learned studies. The universities appear to have been sunk in a lower depth of inefficiency and ignorance about the year 1550, than ever before or since. Under Mary, Cardinal Pole, the legate, was personally favourable to the new learning. Sir Thomas Pope, the founder of Trinity College, Oxford, consulted him on the framing of the college statutes, in which it was provided that Greek should form one of the subjects of instruction. In his legatine constitutions, passed at a synod held in 1555, Pole ordered that all Archbishops and Bishops, as well as holders of benefices in general, should assign a stated portion of their revenues to the support of cathedral schools in connexion with every metropolitan and cathedral church throughout the kingdom, into which lay scholars of respectable parentage were to be admitted, together with theological students. These cathedral schools were kept up in the following reign, and seem to have attained

considerable importance. But one enlightened and generous mind could not restrain the reactionary violence of the Gardiners and the Bonners. Under their management a system of obscurantism was attempted, if not established, at the universities; the Greek poets and philosophers were to be banished, and scholasticism was to reign once more in the schools. Ascham, in his Schoolmaster, thus describes the state of things:

"The love of good learning began suddenly to wax cold; the knowledge of the tongues was manifestly contemned;yea, I know that heads were cast together, and counsel devised, that Duns, with all the rabble of barbarous questionists, should have dispossessed of their place and room Aristotle, Plato, Tully, and Demosthenes, whom good Mr. Redman, and those two worthy stars of that university, Cheke and Smith, with their scholars, had brought to flourish as notably in Cambridge as ever they did in France and in Italy."

If this account can be trusted, it explains to a considerable extent the rooted persuasion which has always prevailed in England, that the Catholic system is hostile to the progress of learning.

Prose Writers.

Although no prose work produced during this period can be said to hold a place in our standard literature, considerable progress was made in fitting the rough and motley native idiom for the various requirements of prose composition. Among the works that have come down to us, perhaps the most interesting is Sir John Fortescue's treatise on the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy. The author was Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench in the time of Henry VI. He was at first a zealous Lancastrian; he fought at Towton, and was taken prisoner at Tewkesbury in 1471, after which he was

contrast

attainted. But upon the death of Henry in that year, leaving no son, Fortescue admitted the legality of the claim of the house of York, and thereby obtained the reversal of the attainder. The title of the work mentioned is not very appropriate; it should rather be,-a "Treatise on the best means of raising a revenue for the King, and cementing his power;"— these, at least, are the points prominently handled. The opening chapters, drawing a between the state and character of the English peasantry under the constitutional crown of England, and those of the French peasantry under the absolute monarchy of France, are full of acute remarks and curious information. It is instructive to notice, that Fortescue (ch. xii.) speaks of England's insular position as a source of weakness, because it laid her open to attack on every side. The observation reminds us how modern a creation is the powerful British navy, the wooden walls of which have turned that position into our greatest safeguard. This work is in excellent English, and, if freed from the barbarous orthography in which it is disguised, could be read with ease and pleasure at the present day. No other prose writer of the fifteenth century deserves notice, unless we except Caxton, who wrote a continuation of Trevisa's Chronicle to the year 1460, and printed the entire work in 1482.

The effect of the revival of ancient learning was for a long time to induce our ablest literary men to aim at a polished Latin style, rather than endeavour to improve their native tongue. Erasmus wished that Latin should be the common literary language of Europe; he always wrote in it himself, and held what he termed the barbarous jargon of his Dutch father-land in utter detestation. So Leland, More, and Pole, composed, if not all, yet their most important and most carefully-written works in Latin. John Leland, the famous antiquary, to whose Itinerarium we owe so much interesting topographical