his childhood to whom he refers in his letters is his old nurse, Mrs. Statham, whom he frequently commends to the care and good offices of Cromwell when he was Lord President and virtual head of the Government. That he was of an affectionate and kindly disposition is evident throughout his whole life, and we may therefore fairly conclude that his relations stood in no need of his help, if indeed they survived beyond his boyhood.

He does not tell us at what school he was educated, and it is not till he came to Cambridge about 1505 that we begin to know anything about him, and even then the definite information to be found is of the scantiest. Foxe tells us that he was sent to Cambridge when he was fourteen, and we learn that he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1510. Apparently he had been elected Fellow of Clare Hall in the previous year, while he was still an undergraduate. Having graduated in Arts, he proceeded, he tells us, to the study of theology and the degree of Bachelor of Divinity.

It was a time when great changes were coming over the character of learning in England. The first stirrings of the new learning had reached the country some years earlier, when Grocyn first coming home from Italy began to teach Greek in Oxford. The new ideas met with much success as well as with much opposition. Naturally enough they were suspected and disliked by those who were given to the older scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which by this time had hardened from its earlier condition of energetic and penetrating thought into a somewhat lifeless and traditional formalism. But from the first

the new ideas, or the new learning, as the phrase went, found protection and encouragement in the very highest quarters in England.

Warham, who had become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1503, was from the first a warm patron, and he was excelled in his friendliness by Fox, Bishop of Winchester, while Cardinal Morton, the chief adviser of Henry VII., though himself not specially interested in the new learning, was a friend and patron of all men of intelligence and capacity. Under the pro

tection of such men as these, the new ideas made considerable progress, and their influence extended rapidly at the Universities. Not many years after Grocyn, Colet, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's and founder of St. Paul's School, came back from the Continent to Oxford, fired with zeal for the study of the New Testament; and his lectures on St. Paul's Epistles marked the religious direction which the new learning was taking throughout the whole of northern Europe. All these influences were strengthened and confirmed by the visits of Erasmus to England, and yet more by his settling down in Cambridge as a lecturer and teacher.

Cambridge from this time forward was the real centre of the new tendencies. It is not easy to say why this was so. Possibly, then, as at some other times in the history of great movements, the older fashions were too strong in Oxford for the new ideas to have permanent success, possibly the removal to London of so strong a leader as Colet was too severe a loss at such a crisis; at anyrate there is no doubt that the work which had been begun by Grocyn and Colet at Oxford was carried out much more fully at

Cambridge, so much so indeed that when, a little later on, Wolsey wished to find scholars of the new learning for his college in Oxford (now Christ Church), he was compelled to import some of them from Cambridge, and it was from Cambridge that the majority of the early reformers proceeded.

We could wish that some of Latimer's correspondence during this Cambridge period had been preserved, for it could hardly have failed to throw an interesting light on the progress of the great change in educational methods which took place just at this time, and on the parallel change in the philosophical and theological opinions of educated men which began in England in the earlier half of the fifteenth century. The opposition between the old and new methods was often very intense, the old-fashioned scholars suspecting and denouncing the new as maintaining dangerous and revolutionary forms of learning, probably also as deficient in preciseness and clearness; while the new scholars found the elaborate and carefully drawn-out formulas of the scholastic philosophy dry and unprofitable beyond all bearing. They were disposed to go behind the premisses of the schoolmen and to ask whether the foundations of their system of learning were really as sure as those great writers had thought them. They refused to accept the principle of the absolute authority of any writer, whether he were a father or an ancient philosopher, and took up the position of men determined to sift and examine everything for themselves. This does not necessarily mean that they differed in all or even in the majority of serious matters from their predecessors, or that the methods of philosophical study were completely

altered. It is obvious to anyone who reads our great philosophical divine, Richard Hooker, that his discussion of the nature of law, which forms the first book of the Ecclesiastical Polity, is founded mainly on the treatment of the same subject by St. Thomas Aquinas; and indeed, in Oxford at anyrate, the foundations of the study of philosophy always continued, as in the thirteenth century, to be laid on Aristotle. No doubt the real point of contention lay in the question whether it was better to study the New Testament and the Scriptures in general in the original tongues, or to read the enormous mass of patristic and mediæval commentary upon them; and we must admit that the older-fashioned men had something to say for themselves in maintaining that it was foolish and presumptuous to neglect the accumulated wisdom of centuries of careful and conscientious toil, and to set out to discuss new meanings in the sacred texts with a total disregard of all that had been so carefully done by learned and good men. The scholars of the new learning, however, seem in the main to tend to distinguish between the value of the writings and commentaries of the earlier Fathers of the Church and those of the scholastic writers and the theological system based upon them, and while disposed to pay much respect to St. Jerome and St. Augustine, they refused to defer to St. Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus.

At what time exactly Latimer came under the influence of the new learning we cannot very well decide. In all probability it was not till he had been for some years in Cambridge. Among the few notices of his life there which have been preserved to us is

one in which he is represented as having at one time strongly opposed the study of the Scriptures, and exhorted the students to a more careful reading of the scholastic writers. We may perhaps infer that during the earlier years of his residence at Cambridge he was first trained in the scholastic philosophy and method of theological study, and that it was only in the latter years of his stay that he came under the new influences. What progress he made in the new studies is far from clear. In his examination before the Commissioners at Oxford in 1555, he said that he understood no Greek, but he may only have meant that in his old age he had forgotten the Greek he once knew, even as he begged to be permitted to answer in English as he had "not these twenty years much used the Latin tongue," and again prayed not to be asked to dispute, for "disputation requireth a good memory," and "my memory is clean gone." On the whole, though he is constantly referred to about 1529 as belonging to the party of the new learning, it is perhaps not wise to press this into meaning that he was at any time an accomplished scholar of the new type.

It cannot be said that Latimer's theological work, so far as it has survived, shows any indications of profound and original scholarship or thought, and indeed there are few signs in it even of any extended knowledge of the Scriptures in the original languages, and his exposition of Scripture still has a good deal of that quaintness which springs from the application of the method of mystical interpretation rather than that of severe scholarly research. The truth is, that Latimer was not without scholarship and even learn