Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/598

584 hordes of barbarism without, of noblest orators thundering against the oppressions of the mighty, of awful tragedians steeping their stage in the imaged blood of tyrants and of traitors, of patriots perishing in joy for the salvation of their country.

It was not to be wondered at that on the bursting of these novel elements like a sudden and strong torrent into the arena of human life, there should arise a fearful struggle and combat betwixt the old intellectual ideas and the new. The duplex inundation pouring from the hills of Palestine and of Greece, and in united vastness deluging Europe, threatened to destroy all the old landmarks of the schoolmen, and to drown Duns Scotus and Aquinas amongst the owls and bats of the monkish cells and somnolent dream chambers. It was soon seen that this new language was the language of the very book from which the Reformers drew their words winged with the fire of destruction to the ancient slavery of popular ignorance and popular dependence on priests and Popes, and no time was lost in denouncing it as a gross and new-fangled heresy. It was a heresy from which not only freedom in Church but in State was to spring; the seed from which grew, in the next age, our Hampdens, Marvels, Pyms, Prynnos, Cromwells, and Miltons.

Yet it is only due to Henry VIII., to his ministers Wolsey, Fox, and More, and to other eminent dignitaries—amongst them Cardinal Pole in Queen Mary's reign—to state that they were zealous advocates and promoters of the Greek learning. The very first public school in which Greek is said to have been taught in England was the new foundation of Dean Colot, St. Paul's school, where the celebrated scholar William Lilly, who had studied in Rhodes, was the master. Wolsey introduced it into his new colleges, and Henry VIII. being at Woodstock and hearing of a furious harangue made at Oxford against the study of the Greek Testament in the university, immediately ordered the teaching of it, and established a professorship of it also in Cambridge.

Notwithstanding, a violent opposition arose against the study of Greek in consequence of the authority it gave to the now doctrines of the Reformers, rendering an appeal to the original text invincible, and Erasmus informs us that the preachers and declaimers against his edition of the Greek Testament really appeared to believe that he was by its means attempting to introduce some new kind of religion. The book was prohibited in the University of Cambridge, and a heavy penalty decreed for any one found with it in his possession. Erasmus attempted to teach the Greek grammar of Chrysoloras there, but a terrible outcry was raised against him, and his scholars soon deserted his benches. As the contest went on, however, the Universities, both here and abroad, became divided into the factions of the Greeks and Trojans, the Trojans being those who were advocates for Latin but not for Greek. The Greeks, however, victorious as of old, expelled the works of the famous Duns Scotus from the schools; they were torn up and trodden under foot; and the King sent down a commission, who altogether abolished the study of this old scholastic philosophy which had had so long and absolute a reign.

Yet the new knowledge appears for some time after the first excitement to have made less progress in the schools than at Court and amongst the aristocracy. On the surface of the age, therefore, it appeared a very learned one. All the great churchmen on both sides the question in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.—Wolsey, Fox, Gardiner, Cranmer, Ridley, Tunstall, Cardinal Pole—were men of great acquirements. Henry was a fine scholar, and, with all his harsh treatment to his wives and children, he gave to the latter educations perhaps superior to those of any princes or princesses of the time. Edward was actually steeped in learning, to the injury, no doubt, of his over-taxed constitution. Mary and Elizabeth were both accomplished linguists, speaking Latin, French, and Spanish fluently; and Elizabeth adding to these Greek and Italian, with a smattering of Dutch and German. Mary was studiously instructed in the originals of the Scriptures, and made a translation of the Latin paraphrase of St. John, by Erasmus, which was printed and read as part of the Church service, till it was ordered to be burnt by herself in her own reign with other heretical books. She was deeply read in the fathers, and in the works of Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and selected portions of Horace, Lucan, and Livy. Elizabeth was a poetess of no mean pretensions, and besides her knowledge of the classical and modern languages, read by preference immense quantities of history. Roger Ascham, the instructor of Lady Jane Grey, says:—"Numberless honourable ladies of the present time surpass the daughters of Sir Thomas More," but that none could compete with the Princess Elizabeth; that she spoke and wrote Greek and Latin beautifully; that he had read with her the whole of Cicero, and great part of Livy; that she devoted her mornings to the New Testament in Greek, select orations of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Sophocles, whilst she drew religious knowledge from St. Cyprian and the "Common-places" of Melancthon; that she was skilful in music, but did not greatly delight in it.

With such examples, no wonder that there were such learned ladies at Court as Lady Jane Grey, Lady Tyrwhit, Mary Countess of Arundel, Joanna Lady Lumley, and her sister Mary, the Duchess of Norfolk—all learned in Greek and Latin, and authoresses of translations from them; the two daughters of Sir Thomas More, and the three daughters of the learned Sir Anthony Cooke—one of them the wife of the all-powerful statesman Burleigh, another the mother of the illustrious Francis Bacon, and the third, Lady Killigrew, a famous Hebrew scholar, as well as profound in Latin and Greek.

It is extraordinary that learning, under these very accomplished women, should have languished in the schools and amongst the people. Yet such appears to have been the fact, and is accounted for by the violent and continual changes which were taking place in Church and State. A great part of the reign of Henry VIII. was agitated and engrossed by the conflict with the Court of Rome regarding his divorce from Catherine, and then by his stupendous onslaught on the monastic and cathedral property. As no man at the Universities could tell where promotion was to come from in the Church under a man who equally took vengeance on Romanist and Protestant who dared to differ from him, and as it was equally uncertain whether, in some new fit of anger