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116 ANNUAL REGISTER

ANTIQUITIES

[[header]] Sketch of the State of Literature in England, particularly at Oxford, about the Period of the Reformation: from Warton's Life of Sir Thomas Pope.

About the year 1480, a taste for polite letters, under the patronage of Pope Julius the second, began to be revived in Italy. But the liberal Pontiff did not consider at the same time, that he was undermining the papal interest, and bringing on the reformation. This event commonly called the restoration of learning; but it should rather be styled the restoration of good sense and useful knowledge. Learning there had been before, but barbarism still remained. The most acute efforts of human wit and penetration had been exerted for some centuries, in the dissertations of logicians and theologists; yet Europe still remained in a state of superstition and ignorance. What philosophy could not perform, was to be compleated by classical literature, by the poets and orators of Greece and Rome, who alone could enlarge the mind, and polish the manners. Taste and propriety, and a rectitude of thinking and judging, derived from these sources, gave a new turn to the general system of study: mankind was civilized, and religion was reformed. The effects of this happy revolution by degrees reached England. We find at Oxford, in the latter end of the fifteenth century, that the university was filled with the jargon and disputes of the Scotists and Thomists; and if at that time there were chiefly the followers of Wicliffe, and were consequently discountenanced and persecuted. The Latin style then only known in the university, was the technical language of the schoolmen, of casuists, and metaphysicians. At Cambridge, about 1485, nothing was taught but Alexander's Parva Logicalia, the trite axioms of Aristotle, which were never rationally explained, and the profound questions of John Scotus. At length some of our countrymen, the principal of which were Grocyn, Latymer, Lillye, Linacer, Tunstal, Pace, and Sir Thomas More, ventured to break through the narrow bounds of scholastic erudition, and went over into Italy with a design of acquiring a knowledge in the Greek and Latin languages. The Greek, in particular, was taught there with much perfection and purity, by many learned Greeks who had been driven from Constantinople. In 1488, Grocyn and Linacer left Oxford, and studied Greek at Florence under the instruction of Demetrius Chalcondylas, and Politian; and at Rome under Hermolaus Barbarus. Grocyn returned an accomplished master in the Greek, and became the first lecturer in that language at Oxford, but without any settled

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settled endowment. Elegance of style began now to be cultivated, and the study of the most approved antient writers became fashionable.

In 1496, Alcock, bishop of Ely, founded Jesus college in Cambridge, partly for a certain number of scholars to be educated in grammar. Degrees in grammar, or rhetoric, had been early established at Oxford. But the pupils of this class studied only systems of grammar and rhetoric, filled with empty definitions and unnecessary distinctions, instead of the real models. In 1509, Lillye, the famous grammarian who had learned Greek at Rhodes, and afterwards improved himself in Latin at Rome under Johannes Sulpitius and Pomponius Sabinus, was the first teacher of Greek at any public school in England. This was at St. Paul's school in London, then newly established, and of which Lillye was the first master. And that antient prejudices were subsiding apace, and a national taste for critical studies, and the graces of composition began to be diffused, appears from this circumstance alone; that from the year 1502, to the reformation, within the space of thirty years, there were more grammar schools founded and endowed in England, than had been for three hundred years before. Near twenty grammar schools were instituted within this period; before which most of our youth were educated at the monasteries. In 1517, that wise prelate and bountiful patron, Richard Fox, founded his college at Oxford, in which he constituted, with competent salaries, two lectures for the Latin and Greek languages. This was a new and noble departure from the narrow plan of academical education. The course of the Latin lecturer was not confined to the college, but open to the students of Oxford in general. He is expresly directed to drive barbarism from the new college. And at the same time it is to be remarked, that Fox does not appoint a philosophy-lecturer in his college, as had been the practice in most of the previous foundations; perhaps thinking, that such an institution would not have coincided with his new system of doctrine, and that it would be encouraging that species of science which had hitherto blinded men's understandings, and kept them so long in ignorance of more useful knowledge. The Greek lecturer is ordered to explain the best Greek classics; and those which the judicious founder, who seems to have consulted the most capital scholars of his age, prescribes on this occasion, are the purest, and such as are most esteemed at this day. These happy beginnings were seconded by the munificence of Cardinal Wolfey. About the year 1519, he founded a public choir at Oxford for rhetoric and humanity; and soon afterwards another for the Greek tongue: endowing both with ample stipends. But these innovations in the plan of study were greatly discouraged and opposed by the scholastic bigots, who called the Greek language heresy. Even bishop Fox, when he founded the Greek lecture above-mentioned, was obliged to cover his excellent institution under the venerable mantle of the authority of the church, lest he should seem to countenance a dangerous novelty. For he gives it as a reason, or rather as an apology, for this new lectureship
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