has described his services in language that cannot be amended: 1

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, that he rais'd in you,
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:

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

1 Henry VIII. Act iv. Scene 2.

2 Christ Church, which Wolsey intended to have founded on a far grander even than its present scale, and to have named Cardinal College.

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 connection 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.'

Prose Writers.

Although no prose work produced during this period can be said to hold a place in our standard literature,

I

considerable progress was made in fitting the rough and motley native idiom for the various requirements of prose composition. Through the truly national work of the publication of our early records, which has now been going on for many years, under the superintendence of the Master of the Rolls, a curious book, dating from the early part of this period, has been made generally accessible. This is The Repressor of Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph. The modern editor of the work, Mr. Babington, calls it, probably with justice, the earliest piece of good philosophical disquisition of which our English prose literature can boast.' Pecock was a Welshman; he was born about the end of the fourteenth century, and educated at Oriel College, Oxford. After his appointment to the see of St. Asaph, he took the line of vehement opposition to the teaching of the Lollards, the followers of Wyclif. The design of The Repressor, which was first published in a complete shape about the year 1456, was to justify certain practices or governances,' as he calls them, then firmly established in the Church, which the Lollards vehemently declaimed against; such as the use of images, pilgrimages to famous shrines, the holding of landed estates by the clergy, &c. Pecock was made Bishop of Chichester in 1450. His method of argument, however, which consisted in appealing rather to reason and common sense, than to Church authority, to justify the practices complained of, was displeasing to most of his brother bishops; and in 1457 his books were formally condemned in a synod held before Henry VI. at Westminster. He was deposed from his bishopric, and only escaped severer treatment by making a full and formal retractation of his opinions.

The most interesting work belonging to this period 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 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 contrast 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. Fortescue wrote also, about the year 1463, an excellent Latin treatise, De Laudibus Legum Angliæ, designed for the use of the ill-fated Edward Prince of Wales, son of Henry VI. and Margaret, in which he labours to prove the superiority of the common law of England to the civil law. No other prose writer of the fifteenth century deserves notice, unless we except Caxton, who wrote a continuation of Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon to the year 1460, and printed the entire work in 1482. The first work printed in England is believed to have been The Game and Play of the Chesse, a moral treatise, translated by Caxton from the French, and turned out by his printing-press in 1474. He also printed a translation, made by himself from the German,

of the famous mediæval apologue or satire of Renard the Fox. For some eighteen years he continued with untiring industry to bring out popular works, chiefly religious or moral treatises and romances, from the press, and when he died, he left able successors to carry on and extend his work.1

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 and sociological information for the period immediately following the destruction of the monasteries, is the author of a number of Latin elegies, in various metres, upon the death of Sir Thomas Wyat the elder, which evince no common elegance and mastery over the language. More's Utopia, published in 1516, was composed in Latin, but has been translated by Burnet and others.

Utopia, according to its Greek derivation (où not, Tóños, place) means the Land of Nowhere. The manners and customs of the Utopians are described to More and his friend Tonstall, while on a mission in Flanders, by an ancient mariner' named Raphael Hythlodaye, who has visited their island. The work is a satire on existing society; every important political or social regulation in Utopia is the reverse of what was then to be found in Europe. The condition of the ideal commonwealth rebukes the ambition of kings, the worldliness of priests, and the selfish greed of private persons. The Utopians detest war, and will only take up arms on a plain call of honour or justice. Instead of burning and torturing men for their religion, they tolerate all forms of belief or no-belief, only refusing to those who

For fuller particulars about Caxton, see the History of English Literature by the late learned Professor Craik, of Belfast.