§ 71. HUMANISM IN ENGLAND. 647
Green, regards the new period as opening. Grocyn lectured on pseudo-Dionysius and, following Laurentius Valla, abandoned the tradition that he was the Areopagite, the pupil of St. Paul. He and Linacre were close friends of Erasmus, and that scholar couples them with Colet and More as four representatives of profound and symmetrical learning.^
At the close of the 15th century, the English were still a "barbarous" people in the eyes of the Italians.^ According to Erasmus, who ought to have known what a good school was, the schoolteachers of England were " shabboLamLbroken .dp^n and, in cases, hardly in their senses." At the universities, the study of Duns Scotus ruled and the old method and textbooks were in use- The Schoolmen were destined, however, soon to be displaced and the leaves of the Subtle Doctor to be scattered in the quadrangles of Oxford and trodden under foot.
As for the study of Greek, there were those, as Wood says, who preached against it as " dangerous and damnable " and, long after the new century had dawned. Sir Thomas More wrote to the authorities at Oxford condemning them for opposition to Greek. 2 A course of sermons, to which More refers, had been preached in Lent not only against the study of the Greek classics but also the Latin classics. What right, he went on to say, " had a preacher to denounce Latin of which he knew so little and Greek of which he knew nothing ? How can he know theology, if he is ignorant of Hebrew, Greek and Latin ? " In closing the letter, More threatened the authorities with punishment from Warham, Wolsey and even the king himself, if they persisted in their course. Of the clergy's alarm against the new learning. More took notice again and again. To Lily, the headmaster of St. Paul's school, he wrote, " No wonder your school raises a storm ; it is like the wooden horse for the ruin of barbarous Troy." But, if there were those who could see only danger from the new studies, there were also men like
1 Nichols : Erasmus' Letters, I. 226. Sir Thomas More, writing to Colet, Nov., 1604, said : "I shall spend my time with Grocyn, Liuacre and Lily. The first, as you know, is the director of my life in your absence, the second the master of my studies, the third my most dear companion."
^Seebohm, p. 283. ^gee the letter. Froude: Erasmus, 139.
648 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
Fisher of Rochester who set about learning Greek when he was 60. For_the venerable Sentences of the Lombard, the Scrifitures were about to be instituted as the text-book of theology in the Englisli liiiTversities. ~ *
The man who contributed most to this result wa^i)hD.Colet, Although his name is not even so much as mentioned in the pages of Lingard, he is now recognized, as he was by Tyndale, Latimer and other Reformers of the middle of the 16th century, as the chief pioneer of the new learning in England and as an exemplar 6i noble purposes in life and pure devotion to culture.
Thesou_ofSir_ Henry Colet,_several times lord mayor of London, the future dean of St. Paul's was one of 22 children. He survived all the members of his family except his mother, to whom he referred, when lie felt himself growing old, with admiration for her high spirits and happy old age. As we think of her, we may be inclined to recall the good mother of John Wesley. After spending 3 years at Oxford, 1493-1496,^ young Colet, "like a merchantman seeking goodly wares," as Erasmus put it, went to Italy. For the places where he studied, we are left to conjecture, but Archbishop Parker two generations later said that he studied "a long time in foreigfn countries and especially the Sacred Scriptures." On his return to Oxford, although not yet ordained to the priesthood, hejbegaij expounding^St._PaaL's- Greek-epistles in pubjic, the lectures ^being given gratuitously. At this very moment the Lady Margaret professor of divinity was announcing for his subject the Quodlibets of Duns Scotus. Later, Colet expounded also the First Epistle to the Corinthians.
At this period, he was not wholly freed from the old academic canons and was inclined to reject the reading of classic authors whose writings did not contain a "salutatory flavor of Christ and in which Christ is not set forth. . . . Books, in wliich Christ is not found, are but a table of devils."^ Of the impression made by his exposition, a proof is given in Colet's own
1 Probably at Magdalen Hall. See Lupton, 23 sqq., and the same cautious author for Colet's school life in London. For the facts of Colet's career, our best authority is Erasmus' letter to Justus Jonas.
'^Quoted by Lupton, p. 70.