The fact is that the group of English scholars was very small, and the acquirements of its members were very limited. Green claims More alone as entitled to rank among the great classical scholars of the age, and even of him Hallam remarks that he had a very ingenious but not a profound mind.*

It must be remembered that at this time the universities on the Continent contained a large number of men learned not only in Greek, but in Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic as well. Peter Albinus, historiographer of Saxony, who died in 1598, wrote a pamphlet on "Foreign Languages and Unknown Islands," in which he enumerates the names and acquisitions of a number of these early scholars, some of whom were skilled in fifteen languages, a knowledge of six or seven being quite common. He says that, although our ancestors were satisfied with the Latin, a man is not now regarded, even by the vulgar, as plausibly learned who is not master of Greek or Hebrew at least, in addition, of course, to Latin, the universal language. Never at any period since the Christian era had there been so many in Europe skilled in Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek literature as there were in that day within the universities of Germany, France, Italy, and

Dean of St. Paul's, founded there a school, and published a Latin grammar. Five or six little works of this kind had already appeared in England. These trifling things are mentioned to let the reader take notice that there is nothing more worthy to be named. . . . The difference in point of learning between Italy and England was at least that of a century; that is, the former was more advanced in knowledge of ancient literature in 1400 than the latter was in 1500.”—Hallam, i. 205. Very mildly he concludes: "In the spirit of truth, we cannot quite take to ourselves the compliment of Erasmus."-Idem, p. 219.

*Hallam, i. 221.

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311

Spain. In 1517, Cardinal Ximenes published in Spain his famous polyglot Bible, in Hebrew, Greek, Chaldee, and Latin. In 1516, Justinian, Bishop of Nebbio, in Corsica, published a psalter in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Chaldee, and Latin. These illustrations only suggest the work going on in the foreign universities when the English were beginning to study the Greek grammar and publish little elementary books on Latin.

Such as they were, however, these disciples of the New Learning form almost the last beacon lights in English literary history, until we come to Spenser, Shakespeare, Hooker, and Bacon. They brought classical literature to the universities, and it lived there for a time a sickly life; but the soil was unfruitful, the climate ungenial, and in a few years it withered away and died. Their religious teachings were equally unfitted for the age and country. Luther came preaching to men and not to scholars, thundering against the abuses of the Church; but he awakened no echo among these students. They founded a grammar school or two, and probably exerted some influence on the middle stratum of society, but on the surface they hardly raised a ripple. §

Upon England the Reformation, for many years, pro

* See translation of this rare pamphlet by Edmund Goldsmid, Edinburgh, 1884. Privately printed.

+ Idem.

Green, p. 31.

§ In this connection we may also profitably notice a little Protestant movement at Oxford which occurred in 1527. It was led by Thomas Garret, a fellow of Magdalen College. The students affected by it read the New Testament, Luther's tracts, and like heretical works. Finally they were detected, placed in confinement, and all except one, who died in prison, retracted. Oxford was purged of heresy. Froude, ii. 56, 76.

duced but a faint impression. The people, to be sure, had their religion changed for them, from time to time, but such transformations signified nothing. The first one was imposed by Henry VIII. in 1531. Finding that he could obtain his divorce in no other way, he deposed the pope from the headship of the English Church and assumed the place himself. The common people acquiesced, for they knew and cared little about such questions, except in their political bearings. The nobles were won over by an arrangement which made the restoration of the old relations with Rome almost impossible. The monastic orders in England, as upon the Continent, had absorbed a large portion of the land.* Henry abolished the monasteries, confiscated their property, and divided it largely among his courtiers. The men thus enriched had no love for Protestantism, but never would accede to any legislation. which looked towards a surrender of their plunder.

In the end, the separation from Rome was to prove a great blessing; but at the outset only evil results seemed to follow. The ecclesiastics, with all their faults, had been at least liberal and indulgent landlords. It has been estimated that they demanded from their tenants not more than a tenth of the rental value of their lands. Under such a system the farmer was almost a freeholder. The suppression of the monasteries brought this to an end. Their estates passed into the hands of men who exacted the last penny of rent. It was as yet more profitable to raise wool than grain, and so farms were now given up in greater numbers, the buildings were torn down, and the tenants turned adrift to prey upon the public. We can trace the effects of

* Estimated at one fifth. Gneist, ii. 159.

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this change in successive acts of Parliament passed for the repression of pauperism, under which the beggar for the first offence was to be whipped, for the second to have his ears slit or bored with a red-hot iron, and for the third to be put to death as a felon. A later act provided that all vagrants should be apprehended and treated as slaves. Formed into bands, the "sturdy beggars" roamed over the country, always ready for a civil commotion, of which they incited several, and everywhere making life and property insecure.*

But this was not the worst immediate result of the separation from Rome. The movement, it must be borne in mind, was not a religious nor a theological, but almost entirely a secular one. During the reign of Henry the Reformer the same hurdle bore to the stake three men who denied the king's spiritual supremacythe new English doctrine-and three others who questioned the doctrine of transubstantiation, the leading tenet of the Church of Rome. No change of belief was proposed, only a change of pope. However, the mode in which this change was accomplished, and the object for which it was brought about, were disastrous

* Harrison says that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons were executed in England for crimes against the person and property. During about the same period over fifty thousand were executed in the Netherlands for heresy. The contrast is

suggestive.

+ Hallam's "Const. Hist.," i. 93. See Gneist, ii. 157, for an account of the difference between the Reformation upon the Continent and that in England. Upon the Continent it was the result of an intellectual belief in the errors of the Romish Church. In England, it gained its power among the masses from a political desire for national independence, by throwing off the yoke of a foreign ecclesiastical ruler. The intellectual and religious movement was delayed in England for many years.

enough to the cause of religion. In the suppression of the monasteries every indignity was offered to objects which the people looked up to with reverent awe. The Bible was translated into the vulgar tongue, but only, to use the words of Henry himself, to be "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse" in the land, so that he soon suppressed its general reading. The priests, terrorized by the crown, lost all independence, and thought only of saving their livings by the most abject servility.

The effect of this religious upheaval on the public at large was bad enough during the reign of Henry; still, he tried to check the excesses of the fanatics, and preserved some respect for outward religious forms. Upon his death, however, the revolution went still further. The uncle of the young king, who assumed the office of Protector, had little religion, but thought it to his advantage to ally himself with the more violent of the Reformers. The precocious Edward was doubtless sincere in his Protestantism, and his sincerity aided the work of the Protector. The mass was abolished, the altars were torn down, all pictures and images removed from the churches; the doctrine of transubstantiation was repudiated, the confessional abolished, and priests were permitted to marry. With these violent changes, the old religion was gone, but unfortunately nothing was substituted in its place. We have seen that in the Netherlands the new religion naturally replaced the old, the process being a slow and silent one, brought about by placing the Bible in the hands of a people all of whom could read. The mass of the English population were too ignorant to dispense at once with the sensuous element in their religion, and utterly unfitted to accept the doctrines of the Reformation, even had