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archdeacons of the twelfth century, the difficulties, disappointments, and inconveniencies, of paying attendance at court. In the course of his correspondence, he quotes Quintilian, Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Seneca, Virgil, Quintus Curtius, Ovid, Statius, Suetonius, Juvenal, and Horace, more frequently and familiarly than the fathers. Horace seems his favorite. In one of the letters, he quetes a passage concerning Pompey the Great, from the Roman History of Sallust, in six books, now lost, and which appears at present only in part among the fragments of that valuable historians. In the NUGE CURIALIUM of MAPES, or some other manuscript Latin tract written by one of the scholars of the twelfth century, I remember to have seen a curious and striking anecdote, which in a short compass shews Becket's private ideas concerning the bigotries and superstitious absurdities of his religion. The writer gives an account of a dinner in Becket's palace; at which was present, among many other prelates, a Cistercian abbot. This abbot engrossed almost the whole conversation, in relating the miracles performed by Robert, the founder of his order. Becket heard him for some time with a patient contempt; and at length could not help breaking out with no small degree of indignation, And these are your miracles!

We must however view the liberal ideas of these enlightened dignitaries of the twelfth century under some restrictions. It

e "Ut ad ministeriales curiæ redeam, apud forinsecos janitores biduanam forte gratiam aliquis multiplici obsequio merebitur.-Regem dormire, aut ægrotare, aut esse in consiliis, mentientur.-Ostiarios cameræ confundat altissimus ! Si nihil dederis ostiario actum est. Si nihil attuleris ibis, Homere, foras. Post primum Cerberum, tibi superest alius horribilior Cerbero, Briareo terribilior, nequior Pygmalione,crudelior Minotauro. Quantacunque tibi mortis necessitas, aut discrimen exhæredationis incubat, non intrabis ad regem." EPIST. xiv. fol. 8. b.

f Latin and French, the vernacular excepted, were the only languages now known. Foliot bishop of London, cotemporary with De Blois and Becket,

was esteemed, both in secular and sacred literature, the most consummate prelate of his time. Becket, EPISTOL. lib. iii. 5. Walter Mapes, their cotemporary, giving Foliot the same character, says he was TRIUM peritissimus linguarum Latinæ, Gallicæ, Anglica, et lucidissime disertus in singulis. Apud MSS. JAMES, xiv. p. 86. Bibl. Bodl. [Ex NUGIS CURIAL.]

"De magno Pompeio refert Sallustius, quod cum alacribus saltu, cum velocibus cursu, cum validis vecte certabat," &c. &c. EPIST. Xciv. fol. 45. a. Part of this passage is cited by Vegetius, a favorite author of the age of Peter de Blois. De RE MILIT. lib. i. c. ix. It is exhibited by the modern editors of Sallust, as it stands in Vegetius.

must be acknowledged, that their literature was clogged with pedantry, and depressed by the narrow notions of the times. Their writings shew, that they knew not how to imitate the beauties of the antient classics. Exulting in an exclusive privilege, they certainly did not see the solid and popular use of these studies: at least they did not chuse, or would not venture, to communicate them to the people, who on the other hand were not prepared to receive them. Any attempts of that kind, for want of assistances which did not then exist, must have been premature; and these lights were too feeble to dissipate the universal darkness. The writers who first appeared after Rome was ravaged by the Goths, such as Boethius, Prudentius, Orosius, Fortunatius, and Sedulius, and who naturally, from that circumstance, and because they were Christians, came into vogue at that period, still continued in the hands of common readers, and superseded the great originals. In the early ages of Christianity a strange opinion prevailed, in conformity to which Arnobius composed his celebrated book against the gentile superstitions, that pagan authors were calculated to corrupt the pure theology of the gospel. The prejudice however remained, when even the suspicions of the danger were removed. But I return to the progress of modern letters in the fifteenth century.

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SECTION XXXVI.

SOON after the year 1500, Lillye, the famous grammarian,

who had learned Greek at Rhodes, and had afterwards acquired a polished Latinity at Rome under Johannes Sulpicius and Pomponius Sabinus, became the first teacher of Greek at any public school in England. This was at saint Paul's school in London, then newly established by dean Colet, and celebrated by Erasmus; and of which Lillye, as one of the most exact and accomplished scholars of his age, was appointed the first master". And that antient prejudices were now gradually wearing off, and a national taste for critical studies and the graces of composition began to be diffused, appears from this circumstance alone: that from the year one thousand five hundred and three to the reformation, there were more grammar schools, most of which at present are perhaps of little use and importance, founded and endowed in England, than had been for three hundred years before. The practice of educating our youth in the monasteries growing into disuse, near twenty new grammar schools were established within this period: and among these, Wolsey's school at Ipswich, which soon fell a sacrifice to the resentment or the avarice of Henry the Eighth, deserves particular notice, as it rivalled those of Winchester and Eton. To give splendor to the institution, beside the scholars, it consisted of a dean, twelve canons, and a numerous

h Knight, LIFE of Colet, p. 19. Pace, above mentioned, in the Epistle dedicatory to Colet, before his Treatise De fructu qui ex Doctrina percipitur, thus compliments Lillye, edit. Basil. ut supr. 1517. p. 13. "Ut politiorem Latinitatem, et ipsam Romanam linguam, in Britanniam nostram introduxisse videatur.-Tanta [ei] eruditio, ut extrusa bar

barie, in qua nostri adolescentes solebant fere ætatem consumere," &c. Erasmus says, in 1514, that he had taught a youth, in three years, more Latin than he could have acquired in any school in England, ne Liliana quidam excepta, not even Lillye's excepted. EPISTOL. 165. p. 140. tom. iii.

choir. So attached was Wolsey to the new modes of instruction, that he did not think it inconsistent with his high office and rank, to publish a general address to the schoolmasters of England, in which he orders them to institute their youth in the most elegant literature. It is to be wished that all his edicts had been employed to so liberal and useful a purpose. There is an anecdote on record, which strongly marks Wolsey's character in this point of view. Notwithstanding his habits of pomp, he once condescended to be a spectator of a Latin tragedy of DIDO, from Virgil, acted by the scholars of saint Paul's school, and written by John Rightwise, the master, an eminent grammarian'. But Wolsey might have pleaded the authority of pope Leo the Tenth, who more than once had been present at one of these classical spectacles.

It does not however appear, that the cardinal's liberal sentiments were in general adopted by his brother prelates. At the foundation of saint Paul's school above mentioned, one of the bishops, eminent for his wisdom and gravity, at a public assembly, severely censured Colet the founder for suffering the Latin poets to be taught in the new structure, which he therefore styled a house of pagan idolatry".

In the year 1517, Fox, bishop of Winchester, founded a college at Oxford, in which he constituted, with competent stipends, two professors for the Greek and Latin languages". Although some slight idea of a classical lecture had already appeared at Cambridge in the system of collegiate discipline", this philological establishment may justly be looked upon, as

i Tanner, NOTIT. MON. p. 520. "Elegantissima literatura." Fiddes's WOLSEY. COLL. p. 105.

1 Wood, Ath. Oxon. i. 15. See what is said of this practice, supra, p. 211.

m" Episcopum quendam, et eum qui habetur a SAPIENTIORIBUS, in magno hominum Conventu, nostram scholam blasphemasse, dixisseque, me erexisse rem inutilem, imo malam, imo etiam, ut illius verbis utar, Domum Idololatriæ," &c. [Coletus Erasmo. Lond. 1517.] Knight's LIFE of Colet, p. 319.

" STATUT. C. C. C. Oxon. dat. Jun. 20. 1517. CAP. XX. fol. 51. Bibl. Bodl. MSS. LAUD. I. 56.

• At Christ's college in Cambridge, where, in the statutes given in 1506, a lecturer is established; who, together with logic and philosophy, is ordered to read, "vel ex poetarum, vel ex oratorum operibus." Cap. xxxvii. In the statutes of King's at Cambridge, and New college at Oxford, both much more antient, an instructour is appointed with the general name of INFORMATOR Only, who

the first conspicuous instance of an attempt to depart from the narrow plan of education, which had hitherto been held sacred in the universities of England. The course of the Latin professor, who is expressly directed to extirpate BARBARISM from the new society, is not confined to the private limits of the college, but open to the students of Oxford in general. The Greek lecturer is ordered to explain the best Greek classics; and the poets, historians, and orators, in that language, which the judicious founder, who seems to have consulted the most intelligent scholars of the times, recommends by name on this occasion, are the purest, and such as are most esteemed even in the present improved state of antient learning. And it is at the same time worthy of remark, that this liberal prelate, in forming his plan of study, does not appoint a philosophy-lecturer in his college, as had been the constant practice in most of the previous foundations: perhaps suspecting, that such an endowment would not have coincided with his new course of erudition, and would have only served to encourage that species of doctrine, which had so long choaked the paths of science, and obstructed the progress of useful knowledge.

These happy beginnings in favour of a new and rational system of academical education, were seconded by the auspicious munificence of cardinal Wolsey. About the year 1519, he founded a public chair at Oxford, for rhetoric and humanity, and soon afterwards another for teaching the Greek language; endowing both with ample salaries. About the year 1524, king Henry the Eighth, who destroyed or advanced literary institutions from caprice, called Robert Wakefield, originally a student of Cambridge, but now a professor of humanity at Tubingen in Germany, into England, that one of his own subjects, a linguist of so much celebrity, might no longer teach the Greek and oriental languages abroad: and when Wakefield

taught all the learning then in vogue. ROTUL. COMPUT. vet. Coll. Nov. Oxon. "Solut. Informatoribus sociorum et scolarium, ivl. xiis. iid."

"Lector seu professor artium hu

maniorum... BARBARIEM a nostro alveario extirpet." STATUT. ut supr.

Wood, HIST. Univ. Oxon. i. 245. 246. But see Fiddes's WOLSEY, p. 197.

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