Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 2.djvu/335

1535.] technica of ignorance, the ancient text-book of à priori knowledge, established for centuries the supreme despot in the Oxford lecture-rooms. 'We have set Duns in Bocardo,' says Leyton. He was thrown down from his high estate, and from being lord of the Oxford intellect, was ' made the common servant of all men;' condemned by official sentence to the lowest degradation to which book can be submitted. Some copies escaped this worst fate; but for changed uses thenceforward. The second occasion on which the visitors came to New College, they 'found the great Quadrant Court full of the leaves of Duns, the wind blowing them into every corner; and one Mr Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering up part of the same book leaves, as he said, to make him sewers of blawnsheres, to keep the deer within his wood, thereby to have the better cry with his hounds.'

To such base uses all things return at last; dust unto dust, when the life has died out of them, and the living world needs their companionship no longer.

On leaving Oxford, the visitors spread over England, north, south, east, and west. We trace Legh in rapid progress through Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, Yorkshire, and Northumberland; Leyton through Middlesex, Kent, Sussex, Hants, Somersetshire, and Devon. They appeared at monastery after monastery, with prompt, decisive questions; and if the truth was concealed, with expedients for discovering it, in which