XXIV. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.--A.D. 1534 TO 1580 (part 3 of 4)

XXIV. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.--A.D. 1534 TO 1580 (part 3 of 4)

From Oxford Edmund proceeded to Paris, where we have already seen something of his manner of life. He seems to have studied more than once at both universities, and also at Merton abbey, then a great seat of learning. As soon as he had taken his master’s degree, he opened a school of his own on the spot now occupied by St. Edmund’s Hall. The favourite maxim he was accustomed to give to his pupils, was this: “Study as if you were to live for ever, live as if you were to die to-morrow.” For himself, he heard Mass daily, attended matins in the nearest parish church, and recited the canonical hours before beginning his lectures. And to satisfy his devotion with the greater convenience, he spent part of his slender patrimony in the erection of a Lady chapel attached to St. Peter’s church, where he and his pupils regularly recited the Divine office. It must be remembered, that at this period Oxford possessed none of those colleges and collegiate chapels, in which the Church office was afterwards celebrated with so much splendour; but the custom, introduced for the first time by St. Edmund, was soon followed by other students. Those who love the memory of the holy scholar may still visit his chapel, which looks desolate enough, with its once delicate lancet windows walled up; yet it is something to know the spots where saints have prayed.

Did we know St. Edmund only by the records left us of his tender piety, his singular devotion to our Blessed Lady, and his manifold austerities, we might picture him as some contemplative saint, whose thoughts were wholly withdrawn from the world, and fixed on unseen things. Yet he was a scholar and a teacher; a close logician, and a great lover of mathematics. Wood says that he was the first who publicly read some of Aristotle’s Treatises at Oxford, and for six years after the opening of his school he continued to lecture on arts. The circumstance which led to his exchanging these studies for that of theology is thus told by his biographer: “After he had taught the liberal arts for six years, and was reading geometry with his pupils, his mother one night appeared to him as he slept, saying: ‘What is it, my son, that you read and teach, and what are those figures over which you are poring so intently?’ He replied, that they were the figures of geometry, on which she took his hand in hers, and drew thereon three circles, at the same time naming the three Divine Persons--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then she added, ‘These are the figures which you must henceforth study.’” From that time he applied himself exclusively to the sacred sciences, and that with greater ardour than he had hitherto bestowed on secular learning. He hardly gave himself time for sleep and refreshment, but studied night and day. An ivory crucifix, with the mysteries of our redemption carved round it, was always on his table when he read, and to it from time to time he directed his eyes, feeding his heart the while with pious ejaculations. He never went to bed, but took his scanty rest on the floor, or in his chair, and was at his books again as soon as the morning dawned. Does this intense application seem excessive? and does any reader conceive a distrust of such absorbing studies? Let them learn that at this very time St. Edmund sold all his books, to supply the wants of some poor scholars whom he had no other means of relieving, and seems to have been indebted to a charitable friend for the gift of a Bible, which afterwards formed his principal study.

After some years, having taken his doctor’s degree, he once more began to teach; and strange and beautiful were the scenes in that saintly lecture-room, where the master was often rapt in ecstacy, and the scholars were fain to shut up their note-books, being too much blinded with their tears to use them. Wood mentions the tradition, common at Oxford, that an angel, in the form of a beautiful youth, was often seen standing by his side while he spoke, a legend which at least shows in what sort of esteem he was held by his scholars. Among them were St. Sewall, afterwards Archbishop of York, St. Richard of Chichester, Stephen Lexington, and Robert Grosteste, all of whom took part in the great intellectual movement shortly afterwards set on foot at Oxford by the mendicant friars. He did not make much profit out of his school, for the money he received from his pupils was either spent in charity, or suffered to lie loose on his window sill, where he would strew it over with ashes, saying, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Any one might take it who chose, and his friends did so sometimes, to see what he would say; but he asked no account of it, and no persuasion would ever induce him to keep it under lock and key. He was not the mere professor, whose care of his pupils ceased when they left his lecture-room. He nursed them when they were sick, and relieved them when they were in want; and they in their turn loved to gather up each trait of their beloved master, and handed down to those who came after them the portraiture of the saint, with his beautiful countenance, the pallor of which became of a fair shining red when he spoke of God or holy things, in his grey scholar’s gown, which was poor without meanness, for he was wont to say that a clerk should remember that his state was an honourable one, and that his appearance, if simple, should never be abject.

St. Edmund had a real love for the work of teaching, and several times when he had been persuaded to accept of benefices, he resigned them in order to return to Oxford. At last, however, we find him treasurer of Salisbury; and with his habits, a very strange treasurer he must have made. And in 1234 he became Archbishop of Canterbury. We need not follow the history of his troublous primacy; he fared the usual fate of English primates who resisted the tyranny of Plantagenet kings; and six years later was an exile at Pontigny, living among the Cistercian monks as one of themselves, writing his “Mirror of the Church,” and preparing for his end. He did not die at Pontigny, however, but at Soissy, whither they brought him in hopes that the cooler air might revive his exhausted strength. His last days were spent in giving alms to the poor pilgrims who passed that way, and when he was too feeble to rise from his chair and go to the gate, he made one of his chaplains take his place, and give to all who came. His last words are preserved, the words he pronounced with outstretched hands, when about to receive the Holy Viaticum:--“Lord, thou art He in whom I have believed, whom I have preached, whom I have truly taught: and Thou art my witness that while I have been on earth, I have sought nothing else besides Thee. And as Thou knowest that I will only what Thou willest, so now I say, Thy will be done.” “All the rest of that day,” says his biographer, “he was joyful and even gay; you would not have thought he was suffering from sickness; and many wondered to see him thus. The tears of devotion were indeed in his eyes, but his beautiful countenance manifested the serenity that filled his heart. There was no sign of approaching death; and at the last moment, neither sigh nor death-rattle was heard; he did not even sink back on his bed, as dying persons are wont to do, but remained sitting, and so gently expired, leaning his head upon his hand.” Pontigny keeps his dust as her most precious treasure, and even in our own day, such a strange attractive power is possessed by the sacred relics of the saints, that a newly-founded religious congregation has selected its desolate church for the site of their mother house, with the view of obtaining for their apostolic work the blessing of Saint Edmé.

Meanwhile, if England had cast out her holy primate, Oxford had not forgotten her doctor. The work he had begun in his schools was carried on by the band of scholars whom he had trained and left behind him. Five years before he left the university, the two orders of mendicant friars had been established in the town. The first colony of the Franciscans was sent thither in 1220, by Brother Agnellus, who soon after came himself, and caused a decent school to be built, in which he induced Master Robert Grosteste to deliver his lectures. Grosteste was at that time the most illustrious doctor of the university, and soon brought the Franciscan schools into high repute. Agnellus, though himself unlearned, was most desirous that the studies of his brethren should be amply provided for, and often visited the schools to watch their progress. One day, to his great surprise, he found them disputing on the thesis, “Whether there be a God.” Whereon he cried out in great distress, “Alas, alas! simple friars penetrate the heavens, while the learned are disputing if there be a God.” With these words he left the school “in a chafe,” says Wood, “to think he had built it for such debates,” but, becoming a little calmer, sent the sum of ten marks to Rome to buy a correct copy of the Decretals, charging his friars to apply themselves wholly to the study thereof, and to lay aside questions of sophistry and foolish babbling.

It must not be supposed from this story that the learning encouraged at the university by Grosteste was entirely of that disputatious and empty kind which had become fashionable in the schools since the time of Abelard. Grosteste, if he exercised the friars in such scholastic disputations, was himself a decided advocate of the older learning, and may be regarded as, in the main, a disciple of the school of St. Victor. When chancellor of the university, he used his influence to promote the study of positive theology, and of that Biblical learning in which he was himself a proficient. One of his modern biographers has candidly admitted that “his wonderful knowledge of Scripture might probably be worthy of remark in our day, though in his own not more than was possessed by all theological students.” But Grosteste had largeness of mind enough to appreciate the value of the scholastic method at the same time that he laboured to prevent the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts from falling into decay; and he probably found means of satisfying Brother Agnellus on this point, for whatever use was made of the copy of the Decretals, it is quite certain that the friars did not “apply themselves wholly” to them, or lay aside their scholastic exercises. On the contrary, Fuller tells us that they soon beat all their competitors in school divinity, “out of all distance;” and Wood adds to his narrative as given above, that Grosteste was not superficial in his performances, and that under him the friars made extraordinary advances both in disputation and preaching.

The great esteem in which Grosteste held the Franciscans led him, not only to teach in their schools, but to persuade other first-rate regents to do the same; besides which, he induced several of his own personal friends to enter the order, among whom was Adam Marsh, the parish priest of Wearmouth, better known by his Italian name of Adam de Marisco, who is reckoned as the first regular professor of the order at Oxford, and was known as “the Illustrious Doctor,” and Roger Bacon, the wonder of his age, and the greatest natural philosopher who appeared in England before the time of Newton. Besides these, the Franciscans were joined by a crowd of other illustrious novices, such as John Wallis, surnamed the “Tree of Life,” Alexander of Hales, Haymo of Feversham, and more than one Benedictine and Augustinian abbot, which latter circumstance has greatly excited the spleen of Matthew Paris.

Grosteste, after for some time filling the office of chancellor, became Bishop of Lincoln in 1235, in which capacity he was still ex officio head of the university, and continued to keep up an active interest in its affairs. Among his letters is one addressed to the regents of Oxford, in which he gives them much useful advice as to the regulation of their studies. “Let the foundation-stones be well laid,” he says, “on them the whole building rests. The morning is the best time for study, and the good old Paris custom should be observed of reserving those early hours for the lectures on Scripture, giving the later part of the day to other subjects.” Even when treating of questions altogether unconnected with natural science, his love of it peeps out in spite of himself, as in the passage where he gracefully compares the difference between direct and delegated authority to the different powers of the sun’s rays when falling direct, or reflected from a mirror. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of his time, a universal genius, and revered by his countrymen as a saint. After his death, the university united with the king in petitioning for his canonisation, and sent a document to Rome, in which it is declared “that the said Robert never left undone any good action pertaining to his state and office for fear of any man, but was rather prepared for martyrdom should the sword of the assassin have fallen upon him. Likewise, the university certifieth of his splendid learning, and that he most admirably governed Oxford, in his degree of doctor of holy theology, and was illustrious for many miracles after his death, wherefore he is named by the mouth of all men, ‘Holy Robert.’” He may, in fact, be regarded as, in his own time, the representative of the university, and hence it is of particular importance to ascertain what the studies were which he followed and promoted. As a theologian, he belonged rather to the mystic than the speculative school, and as a scholar he was a warm upholder of the liberal arts, doing his utmost to encourage the study, not only of the Latin classics, but also of Greek and Hebrew. He translated the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and, to facilitate the study of Greek, is also said to have translated the Lexicon of Suidas. He promoted two ecclesiastics who are likewise known to have been Greek scholars: John Basing, archdeacon of St. Alban’s, who in 1240 returned from Athens laden with Greek manuscripts, and Nicholas, chaplain to the abbot of St. Alban’s, surnamed Græcus, who assisted the bishop in some of his translations. He is also said to have been acquainted with Hebrew. But his skill in the learned tongues formed but a small part of Grosteste’s acquirements. He was a mathematician, a poet, a musician, and a philosopher. Among the two hundred treatises of various kinds which he left behind him are to be found, besides his theological writings, works on the sphere, on physical science, husbandry, political economy, medicine, and music; commentaries on Aristotle and Boëthius, and Norman-French poems. Of these last, one is entitled the “Château d’Amour,” a name he bestows on the Blessed Virgin, and consists of a religious romance on the fall and redemption of man. This, together with his “Manuel des Péchés,” was translated in the following reign into English verse, by Robert Manning, who, in the prologue to his poem, alludes to the bishop’s well-known love of music, and tells us that--.

He loved moche to here the harpe, For mannys witte yt maketh sharpe. Next his chaumber besyde hys stody Hys harper’s chaumber was fast thereby And many tymes by nyghtes and dayys He had solace of notes and layys.

Most readers are aware that Grosteste is commonly represented as an enemy to papal supremacy, and is rather favourably treated, in consequence, by some historians who find great consolation in the thought that he died excommunicate. That he opposed the nomination of foreigners to English benefices, and that in very bold language, is quite certain, but the rest of the story belongs to our mediæval myths. It is supposed to have been conjured out of the anathemas attached to the Bull of provisors, the execution of which he resisted. It is scarcely necessary to observe that petitions would hardly have been presented to the Holy See in the next reign for the canonisation of one who had died under the censures of the Church, and in these petitions there is not to be found the smallest allusion to his having even incurred any sort of disgrace. More than this, Wood tells us that just before the death of Innocent IV., that Pontiff granted to the university four new Bulls containing great privileges, which had been procured through the interest of Grosteste. In point of fact, however bold and uncompromising he may have been in resisting what he deemed a practical abuse, there was no English Divine who ever expressed himself with more hearty loyalty towards the chair of St. Peter than “Holy Robert.” He plainly declared that to refuse obedience to the Supreme Pastor was “as the sin of witchcraft and idolatry,” and even Mr. Berington is forced to allow that his language regarding the authority of the Holy See is so “adulatory,” that the attempt to rank him among its enemies must be deemed a total failure.

It would carry us too far to attempt anything like a particular account of the Franciscan scholars, who flourished at Oxford during the time of Grosteste. One among them, it need hardly be said, towers above all the rest, his celebrity having survived undiminished to our own day. Roger Bacon, a west countryman by birth, and a pupil of St. Edmund’s, had passed from Oxford to Paris, where he received his doctor’s degree, and then returning to the English university, spent forty years of his life in studying and lecturing upon the sciences. He had acquired the Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental languages in Paris, and wrote grammars of the two first-named tongues which are said to be preserved in MS. at St. Peter’s College, Cambridge. But it was as a natural philosopher that he chiefly distinguished himself above his contemporaries, and anticipated the discoveries of later science. At this time the physical sciences were chiefly cultivated by the Arabians, who presented them in a mystic and fanciful shape, which did not render them less acceptable to mediæval students. The study of physics was understood to include mathematics, alchemy, astrology, medicine, and mechanics, each of which received its own colouring of romance. Thus a certain Arabian physician put forth the theory that medicines could only be properly mixed according to the principles of music, and no one ventured to doubt the connection of astronomy with the medical science. Bacon was certainly not less credulous than his contemporaries, but he was more experimental, and hence, though he does not seem to have done much towards establishing truer scientific principles, he obtained many brilliant results. The long list of his writings includes treatises on Optics (then called Perspective), Mathematics, Chemistry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, the Tides, and the Reformation of the Calendar; and, as is well known, he was familiar with the properties of mirrors, and appears to have been acquainted with the principle both of the microscope and the telescope, and with the powers of steam and of gunpowder. It is not to be doubted that he was greatly in advance of his age in scientific knowledge, and it was probably his skill in the use of optical and mechanical instruments, which earned for him the vulgar reputation of dealing in magic. Charges of this sort are commonly enough explained as arising out of the ignorance of the multitudes, who thought every man who could read Greek to be possessed of unlawful knowledge. But besides the awe with which a semibarbarous age naturally regarded one possessed of secrets not revealed to the vulgar herd, it must be remembered that Bacon’s science sometimes clothed itself in very suspicious language. He declared that his wonderful tube possessed the power of beholding, not distant objects only, but future events; and his enthusiastic language in praise of his favourite science may read to us as simple nonsense, but was understood in his own day to imply something very like a magic art. He was not a whit less disposed than his contemporaries to credit the wildest theories of the alchemists, but believed in the possibility of contriving lamps that should burn for ever, magic crystals, the elixir of life, and the philosopher’s stone, and wrote treatises on the two last-named subjects. It is plain, indeed, that he only expected to realise these schemes by an application of the secret powers of nature, and not by any forbidden arts. Yet it sounded startling to simple ears to hear of schemes whereby one man might draw a thousand to himself, might raise himself into the air and fly, or manage a ship with his single arm; not to speak of his boastful offer to teach any man Hebrew in three days, Greek in another three, and the whole course of arithmetic and geometry in a week.[250] Unfavourable rumours having reached the ears of Jerome of Ascoli, then general of his order, he was prohibited from teaching, and for a time imprisoned; but in 1264, Cardinal Fulcodi, formerly legate in England, becoming Pope under the title of Clement IV., Bacon despatched to Rome his favourite disciple, John of London, who placed in the Pontiff’s hands all his master’s books and instruments, an examination of which appears to have justified him in the opinion of his judges. Clement bestowed great marks of favour both on the master and scholar, and it was at his suggestion that Bacon made that collection of his chief philosophical views which is known as the Opus Majus. When Jerome of Ascoli himself became Pope Nicholas IV., Bacon was again imprisoned, but as Wood shows, the assertion that he died in confinement during the pontificate of Nicholas is clearly an error, for his death did not take place till 1292, he having survived the Pope four years, and having before his death recovered his liberty, and published several theological works.

The only other Oxford Franciscan who must be mentioned in this place, is Nicholas de Lyra, whose claim to be regarded as a native of this country is not, indeed, undisputed, though it rests on the respectable authority of Trithemius, Sixtus of Sienna, and a majority of writers. The Flemings assert that he was born at Lyre in Brabant, the French as peremptorily declare him a native of Lyra in Normandy, and the English author of the Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, will have it that his real name was Harper, Latinised after the fashion of the day into Lyra. Equal uncertainty rests on the point whether he were by birth a Christian or a Jew, the common belief inclining to the view that he was the son of Jewish parents, though this fact is hard to reconcile with the assertion of his biographers, that he only began the study of Hebrew at an advanced age. But whatever doubt hangs over his origin, none exists as to the position he held among the scholars of the day. Biblical learning and the study of the Scriptural tongues had not quite fallen into decay, when the age could produce the author of the “Scholastic Postils,” a commentary upon every part of the Sacred Volume, which was the first commentary on the Scripture ever printed. Nicholas de Lyra had studied at the Universities of Paris and Oxford, and if it be true, as is asserted, that he did not apply himself to Greek and Hebrew learning until after his entrance into the Franciscan Order, we must allow his erudition to have been gained in the university schools. Whether himself a Jewish convert or not, his labours are said to have been undertaken in the first instance with a view to the conversion of that unhappy people, a work which, in the thirteenth century, engaged the attention of the most illustrious divines. By his writings, disputations, and sermons, Nicholas is said to have converted six thousand Jews to the faith. But his great work was far from being exclusively intended for their instruction; it became the Text Book of Biblical students, an indispensable part of every cathedral and monastic library, and laid down rules for the safe interpretation of Scripture based upon the right intelligence of the literal sense. It must be added, to the honour of English scholarship, that this important work, which fills five folio volumes, was first published at the expense of a private London citizen, and that the money paid for copying it amounted to 670 florins. Its composition occupied the author thirty-seven years, for, as he himself declares, it was begun in 1293, and not completed until 1330.

Let us now turn to an Oxford scholar of a different stamp, whose name, inseparably united to that of St. Edmund, almost closes the catalogue of our English Saints. Born of respectable parents, who owned the lands of Burford, near the little town of Wyche, in Worcestershire, Richard had very early given evidence of a scholar’s tastes, and the first fact which his biographer, Ralph Bocking,[251] records regarding him, is his determined refusal to be drawn away from his books to join in any of the village dances and revelries. But a hard fortune left him little hopes of being able to devote his life to books and learning. The death of his father, and the mismanagement of the guardians to whose care he and his brothers were consigned, reduced the family to extreme poverty. And Richard, with generous self-devotion, gave up all his own cherished plans, and entered his elder brother’s service in order, by a life of vigorous labour, to put the affairs of the family on a better footing. “He served him,” says Bocking, “in poverty and abjection, and that for many years; working, now with the plough and now with the cart, and enduring many other kinds of hard and humble toil, patiently and modestly.” Richard’s memory was long preserved and revered in his native place, and even down to the time of the great Rebellion, the Droitwich peasantry put on their best clothes on St. Richard’s day, and went to decorate with boughs and flowers a certain well dedicated to the Worcestershire saint. Aubrey, who notices this circumstance,[252] informs us that St. Richard was a person of good estate, and “a brisk young fellow that would ride over hedge and ditch;” a description which, quaint as it is, expresses well enough one feature in his thoroughly English character. He was not a dreamer or a bookworm; he did nothing by halves, and his strong, manly nature loved the practical side of everything. As a Worcestershire farmer he was just as ready to ride over hedge and ditch when that was needed, as he was, when bishop, to do his pastoral work in the guise of a poor beggar. The future chancellor of Oxford began life, in short, as a simple yeoman. His energy and perseverance had their reward, and in a few years his brother’s lands, well tilled and managed, began to yield an ample revenue. But when a prosperous fortune seemed opening before him, he refused every offer made him by his kinsfolk, and as soon as his self-imposed task was over, he bade farewell to his Worcestershire home, and betook himself to Oxford, whence, after a time, he passed on to Paris. In both universities he led the hard and mortified life of a poor scholar. For it must be remembered that this was before the time of colleges; it was the golden age when Oxford numbered her thirty thousand scholars, most of whom had scanty means of subsistence. Some were supported by the alms of private individuals, others by the great abbeys of Eynsham and Osney, which on certain festival days, bound themselves to regale the poor scholars with “honest refection.” Others went about begging and singing the “Salve Regina” at the doors of the citizens, well content to receive by way of payment a dish of broken meat from the rich man’s table. Every one will remember the picture drawn, many years later, by Chaucer, who describes the clerke of Oxenforde in his threadbare doublet, who would rather have

At his beddes hed Twenty bokes clothed in blake or red Of Aristotle and his philosophie Than robes riche, fidel or sautrie, For al be that he was a philosopher Yet hadde he but litel gold in coffor, And all that he might of his frendes hente On bokes and on learning he it spente, And besily gan for the soules praie Of them that gave him wherewith to scholaie.

The account that Bocking gives of St. Richard’s student life is hardly less graphic. Like the poor Cambridge scholar before spoken of, who had to run about to keep his feet warm, Richard never saw a fire. But, unlike him, he was seldom able to afford himself the luxury of beef or even mutton, then reckoned as ordinary “scholar’s fare.” “So entirely,” says Bocking, “was he carried away with the love of learning, that he gave but little thought to the necessities of the body. For, as he used afterwards to relate, having two companions with him in his poor chamber, the three had but one tunic each, and one hooded gown between them. One of them at a time, therefore, put on the gown and went to hear the lectures, leaving the other two in their lodgings, after which they in their turn put on the gown and so went to lecture. Their food was bread, with a very little wine, and salad, or other such poor sort of viands. For then poverty did not allow them to eat flesh or fish except on Sundays and high days, or when any friends were their guests. Nevertheless, the saint was wont to affirm that no period of his life had ever been more joyful and delightful.” His love of Oxford induced him to return thither a second time, instead of taking his master’s degree at Paris; and for some years after graduating at the English university he taught in his own school, “liberally dispensing to others what he had himself acquired.” After a while he repaired to Bologna, and there spent seven years in the study of the canon law. And in 1235 we find him once more at Oxford, where he was unanimously chosen Chancellor of the University. He does not seem to have filled this office for any great length of time, for Robert Grosteste and St. Edmund of Canterbury were both anxious to draw him to their respective dioceses, St. Edmund succeeded, and appointed him his chancellor, and a close friendship sprang up between the two saints, which is thus eloquently described by Bocking:--“In all things,” he says, “Richard had an eye to the peace and quiet of his lord and archbishop, who, as he knew, had chosen Mary’s better part. And the archbishop exceedingly rejoiced that by the discreet affection and loving discretion of his chancellor he was saved from the tumult of outward business; while the chancellor was in like manner glad to learn from the holy and heavenly conversation of his prelate. Each leaned on each, the saint on the saint, the master on the disciple, the disciple on the master, the father on the son, and the son on the father. To one who looked on them religiously, they seemed like the two cherubim stretching their wings over the ark of the Lord--the church of Canterbury; each with holy eye gazing on the other, and touching each other with the wings of holy love; their faces, that is, their wills, ever turned towards the Mercy-seat.”

Richard followed his friend into exile, and was with him both at Pontigny and at Soissy, where he died. Up to that time St. Richard had not given much time to the study of theology, and had only received minor orders on his appointment to the Chancellorship of Canterbury. He had made himself known rather as a man of practical sense than of profound intellect, and the tie that bound him to St. Edmund drew something of its strength from the very contrast of their natural characters. But the snapping of that bond was the heart wound destined to draw St. Richard to yet more excellent things. The tree must be pierced to give out its most precious balm, the leaf must be bruised to yield its fragrant odours. The strong, manly heart of the Worcestershire yeoman was bowed in anguish over Edmund’s grave; but the anguish softened, refined, and elevated his nature; it drew heaven nearer to him, and him nearer to heaven; so that, conceiving a distaste for all secular studies, he retired to Orleans, and set himself to study theology in the convent of Dominican Friars.

This was not his first acquaintance with the Friar Preachers, who had established themselves in the Jews’ quarter of Oxford before St. Richard’s residence there as Chancellor. The excellence of their theological schools was therefore well known to him; and after studying with them for two or three years, and receiving ordination as a priest from the hands of the Bishop of Orleans, he returned to England, and for some time exercised the office of parish priest of Deal. Boniface of Savoy, the successor of St. Edmund in the primacy, soon found him out, and compelled him to resume the office of chancellor; but, before doing so, Richard, whose desire was to lead a poor and apostolic life, took a vow to join the Dominican Order, trusting that such an obligation would stand in the way of his retaining any public dignity. He was never able actually to fulfil this vow; yet, as Bocking remarks, the after circumstances of his life may be regarded as a sort of virtual accomplishment of it, “inasmuch as for many years he led the life of a true Friar Preacher, preaching Jesus Christ in poverty, and labouring for the salvation of souls, stripped of all worldly possessions.”

In 1244 the unwelcome news reached him that he was elected Bishop of Chichester; but king Henry III., enraged that the canons had rejected his own unworthy minister and nominee, Robert Passelew, revenged himself by seizing the temporalities of the see; and when an appeal to Rome resulted in the confirmation of St. Richard’s election, the new bishop, compelled by obedience to accept the weighty charge, and consecrated at Rome by the Pope’s own hand, returned to England to find his manors confiscated and an edict published forbidding any man to assist him even with a loan. This may be taken as a fair specimen of the system steadily pursued by the English kings against the Church, from the Conquest to the Reformation; and if such examples may be adduced from the policy of him who was avowedly the most pious and least ferocious of the Plantagenets, we may judge what sort of measure was dealt to English prelates by sovereigns of more tyrannic temper. In his younger days St. Richard might probably have repelled the royal injustice with the bold courage of St. Thomas; he preferred now to meet it in the spirit of patient endurance, and taking up his residence with a poor priest of his diocese, gave England an example no less sublime than that of her martyred primate. Utterly penniless, and as dependent on the alms of the faithful as the poorest beggar, St. Richard did not on that account neglect his flock. Like a true apostle he journeyed on foot over the downs of Sussex, visiting in turns every remote village, and exercising the Pastoral office with a vigorous hand that stood in no need of courtly splendour to enforce its authority. A poor priest of Ferring, named Simon, gave him hospitality, and there, in the intervals of his toilsome journeys the bishop recreated himself with gardening, and displayed the skill in budding and grafting which he had acquired during his yeoman’s life in Worcestershire. Simon regarded the plants which the bishop tended as sacred relics, and was greatly distressed when one of the grafts was destroyed by a beast which broke through the garden fence. The next time that Richard visited Ferring he good-naturedly consoled his host by putting in another graft, which that same year bore flowers and fruit. It was during this time of outlawry and humiliation that he published his Constitutions for the reform of his diocese, in which he made special provision for the instruction of the poor. At last, about 1247, king Henry was forced by the threat of excommunication, to restore the temporalities, and Richard was joyfully welcomed to his Cathedral city. But his private habits underwent no change. He adhered to his old Oxford fare of bread and a little wine; he seldom touched flesh, and if delicacies, such as lambs or young chickens were placed on his table, would exclaim, “Poor innocents; what have ye done to deserve death! Could ye but speak, ye would surely blame our gluttony!” He rose with the lark, to say his office in the silent early hours; and if it so fell out that the birds had begun their matin-song before him, it mortified him: “Shame on me!” he would say, “that I have allowed these irrational creatures to be beforehand with me in singing God’s praises!” His hand was ever open to poor scholars, and he would take the silver goblets off his table to supply their needs. His whole life presents us with a succession of beautiful, homely, and pathetic scenes, which display to us a character wherein pastoral firmness, scholarlike acuteness, and rustic simplicity are blended together, all bound and beautified by the spirit of patience, humility, and prayer. At one time we find him baptizing a Jew whom he has converted by his learning; at another, preaching the Crusade on the Sussex sea-coast to the rough sailors who flock to hear his simple, energetic eloquence. It was whilst engaged in this last work that he was called to his reward. He died in 1252 at St. Mary’s Hospital at Dover, where he had just consecrated a church in honour of St. Edmund. In his last moments his thoughts wandered back to the Convent of Orleans, and with his parting breath he repeated the invocation, which he had so often heard repeated by the white-robed Friars:

Maria, Mater gratiæ, Mater misericordiæ, Tu nos ab hoste protege, Et hora mortis suscipe.

Of the English Friar Preachers, to whom St. Richard in heart at least may be said to have belonged, and of their position in the university, something must now be said. It was on the feast of the Assumption 1221, that they first arrived at Oxford, and obtained from the canons of St. Frideswide a settlement in the Jews’ quarter of the town, where it was hoped that their learning and their preaching might win many converts. From Elizabeth Vere, countess of Oxford, they obtained a piece of ground on which they erected their first schools, known as St. Edward’s schools, where the first lecturers were the two friends Robert Bacon and Richard Fishacre, both of them old pupils of St. Edmund, of whom Matthew Paris says that England had no greater men living. The resort of scholars soon obliged them to choose some more commodious site and in 1259 they removed to St. Ebbe’s island in the south suburb, another adjoining island being occupied by the Franciscans. The extraordinary popularity enjoyed by the Dominican Order during the first century of its establishment in England is attested by every historical document. The lower classes loved them for taking the popular side in politics, while the nobles were no less forward in appreciating their merits. It became a coveted privilege to be buried in their churches, and Wood says that even in his day skeletons and hearts encased in lead were continually being disinterred from the ground formerly occupied at Oxford by the Dominican convent, supposed to be those of devout clients of the order. However, in spite of all this, they had their enemies, especially among the secular regents, who were jealous of their privileges, their popularity, and possibly also of their learning. In 1360 Richard, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, being elected Chancellor of Oxford, was despatched by a certain party of the Oxford doctors to Rome, to lay a formal complaint before the Pope of the alleged delinquencies of the friars. One of his complaints was, oddly enough, their perseverance in collecting libraries; if he was to be believed, no one could now procure any books at Oxford on canon law, arts, or theology; they were all bought up by these insatiable friars, a charge which at least sets them in the light of being favourers of learning. The chancellor’s mission proved utterly fruitless, a result which Ayliffe attributes to the fact that “they had money wherewith to purchase the Pope’s protection.” This last-named writer, in common with most of the Post-Reformation writers, labours hard to affix the stigma of ignorance on the mendicant orders, which he denominates as locusts and caterpillars, who devoured the vital parts of learning, and involved the Oxford students in a fog of darkness but partly dispelled by “the daybreak of Wickliffe’s doctrine.” Even their vast libraries were collected, he assures us, only to lock up the treasures of knowledge from other men, and to become the food of moths and worms. And here is perhaps the place to notice the grave accusations brought against the Christian schoolmen in general, and the mendicants in particular, of bringing in a reign of literary barbarism. Fleury devotes a considerable part of his fifth discourse to this subject, and the German critics, especially Meiners, can never find enough to say condemnatory of the scholastic jargon. Hallam adopts the same line, and assures us that “the return of ignorance was chiefly owing to those worse vermin, the mendicant friars, who filled all Europe with stupid superstition.” Whether this is the best specimen that a man of letters could give of refined and polished diction may be questioned, but he goes on to remark (in a sentence which, considering the zeal of its writer for grammatical accuracy, exhibits a rather remarkable confusion of tenses),--“the writers of the thirteenth century display an incredible ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of the common grammatical rules. Those who attempted to write verse have lost all prosody, and relapse into Leonine rhymes and barbarous acrostics. The historians use a hybrid jargon intermixed with modern words. The scholastic philosophers wholly neglected their style, and thought it no wrong to enrich the Latin, as in some degree a living language, with terms that seemed to express their meaning.... Duns Scotus and his followers in the next century carried this much further, and introduced a most barbarous and unintelligible terminology, by which the school metaphysics were rendered ridiculous in the revival of literature.”

That the thirteenth century witnessed a great decay of Latinity is not to be denied, though, as has been before shown, this decay and the neglect of classical studies had set in before the rise of the mendicant orders and is in no way to be attributed to them. Oxford enjoyed the reputation of talking the very worst Latin in Europe, whence arose the proverb, Oxoniensis loquendi mos. Certainly, if the grammatical errors condemned in the visitation articles of John of Peckham, as reported by Wood, were common in the schools, there is not much to be said in their defence. The prevalence of law studies, too, helped on the decline of rhetoric, for the diction of the jurists was, if possible, worse than that of the scholastics; and the inferiority, apparent during the reign of Edward II., in the schools of divinity, philosophy, and arts, is attributed by the learned Dominican, Holcot, to the over-abundance of law lectures. Granting, however, a full share in the corruption of Latinity to have been the work of the schoolmen, it is difficult to understand how they can be said to have committed a “wrong” by “enriching the Latin with terms which seemed to convey their meaning.” It is usually supposed to be the object of language to convey one’s thoughts, and writers who had to express the nice distinctions of Christian theology would have been puzzled had they been bound to confine themselves to the Ciceronian phraseology. They did, therefore, what Cicero himself had done before them, and coined words and idioms to express ideas which were not current in the Augustan age. The writings of the scholastics must be regarded as in some sort scientific works, in which the object was not elegance of style, but accuracy of sense. We are not, therefore, necessarily to conclude that the Latin of Duns Scotus was an example of the best that the age could produce; on the contrary, many instances might be cited to prove that even this unfortunate thirteenth century possessed scholars whose Latin was at least as pure as the English of some of their critics. Thus the Bull of Gregory X. for the canonisation of St. Louis, is cited by M. Artaud, the biographer of Dante, as “a very model of pure Latinity.” Cicero’s Rhetoric was so far from being devoured by the moths, that it was almost the very first work chosen for translation into Italian prose, and appeared in the vulgar idiom in 1257, the translator being Galeotto, the professor of grammar at the university of Bologna. But, putting aside all exceptional cases of those who still studied and imitated the classics, may we not reasonably complain of the narrowness of that criticism which stigmatises as barbarous everything which does not belong to one style, or reflect the phraseology of one arbitrarily chosen period? “It is strange,” observes Rohrbacher, “that every one supposes and repeats that the scholastics and the cloisters of the Middle Ages produced no book capable of pleasing the world and becoming popular; and yet, for centuries past, the world has read and delighted in a book of scholastic morality, composed in the Middle Ages by a monkish superior for the use of his novices, and that this book which has been read, known, and admired by everybody, is especially a popular book; and has been translated into every language, and gone through thousands of editions.” He is speaking of the Following of Christ, which, according to very probable conjectures, appears to have been composed in the thirteenth century, by John Gersen of Cabanaco, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St. Stephen, at Vercelli.[253]

Again: among the writers who displayed such incredible ignorance as to write Leonine verse were the authors of a sacred poetic literature which will defy all the attacks of time, and which no classic revival can ever render obsolete. The “Dies Iræ,” the “Ave Maris Stella,” the “Stabat Mater,” the “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” the “Hymns of the Blessed Sacrament,” and those innumerable sequences so familiar to every Christian ear, owe nothing of their inspiration to classic sources. It is even possible that they may set at defiance the rules of Latin prosody; but all sense of harmony must be destroyed before we can designate the language in which they are composed as a “hybrid jargon.” And who were the writers of these exquisite compositions, which gave a voice to popular Christian devotion, and still preserve, like some choice balm, not merely the dogmas of the faith, but the very unction of a believing age? They were, for the most part, monks, schoolmen, and friars, the very men who stand charged with a conspiracy against literature and common sense. St. Peter Damian, Adam of St. Victor, Pope Innocent III., the Franciscan Jacopone, the Dominican St. Thomas, and we may add, the gifted and unfortunate Abelard, the very type and representative of the earlier scholastics--these are the barbarians to whom we are indebted for that mediæval lyric poetry, much of which has been incorporated into the office of the Church. In the seventeenth century France grew ashamed of her ancient hymnology, and committed the task of liturgical reform to Santeuil, the half-scholar, half-buffoon, to the Jansenist Coffin, and the Deist De Brienne. The hymns of Fortunatus and St. Ambrose were then exchanged for studied imitations of Horace, from the pen of a writer who boasted that he was ready to be hung up at a lamp-post if he were detected in writing a single bad verse, though one of his Jesuit critics has cruelly enumerated no fewer than a hundred and eight. But whatever be the merit of his poetry, the Catholic sense has long since passed its verdict on the question, and declared the unction of the ancient lyrics to be worth the pure Latinity of a thousand such writers as Jean Baptiste Santeuil.[254]

Both orders of Mendicant Friars gave to the English Church great prelates as well as great scholars; Kilwarby the Dominican and Peckham the Franciscan, two of the grandest of our English primates, may be taken as fair representatives of their respective orders. In the first we see the Oxford and Paris doctor, learned in scriptural and patristic lore, the “great clerk,” as Godwin calls him, who “disputed excellently in divers exercises,” and who, as primate, distinguished himself by his bold, uncompromising resistance to the tyranny of powerful nobles, and his efforts for the advancement of learning and the correction of public morals. After filling the see of Canterbury for six years, “he was obliged to fly from the king’s anger,” says Harpsfield, and, retiring to Rome, resigned the English primacy and became Cardinal Bishop of Porto.[255] His successor was the Franciscan, John of Peckham, appointed like himself by papal provision. How little was there of a worldly spirit in these appointments, so loudly and captiously condemned, when a Pope could put aside so powerful a personage as Robert Burnel, the chancellor of the greatest king of England who had reigned since the Conquest, in order to promote one, by birth a poor Sussex peasant, whose only recommendations were his exquisite scholarship and his saintly life! Peckham’s learned reputation was not indeed of an ordinary kind. He was a doctor both of Paris and Oxford, and a pupil at the latter university of St. Bonaventure; he had made the tour of all the Italian universities, and in the Pope’s own palace had lectured on sacred letters to a crowd of bishops and cardinals, who were proud to call themselves his pupils, and who every day as he passed through their ranks to his pulpit arose from their seats to show him reverence. Wadding speaks of his singularly noble countenance and graceful demeanour, and adds that, besides his other learned acquirements, he was an excellent poet.

His appointment to the primacy being, strange to say, unopposed by the Crown, he began his administration by calling a Provincial Synod, among the acts of which is that memorable one which enjoins every parish priest to explain to his flock the fundamentals of the Faith, laying aside all the niceties of school distinction, and which draws out in admirable and lucid terms what may be called an abridgment of Christian doctrine, under the heads of the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Two Evangelical Precepts, the Seven Works of Mercy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and those that proceed from them, the Seven Contrary Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments.[256] Moreover, we find him appointing parochial schoolmasters in holy Orders for teaching the children of the poor.

Peckham not only visited his whole diocese, but travelled over the greater part of England, informing himself of the exact state of cathedrals, monasteries, clergy, and people, and making war on pluralism, and every other abuse which be discovered. He also showed himself very active in reforming the disorders that had crept into the universities, and at his visitation, held at Oxford in 1283, condemned a considerable number of false propositions, as well in theology, as in grammar, philosophy, and logic. His fearless independence of character did not shrink from presenting a remonstrance against the tyranny of Edward I., and administering a rebuke to the great Earl of Warren for allowing his deer and cattle to trample down a poor man’s field of corn. The immense list of his works, as given by Pitseus, shows that he was not of the number of those who neglected the arts. Besides his “Concordance of the Scriptures,” and his theological and scholastic works, there are poems, treatises on geometry, optics, and astronomy, others on mystical divinity, others on the pastoral office intended for the use of the parochial clergy, and some apparently drawn up to facilitate the instruction of the poor. Yet this illustrious man, undoubtedly one of the greatest of our English primates, was never in private life anything but the simple Friar Minor. “He was stately in gesture, gait, and outward show,” says Harpsfield, “yet of an exceeding meek, facile, and liberal temper.” At his own table sumptuously furnished for his guests, he ate only the coarsest viands, always travelled on foot, and chose to perform the humblest offices in his cathedral church, such as lighting the waxen tapers on the altar. It is a significant fact, that he always retained a prebend attached to the see of Lyons, in case he might at any time be forced to fly from England; and Godwin tells us, that after his time this benefice continued annexed to the see of Canterbury, in order to provide against the case of the more than probable exile of the Primates.

Our last specimen of an Oxford Don of the thirteenth century shall be taken from a different class; no Worcestershire yeoman, or Sussex peasant boy, but the son of the greatest and noblest of the English barons, Cantilupe, Earl of Pembroke, marshal and protector of the realm during the stormy minority of Henry III. Thomas Cantilupe, his eldest son, was educated first at court, and then at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Orleans; and whether at court or in the schools, he displayed the same piety and delicacy of conscience. Deeply learned both in canon and civil law, he was raised by king Henry to the post of Lord Chancellor, and was also elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But on the accession of Edward I. he obtained leave to resign his dignities, and retired to Oxford, where he trusted he might spend the rest of his life in the practice of study and devotion. He took his degree of Doctor of Divinity in the church of the Dominicans, on which occasion his old master and spiritual director, Robert Kilwarby, then Archbishop of Canterbury, was present, and scrupled not publicly to declare his belief that he had never forfeited his baptismal innocence. He was then fifty-four years of age. “So help me God,” were the archbishop’s words, “I believe him to be this day as pure from all actual sin as on the day of his birth. And if any man ask, let him know that from his childhood I have heard his confessions, and read his life and conscience as clearly as a man may read an open book.”[257]

After attending the second Council of Lyons, he was elected Bishop of Hereford, and in the government of his diocese found himself, singularly enough, opposed to his saintly metropolitan, John of Peckham, who, as he conceived, overstrained his authority as Primate. Yet though he staunchly defended the rights of his Church, and was constantly engaged in vexatious disputes with some of the great barons, no one ever dreamt of charging him with a haughty or ambitious spirit. The speciality of his sanctity was charity, and it was said of him that he was never seen angry, save when a whisper of detraction met his ear.

Such were some of the Oxford doctors and chancellors of this period, and such the prelates chosen from their ranks. Not indeed that we would be thought desirous of representing our ancient universities as exclusively schools of saints; the slightest acquaintance with the academic annals suffices to show that they were disgraced by many scandals, and were too often the scenes of lawless outrages and contentions, which, in our days of higher civilisation, must naturally excite both wonder and disgust. Moreover, the halls of Oxford were haunted by a spirit very different from that which pervaded the cloisters of Jarrow. The world had entered there, with all its false maxims, and scholars were not ashamed to squabble for benefices, and often, on the motive of self-interest, to take part with the Crown against the Church. Still, when all has been said that impartial candour demands, we cannot doubt that many precious traditions must have been preserved in the university schools, and that they moulded many a poor scholar in the old saintly and beautiful type. Moreover, we are approaching the time when the most flagrant evils of the universities were about to receive a partial remedy by the establishment of the collegiate system, which soon became tacitly accepted as the educational system of England. It aimed, and to a great degree successfully, at combining the discipline of the old monastic schools with the larger intellectual advantages of the universities. The reputed priority is ordinarily assigned to University College, which, on the ground of its supposed foundation by Alfred, claims to be the first in point of antiquity of the Oxford foundations. But its real existence as a college dates only from the time of William, Archdeacon of Durham, by whose will a sum of money was assigned for the maintenance of a body of masters, who, in 1280, were required to live together in one house, and receive a body of statutes. But Merton College had already received its royal charter in 1264, and one year previously to that date, John Baliol, father to the unfortunate Scottish King, had taken some steps towards the foundation of the college which bears his name. His intentions were carried into effect by his widow, the Lady Devorgilla, who, at the instigation of her Franciscan confessor, Richard Stickbury, founded the college in honour of the Holy Trinity, Our Lady, and St. Catherine the Martyr. It would be pleasant to present to the reader the heiress of the ancient princes of Galloway, as she appears in semi-monastic costume, in her Oxford portrait, or to reproduce those exquisitely engrossed statutes, which provide that the students of Baliol shall be present at the divine offices on Sundays and holidays, and shall on other days frequent the schools; that they shall always speak Latin in common, and if they neglect to do so, shall be served last at table; that a sophism shall be disputed among them once a week, and that they be allowed a penny a day for their sustenance, and two pence on Sundays! But as our object is only to notice those collegiate foundations which in a marked way influenced the system of education, we shall pass on to Merton, avowedly the first English college incorporated by charter, and the model on which most of the subsequent foundations, both of Oxford and Cambridge were raised. Its founder, Walter de Merton, Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of the realm, may be, in fact regarded as the originator of the collegiate system, and is designated in his monumental inscription unius exemplo, omnium quotquot extant collegiorum Fundator, maximorumque Europæ totius ingeniorum felicissimus parens. The immense evils of the university system, which was practically no system at all, early attracted his attention, and determined him on making the experiment of gathering a certain number of scholars from the halls and hostels where they now congregated subject to a merely nominal discipline, and placing them under the control of masters and tutors in a spacious building under semi-monastic rules. What was designed with so much sagacity was executed with corresponding magnificence, and the Domus Scholarium de Merton became the curiosity of its age. Architectural splendour was not at first considered any necessary part of a collegiate foundation, but the various tenements purchased by Bishop Merton were reduced to a regular quadrangular form, and a college chapel was included in the original design, two chaplains being appointed for “the ministration of Divine service.” In 1265, the parish church of St. John Baptist was made over to the founder by the monks of Reading, and granted to the perpetual use of the scholars. Their studies appear to have differed in no way from those of the other Oxonians, but Wood considers the appointment of a grammar-master to indicate that Bishop Merton designed to put some check on the decay of arts.

Among the early benefactresses to this college was one who might almost be called its co-foundress, Ella Longspée, Countess of Warwick, and daughter to that other Ella, Countess of Salisbury, who had obtained the conversion of her ferocious husband, Longspée, through the instrumentality of St. Edmund.[258] The friendship of the elder Ella with the saintly archbishop appears to have inspired both her daughters with a singular goodwill towards Oxford, and Ella in particular made large donations of lands and endowments to the Merton scholars. Such was the success of the new foundation that the king himself recommended it to Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, as a model for his proposed Cambridge College of Peterhouse; and the example once set, was soon taken up by others. The Benedictines had possessed houses of studies in Oxford from a very early period, but the proposal was now made to found a regular college, intended, in the first instance, exclusively for students from Gloucester Abbey, but the benefits of which were afterwards extended to those of St. Alban’s, Glastonbury, Tavistock, Chertsey, Coventry, Evesham, St. Edmundsbury, Winchcombe, and Malmsbury, all of which contributed to the expense of rearing the necessary buildings. The real founder of Gloucester College, however, was not an abbot, but a baron, John Giffard, Lord of Brimesfield, and husband of Maud Longspée, whose persuasions doubtless had great share in promoting his munificence. In 1291, a general chapter was held at Abingdon of the monks of the province of Canterbury, and a tax imposed on all the Benedictine houses of the province, to raise the necessary funds.

The result was the erection of a grand and commodious pile of buildings, some of which remain to this day, and form a part of the modern Worcester College. The apartments occupied by the students of the different religious houses were separate one from another, and distinguished by their arms or rebusses. Thus, we see the cross-keys for St. Peter’s of Gloucester, a comb and a ton, with the letter W, for Winchcombe, and so of the rest. Each abbey sent a certain number of students at a time, who were governed by a prior, elected by themselves, called the “Prior Studentium,” and who had a rule adapted to suit their peculiar requirements. They were enjoined not to mix familiarly with the secular students, to have divinity disputations once a week, and to practise preaching, both in Latin and English. A chair of theology was afterwards founded for their special instruction. In short, Gloucester College was a true religious seminary, and continued to enjoy a high character for learning down to the time of the general suppression of religious houses. Wood gives many interesting particulars of the college, and the good scholars whom it produced. Whethamstede, abbot of St. Alban’s in the reign of Henry VI., of whom we shall have hereafter to speak more at length, was at one time the “Prior Studentium,” and afterwards bestowed such large benefactions on the house as to be called its second founder. He put in the five painted windows of the chapel, built a vestiary and a library, and presented many books. Moreover, he adorned the images of the Crucifix and the Saints with “deprecatory rhymes.” His dear and learned friend, Humphrey of Gloucester, likewise enriched the library with several valuable manuscripts. The first Benedictine of this college who took his doctor’s degree was William Brok, who graduated in divinity in 1298. The inception of a university doctor was in those days a stately ceremony, and on this occasion the Benedictines thought it well to celebrate the auspicious event with more than ordinary splendour. Six abbots of the order, therefore, attended the customary procession on horseback, besides “monks, priors, obedientiaries, and claustral clerks, a hundred noblemen and esquires,” and most of the Benedictine bishops of the province of Canterbury. The Durham monks were not long before they provided themselves with a similar seminary, and in 1286 obtained lands for the erection of their college from Dame Mabel Wafte, abbess of Godstow. The endowments of this establishment were intended half for lay and half for religious students. They also had their “Prior Studentium,” and the good repute of their learning induced Richard of Bury, the celebrated Bishop of Durham, to leave them his magnificent library of books. The site of this foundation is now occupied by the more modern Trinity College.

These religious establishments, it is not to be doubted, had a considerable share in promoting the extension of the collegiate system now fairly introduced into Oxford. The Merton scholars soon attracted notice; of whom the most famous was Duns Scotus, who after leaving the university entered among the Franciscan friars of Newcastle, and returning to Oxford to study a second time under the doctors of his own order, won perhaps the highest renown which attaches to the name of any English divine since the days of Bede.[259] The reign of Edward II. witnessed the foundation of two more colleges. Oriel claims as its founder that unfortunate monarch himself, who, whatever may have been his faults, was an undoubted patron of letters. It is probable, however, that he had little more than a nominal share in the foundation, which was the real work of his almoner, Adam de Brom. Exeter owes its name to its founder, Walter Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, and both these were, more or less, in their statutes and general spirit, copies of Merton. The effects of the changes thus introduced into the university system are differently estimated by different writers. By many the diminution in the number of students which became apparent in the fourteenth century, is attributed to the increase of colleges. These of course could only accommodate a limited number, whereas any amount of students might swarm in the hostels and lodging-houses which were formerly their only resort. However, if the old adage, that quality is to be preferred to quantity, is to be held of any force, this can hardly be said to be a disadvantage. Six thousand students living under regular discipline were perhaps better than thirty thousand, containing a large proportion of “varlets;” and although in our days the collegiate system may be regarded as having a tendency to aristocratical exclusiveness, this was far from being its intention or result in the early period of its institution. The endowments were for poor scholars, and by poor scholars they were mostly enjoyed. It appears probable also that the successive pestilences which desolated Oxford in the reign of Edward III., and the troubles occasioned by Wickliffe and his followers, had a great deal to do with the decrease of the scholars. Besides which, it must be borne in mind that the rage for scholastic learning which characterised the thirteenth century, gave place in England during the fourteenth to a rage for French conquests. So completely did the brilliant successes achieved by the two Edwards root this passion in the English mind, that the cultivation of letters was little regarded, and perhaps after Wickliffe’s time it was looked on by some with a not unnatural suspicion. Many of the colleges had become tainted with Lollardism, and remained under a cloud; the tide of popular favour had set in for the showy chivalry of the day, and clerks and scholars went somewhat out of fashion. The close tie which had hitherto knit together the schools of Oxford and Paris was henceforth totally sundered, nor is it easy to estimate the injury thus accruing to the English university, which in the thirteenth century enjoyed the freest intercommunion with the French and Italian academies. The narrow insular spirit which thus sprang up, and which was nourished by the anti-Roman tendencies of English legislation, was fatal to intellectual progress. Hence the learned renown of our universities certainly declined, but so far was this from being the result of the collegiate system that it is evident the noble foundations of Wykeham, Waynflete, Fleming, Chicheley, and Henry VI., were undertaken with the view of supplying a remedy to the existing evils, and as a means of effecting a revival of learning among the English clergy.

The history of these foundations belongs however to a later date. For the present we must leave our semibarbarous island (for so, under favour, must baronial England doubtless have been regarded by dwellers south of the Alps), and see what kind of scholarship was flourishing in the more classic atmosphere of Italy at the very time when the first stones were being laid of our ancient Oxford cloisters.

CHAPTER XVII.

DANTE AND PETRARCH.

A.D. 1300 TO 1400.

In what has hitherto been said of the universities, which in the thirteenth century had fairly established themselves as the great organs of education, it has not been possible to convey any just or satisfactory notion of the exact nature of those studies fostered within their schools. The reader will perhaps have gathered a general idea that a great change had been gradually effected since the days of St. Anselm; that humane letters were becoming neglected, and that scholastic philosophy and canon law had even threatened at one time to discourage the cultivation of Scriptural and patristic studies; that theology, on the other hand, had become digested into a scientific system by the great scholastic doctors, who had reinstated the study of the Scriptures and the Biblical tongues, but who had not done much to restore polite letters; and finally, that the physical sciences had made a certain sensible advance. This general statement has in it a fair amount of truth; nevertheless, general statements are such unsatisfactory things, that the desire rises to one’s mind that some scholar of our old universities could be put on his examination before a Royal Commission, and tell us with his own lips what he did, and what he did not, learn from his mediæval teachers. The wish is not so extravagant as it might appear. Fortunately for our purpose, one scholar existed who gathered in himself the learning of Padua, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford Universities, for he studied successively at them all, and has left the result in writings, which for six centuries have been submitted to close critical examination, and are still in our hands. A glance through their pages promises, therefore, to give us some information on the point in question.

It was probably some time in the reign of Edward I., that among the 30,000 students who crowded the inns and hostels of old Oxford, there appeared an Italian of middle age, of whose previous career at other universities we know no more, than that at Padua and Bologna he had addicted himself to moral and natural philosophy; that at Paris he was held to be a first-rate theologian; and that returning thither a second time, after political troubles had driven him into exile, he had held a disputation against fourteen opponents, had taken his bachelor’s degree, and was only prevented by an empty purse from graduating as master; and finally, that both at Paris and elsewhere he had evinced a marked predilection for the mystical interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. These are all the traces that he has left behind him in the schools, and yet how well we know him! The countenances of Shakespeare or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, are not more familiar to us than the grand and melancholy features of Dante Alighieri, whom we claim as an Oxford student, on the authority of John de Serraville, Bishop of Fermo, a writer who, as he lived only a century later than the poet, may be supposed to have derived his information from contemporary sources.[260] Plain in dress, temperate in his habits, polished and dignified in his manners, which were, however, dashed with more than a touch of sarcasm,--a man of few words, given to long fits of abstraction, his form a little stooping, his sight early impaired by excessive application to his books; something of an artist, and such a lover of music that, as he tells us, it had power to soothe him even in the worst of times, an exquisite caligrapher, as they attest who have seen his writing, and describe it as magra e lunga, e molto corretta, a close and curious observer of nature, and above all, of the phenomena of the starry heavens, a perfect scholar, yet, withal, a soldier too, well skilled in all the martial exercises that became his rank--such was he whom we have ventured to select as the representative man of the Catholic universities as they existed before that new era of taste and literature which was ushered in by his countryman Petrarch.

Dante is acknowledged by all critics to have been the most learned of the poets, not excepting Milton, the character of whose genius so closely resembles his own. His learning was characteristic of his age: the extraordinary prominence given in his poem to the scholastic theology and philosophy tells us at once in what century it was composed. Aristotle, Christianised and interpreted by St. Thomas, is the master whom he follows;[261] yet perhaps he is not quite so exclusive an Aristotelian as most scholastics of his time, for it is evident that he had studied Plato with almost equal attention, specially the Timæus of that philosopher, to which he frequently refers. He, however, invariably gives the preference to Aristotle, whom he calls, “the master among the wise;” whereas Petrarch assigns the first place to Plato. But “Dante the Theologian,” as he is called in his epitaph, had other masters besides the Greeks. He who had won his bachelor’s degree in fair fight against fourteen opponents, a reminiscence to which he refers in his poem, had to be furnished with arms from the scholastic arsenal. Accordingly, when he describes himself as undergoing the questioning of the Apostles on the subject of Faith, Hope, and Charity, he gives his answers in the language of the Master of the Sentences, as well as of St. Denys the Areopagite, and St. Augustine. His diction is thickly sown with the phraseology of the schools, with “quiddities,” “syllogisms,” “propositions,” “demonstrations,” and the like; yet when he comes to make his profession of faith, how sublimely does he rise above these technicalities, and declare that his belief rests neither on physical nor metaphysical proof, but on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, on Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels.[262] Elsewhere he appeals to the teaching of St. Jerome, St. Isidore, St. Gregory, St. Bernard, and most of the other Latin Fathers, and names with loving reverence not a few of those monastics and schoolmen with whom we have made acquaintance in the foregoing pages, such as Bede and Rabanus, St. Peter Damian, Peter Comestor, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and Albert the Great. But above all these appear St. Thomas and St. Buonaventura, the former of whom is, beyond all doubt, the guide of Dante in philosophy and theology, and whom he introduces in the thirteenth canto of the Paradiso, speaking in his own person, and using the scientific phraseology of the schools.

The political opinions set forth by Dante are no less characteristic of the mediæval university student than his theological views. Born of a family attached to a party of the Guelphs, he himself kept aloof for some time from either faction, and, as Chief Prior of Florence, aimed at holding an even balance between them. This line of conduct gave little satisfaction to the Neri, as the Florentine Guelphs were called; and they accused him, as it would seem not without cause, of concealing, under the show of impartiality, a secret leaning towards the Ghibellines. On occasion of a popular insurrection, the Priors agreed to banish the leaders of both parties; on this the Guelphs leagued to call in the assistance of Charles of Valois, Captain-General to Pope Boniface VIII. This appeal to the protection of the hated lilies of France moved Dante to an act of severity which proved his own ruin. The banished chiefs of the Bianchi were recalled, while those of the Neri remained in exile. Driven to extremity, the Guelphs despatched an envoy to Rome, entreating the Pope to put the pacification of Florence into the hands of Charles of Valois. Dante hastened to Rome to oppose this demand, but in his absence another popular émeute broke out, the Neri triumphed, their exiles were recalled, and in their turn decreed banishment and loss of goods against their enemies. The original document is still preserved, in which, to the sentence of confiscation is added that of burning alive, decreed against Dante and fourteen other citizens, should they ever again set foot in Florence.[263]

It must be admitted that if the writings of Dante exhibit after this time all the bitterness of “Ghibelline bile,” there was some excuse to be made for him. Almost against his own will he had been thrown from his position of theoretic impartiality into the arms of the Ghibelline faction. Not that he ever entirely embraced their cause; he had good sense enough to admit that truth is seldom to be found in the ranks of party, and owned in after years that it was hard to say whether Guelph or Ghibelline were most to be blamed for the evils which their animosities had brought upon Italy.[264] He felt for the sufferings of his country scarcely less than for his own; and the only remedy which he saw for the miseries resulting from the rage of factions was the establishment of a firm monarchical government, such as was presented in the theory of the Holy Roman Empire. This fancy he dwelt on and idealised till he came to believe that Empire a thing of divine institution, applying to it the words of the Apostle, “There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” The extravagances into which he suffered himself to be led on this subject are not entirely to be referred to the influence of his university studies, yet it is certain that the principles current in all the great academies offered nothing to correct the absolutism of his political creed. Bologna had received her “Habita” from the Emperor Frederic II., in reward for the good services which her lawyers had rendered him in supporting his claims against the Italian Communi. Paris was on the very eve of supporting the sacrilegious enormities of Philip le Bel. At Oxford, the greatest law school north of the Alps, the imperial jurisprudence formed the favourite study; and though, with that happy inconsequence which is the national characteristic, the English would none of it for practical purposes, yet they learnt enough from their law studies to induce them to support a course of legislation, the ultimate result of which was the establishment of a royal supremacy.

In all these academies the supremacy of the temporal power was, in one form or other, the favourite political dogma, and the tendency of their teaching was, perhaps, more directly anti-Papal than that of the Italian poet, for Dante’s Ghibellinism, bitter and resentful as it was, never clouded the instincts of his faith. He regarded Boniface VIII. as his personal enemy, and attributed to his intervention the revolution that had driven him into exile. With the terrible anger of his silent nature which suppressed every outward demonstration of passion, he pursued and made war upon him with his pen; yet the hatred he felt for the man never blinded him as to the character of his office. When he comes to speak of the outrages committed against him at the instigation of Philip le Bel, he forgets that it is his enemy who is being thus dealt with, and gives expression to the deep religious sense of a child of Holy Church in lines for ever memorable. He beholds Christ once more mocked and derided in the person of His Vicar, he sees the gall and vinegar renewed, execrates the cruelty of the new Pilate and the new thieves, and weeps over the sufferings of the Church, whose woes are now, he says, the theme of every prayer.[265] Indeed, in all save his politics, Dante reflects the spirit of the ages of faith. The grim grotesqueness which mingles with his most terrible pictures breathes the identical character to be found in the illuminations and sculptures of the same period, evincing an intense sense of certain grave realities which the mediæval artists never shrank from picturing to the mind and eye. The liturgical spirit, too, is there, reminding us almost at every page that we are reading the words of one who lived when the office of the Church was still the Prayer Book of the faithful, and when university students, like St. Edmund, or Jordan of Saxony, were accustomed to rise at midnight and attend the singing of Matins in their parish church.[266] Some of the most exquisite passages of his poem owe their beauty to the skill with which he has woven into his verse passages and phrases from the Psalms, the Breviary Hymns, and other devotions of the Church. Yet Dante was very far from being exclusively a theologian and a scholastic. His writings offer sufficient evidence that the scholars of the thirteenth century were familiar with other Latin than that of Duns Scotus. He had closely studied all the Latin poets, and sometimes translates or paraphrases entire lines from Virgil. His mind was so steeped in the history and mythology of the ancients, that many of his pages, if translated, might be taken for quotations from Milton; for like him he possessed the art of stringing together a series of classic names and allusions, the melody of which makes us willing to pardon their pedantry. One example may suffice, which shall be given in its English dress, the better to convey the resemblance which it bears to kindred Miltonic passages. It is the poet Virgil who is speaking to Statius, and describing the state of the good heathen in limbo:--

There oft times, We of that mount hold converse, on whose top For aye our nurses live. We have the bard Of Pella, and the Teian; Agatho, Simonides, and many a Grecian else Ingarlanded with laurel. Of thy train Antigone is there, and Deïphile, Argia, and, as sorrowful as erst, Ismene, and who showed Langia’s wave; Deidamia with her sisters there, And blind Tiresias’ daughter, and the bride, Sea-born of Peleus.[267]

Every one of the names here named are Greek, and it is clear that Dante was well acquainted with the stories of the Greek poets; but was he also acquainted with their language? This is a question fiercely debated by his commentators, and considered to be still an unresolved problem. In his prose work, the “Convito,” he has criticised an erroneous translation from Aristotle, and in one of the finest passages of the “Purgatorio” introduces a Greek word, which alone has furnished matter for a voluminous controversy.[268] These and other passages have led many to give him credit for being possessed of Greek scholarship. The point is not decided, but the probability appears to be that his knowledge of the language was at any rate not very profound. In the same way he may be said to have been not totally unacquainted with Hebrew and Arabic, for several explanations of Hebrew words occur in his works, and the mysterious words which he places with so tremendous and dramatic an effect in the mouth of Nimrod,[269] are declared by one critic to be Arabic, and by another to be Syriac; but are more probably, as Bianchi observes, a jumble of sounds chosen from the Oriental dialects, and intended to convey a notion of the confusion of tongues, and to startle the ear with their uncouth cabalistic sound. Without claiming for our poet the merit of Hebrew and Oriental learning, we may at least gather from such passages that he had studied in schools where these tongues were not entirely unknown, where the decree of Clement V. was probably carried out, and professors were to be found who could furnish him with enough of Eastern erudition to serve his purpose. On other points his acquirements were, however, far less superficial. The trivium and quadrivium in all their branches are easy enough to be traced through his writings. He is known to have been a proficient in music. He refers to the quadrature of the circle and other problems of geometry, but astronomy was evidently his science of predilection, and occupies a very considerable place in his poem. He wrote at a time when the Pythagorean system was the only accepted theory, and his scientific allusions can of course only be explained according to its supposed laws. But he did not draw all his ideas from the books of the ancients. In his “Convito,” after giving the various explanations of the Milky-way furnished by Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and others, some of them sufficiently absurd, he decides in favour of the opinion that there is a multitude of fixed stars in that part of the heavens, so small (or, as we should now say, so distant), that we cannot separately distinguish them, but which cause the appearance of whiteness. The other views, he observes, seem devoid of reason. The astronomer, Ideler, was the first to point out that Dante’s description in the opening canto of the “Purgatorio” of the four stars,[270] which he makes symbolic of the four cardinal virtues, betrays a knowledge of the constellation of the Southern Cross, of which he may have heard from the Genoese and Pisan mariners who had visited Cape Comorin, and which he may even have seen depicted on that curious globe constructed by the Arabs in 1225, where it was distinctly marked. He had attentively studied geography, and notices many such points as find a place in our manuals of the globes, such as the intersection of the great circles, as they are exhibited on the armillary sphere; and reminds us that within the torrid zone at certain seasons no shadows fall, on account of the sun being then directly overhead.[271] Tiraboschi gives him credit for anticipating a supposed discovery of Galileo’s, that wine is nothing but the heat of the sun mingled with the juice of the grape; and Maffei comments on the “marvellous felicity” with which he expresses his scientific ideas. The theory of the attraction of gravitation[272] is stated as distinctly in his pages as in those of Vincent de Beauvais; and his allusions to the nature of plants and the habits of animals, and particularly of birds, seem to evince, not merely a familiarity with the works of Albert the Great, but the observant eye of a real naturalist.[273] His artistic feeling appears in a thousand passages, which were afterwards given a visible shape by Orcagna, and so many other painters of the early Florentine school; as well as in some wonderful landscape-painting in words, which, as Humboldt says, “manifest profound sensibility to the aspect of external nature.” Such is his description, imitated by so many later Italian poets, of the birds beginning their morning songs in the pine forest of Chiassi, of the dawning light trembling on the distant sea, of the goatherd watching his flocks among the hills, and of the flowery meadow illuminated by a sudden ray of sunlight darting through the broken clouds.[274] He never directly alludes to those grand creations of Christian art, the cathedrals, most of which were coeval in their rise with the European universities. Yet he continually reminds us that he lived when religious artists were carving the sacred sculptures on their walls, or filling their windows with a mystic splendour, and that he had felt the power of those vaulted aisles, which he had, perhaps, visited as a pilgrim.[275]

Enough has been said to indicate the nature of Dante’s learning, which was undoubtedly the learning of his time. It differed from that of his contemporaries in degree, but not in kind. When Mr. Berington gives expression to his delight at having at last found a man who could admire Virgil, he shows not only a very imperfect appreciation of the acquirements of mediæval scholars, but even of the poet whom he condescends to praise. Dante’s aim was avowedly to write a popular poem; he desired to be read, not merely by the learned, but by the mass of his countrymen; and it was with this object that he sacrificed his first intention of writing in Latin verse, and chose the rude Italian vernacular, not without a certain regret, but with the design of being more widely intelligible, for, to use his own words, “we must not give meat to sucklings.” We may safely dare to affirm that had not the Latin classics been freely admitted into the Christian schools of the thirteenth century, Dante would never have ventured to have chosen Virgil as his representative of Moral Philosophy. And if the world to which he addressed himself had not known something--perhaps a good deal--of classical history and poetry, his poem could not have achieved the popularity at which he successfully aimed. But it is probable that on this point things were not greatly changed from what they had been in the days of his ancestor Cacciaguida, when, as he tells us, the ladies of Florence, as they sat with their maidens,

Drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, and Fesole, and Rome.[276]

Certain it is that the erudition of the “Divina Commedia” proved no obstacle to its popularity. There is nothing in the history of literature that can be at all compared with the instantaneous conquest which it achieved over the Italian public. Within thirty years of the poet’s death an Archbishop of Milan appointed a carefully-chosen commission of learned men to write a commentary on the poem; Florence, which had cast him out of her walls when living, now founded a public lecture to explain his works; and in 1373, called on Bocaccio to deliver this lecture in the Church of St. Stefano, at the annual salary of a hundred florins.

We are not, however, concerned with the literary history of Dante, who is only here spoken of as the representative scholar of his times. His profound learning has never been disputed; yet it is worthy of remark that if it be good criticism to measure a man’s scholarship solely by the style of his Latin compositions, we should have to number the author of the “Divina Commedia” among the other writers whose “incredible ignorance” disgraced their age. His prose treatises, De Monarchia and De Vulgari Eloquio, in substance learned and full of acute observation, are declared to be rude and unclassical in style; a fact which suggests doubts how far this standard of criticism is a just one. It was fortunate indeed that he abandoned his first purpose of writing his poem in the Latin tongue, and chose rather that vernacular idiom which he raised to the dignity of a language. How he dealt with it is the real marvel; he built up his verse, much as the Athenians constructed their walls in the days of Themistocles, laying hold of any material that came in his way, quarrying words and phrases out of the Latin at his pleasure, filling up chinks and vacancies with verbs and adjectives which, whatever may have been their plebeian origin, became ennobled by his use; and creating many a good strong word of mighty meaning which it would have been well if his countrymen could have persuaded themselves to retain. After his time the formation of the Italian language rapidly developed, and the majestic mass which had been hewn into shape by Dante, received a finer and softer polish from Bocaccio and Petrarch.

Of the latter poet we now have to speak; for any sketch of mediæval scholarship would be imperfect without some notice of him who is commonly regarded as the restorer of polite letters. The father of Petrarch had been banished from Florence at the same time with Dante; and when a child, he himself had once beheld the great poet, whose fame he was in some respects destined to surpass. When he was nine years old his parents removed to Avignon in France, where the establishment of the papal court drew many Italians. There for four years he learnt as much grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the schools of Avignon and Carpentras could teach, and that does not appear to have been much. However, even at this age his classic tastes betrayed themselves. Whilst his comrades were still reading Æsop’s fables and the verses of Prosper, he studied the works of Cicero, which delighted his ear long before he understood their sense. Then came another four years at Montpelier, after which he went to Bologna, and there studied civil law for three years more. But as soon as he found himself removed from his father’s watchful eye the study of jurisprudence somewhat languished. “It was thus,” he says, “that I spent, or rather wasted, seven years; and if I must say the truth, disgusted with my legal studies, I spent my time mostly in reading Cicero, Virgil, and the other poets. My father learnt this, and one day he unexpectedly appeared before me. Guessing at once the object of his coming, I hastily hid the great Latins, but he drew them from their hiding-place, and threw them into the fire, as if they had been books of heresy. At this sight I cried out as though I myself had been burnt. My father, seeing my affliction, drew out two volumes half-scorched with the flames, and holding one in his left and the other in his right hand, he said, “Here, this is Virgil, take it, and it will comfort your soul a little--and here is Cicero, you may have him too, for he will teach you how to plead.” Somewhat consoled by this, I ceased my lamentations.”

But a lawyer Petrarch was determined never to become. In 1327, having lost both his parents, he returned to Avignon, put on the ecclesiastical dress, and received the tonsure; but he had no more serious intention of following the clerical than the legal profession. He cared only for a life of literary ease, and the “graceful indolence” which has been declared to form one of the charms of his verses, was the predominant feature in his character. It was at this time that he formed that attachment to Laura de Sade which inspired the 400 sonnets, and other “Rime,” which have made the celebrity of their author. At once to soothe his grief and to satisfy his curiosity, he undertook a voyage through France and Germany. He visited Paris, and describes its University as “a basket filled with the rarest fruits of every land.” The French, he says, are “gay of humour, fond of society, and pleasant in conversation; they make war on care by diversion, singing, laughing, eating, and drinking.” He visited Toulouse, and was introduced to the famous academy of the Gaie Science, established in 1324, of which Laura de Sade was herself a member. Seven poets, with a chancellor at their head, held their meetings in a palace surrounded by beautiful gardens, and solemnly granted the degrees of bachelor or doctor to the candidates for Parnassian honours, the prize for the best poem produced at the floral games of the month of May being a golden violet. At last he returned to Avignon, and, retiring to a country house in the solitude of Vaucluse, composed, amid its woods and fountains, some of his sweetest Italian sonnets, some Latin prose treatises, and his heroic Latin poem of “Africa,” on which he bestowed immense labour. Great, indeed, would have been his own surprise could he have foreseen that posterity would have cared nothing at all for the classical imitations which procured him his laurel crown from the hands of the Roman Senate, and that his immortality as a poet would rest on those careless rhymes which he calls the unpremeditated songs of his juvenile sorrows, and which, being written in the despised vernacular tongue, he counted as of little merit. It was as a Latin writer that he desired to be remembered, and it was the fame of his “Africa” that induced the Senate of Rome and the University of Paris to offer him their honours on the same day. Petrarch’s classic predilections, and his intense love of his native country, determined him to give the preference to Rome; and after a three days’ examination, which was presided over by the learned King Robert of Naples, he was crowned on the Capitol, on Easter-day, 1341, and hung up his laurel wreath in the Basilica of the Apostles.

The rest of his life was chiefly spent in Italy, where the reigning princes of the Visconti, the Este, the Scaligeri, and the Gonzaga vied one with another in doing him honour. He devoted himself with a sort of passionate eagerness to the enterprise of seeking out copies of the neglected classics, and his correspondents in all parts of Europe assisted him in his labours. Cicero was his literary idol, and when the strangers who crowded round him asked him what presents they could send him from their distant lands, his reply was ever, “Nothing but the works of Cicero.” He rescued from oblivion some of the epistles of his favourite author, and was once possessed of a copy of his treatise De Gloria, now lost to the world. He had almost an equal zeal in collecting and preserving medals and ancient monuments of art, and severely reprehended the practice, so common among the Romans, of destroying the venerable remains of antiquity, in order to procure building materials at an easy rate. Though never able to master the Greek language, he had the consolation of witnessing the first steps which ushered in the revival of that study. In 1339, Barlaam, a Calabrian monk who had for many years been a resident in Greece, was despatched to Avignon on a mission to Pope Benedict XII., from the Emperor Cantacuzenus. Petrarch took some lessons in Greek from him, but had too little perseverance to profit much from his master’s lessons. Barlaam is declared by Bocaccio to have been a treasury of every kind of learning, and superior to any other scholar of the time. He wrote on theology, astronomy, and mathematics, and was well acquainted with the ancient Greek poetry. And so, after all, the Greek literature was restored to Europe through the instrumentality of a monk! For it was one of Barlaam’s disciples, by name Leontius Pilate, also a Calabrian, who afterwards visited Petrarch at Venice, and from whom Bocaccio acquired a knowledge of Greek. The latter scholar persuaded the Florentine magistrates to appoint Leontius Greek professor in their city, and in 1361 the first Greek chair was erected in the West, and curious crowds flocked to listen to lectures on the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” delivered from the lips of one whose outward appearance was that of an uncouth savage. He wore the philosopher’s, or rather the beggar’s, mantle, his countenance was hideous, his beard long and uncombed, his manners rude, and his temper gloomy. He remained at Florence three years, and then returned to the East to search for manuscripts; but such was his overbearing insolence that, in spite of his treasures of classic erudition, Petrarch would have nothing to say to him when he proposed a second visit to Italy. Leontius, however, embarked on board a vessel with the intention of returning to Florence, but was overtaken by a tempest, and struck dead by lightning. Petrarch was concerned at his loss, and yet more so by the fear that his books had perished with him. “Inquire, I beseech you,” he wrote to Bocaccio, “whether there were not a Euripides or a Sophocles among them, or some other of the books he promised to bring me.” He had already procured from Nicholas Sigeros a Greek Homer, which he prized, though unable to read it. “Your Homer,” he writes, “is dumb to me, and I am deaf to it; nevertheless, the sight of it consoles me, and I often kiss its cover. I beg of you send me Hesiod, send me Euripides.”

It was not only by the Italian dukes and princes that Petrarch was cherished; the Popes--Benedict XII., Clement VI., and Urban V.--all testified their sense of his merit, and enriched him with many benefices, and Urban is said to have been somewhat influenced in his determination to revisit Rome by the arguments of the poet. For whilst Petrarch allowed his pen the most unwarrantable freedoms in censuring the conduct of the papal court, he had nothing more at heart than the restoration of the Popes to their ancient capital, and on this point he shared the sentiments of Dante. Neither were the middle and lower classes at all behind their betters in the enthusiasm with which they regarded the great scholar. A certain grammar-master who had grown half-blind and wholly crippled, hearing that Petrarch was at Naples, determined to go thither to see him, and made his son carry him there on his shoulders. By the time they arrived the poet had departed for Rome. However, the old man declared himself ready to journey to the Indies if he could only come up with the object of his search, so they took the road to Rome; again too late, they proceeded to Parma, and there, to the inexpressible consolation of the venerable grammarian, he saw “his Petrarch,” and causing his son to lift him up, he reverently kissed the head that had conceived so many noble thoughts, and the hand that had written so much good Latin.[277] In one of his familiar epistles, Petrarch relates the story of a certain goldsmith of Bergamo who, having exchanged the pursuits of trade for those of literature, was possessed with such a passing great admiration of the author of the “Rime,” that he declared he should not die content unless he were once suffered to receive him in his house. Petrarch gave him that satisfaction but the delight of the goldsmith was so excessive, that his servants feared he would go mad with joy, and his guest had some difficulty in freeing himself from his troublesome attendance. Petrarch affected to treat these demonstrations of popular homage with studied contempt, but whilst he talked and wrote of the charms of solitude, it was evident that he was not a little intoxicated with the vapours of gratified vanity. Whatever pains he took to express his indifference to the world, he lost no opportunity of letting his friends know that the world was not indifferent to him. “Whenever I leave my house,” he wrote from Milan, “a thing that happens very rarely, I bow right and left, and stop to speak to no one. I am more esteemed here than I deserve, and far more than suits my taste for quiet. Not only do the prince and his court love and honour me, but the people respect me far beyond my merits, and love me without so much as seeing me, for I rarely appear in public.” His letters are filled with passages of this kind, which sufficiently betray that the would-be philosopher, who had written long treatises on the Solitary Life, and on Contempt of the World, was secretly devoured by a hungry egotism. His notions of the joys of Solitude attained to nothing more sublime than lying under a tree with a book in one’s hand, and no one would have been less pleased than he, if his admirers had taken him at his word and ceased to pester him. Yet the homage of the world had no power to soothe the restlessness that devoured him, and in the midst of all his outward successes, fortune failed not to deal him many a cruel blow. The great plague of 1348, which desolated all Europe, and which was so powerfully described by the pen of Bocaccio, carried off Laura de Sade among its first victims, and Petrarch recorded his sorrow on the blank leaves of his Virgil. Other losses followed, and in the midst of these private griefs, Petrarch, who had given his confidence to the celebrated Rienzi and had dedicated a noble sonnet to one whom he fondly trusted would have been the restorer of his country’s greatness, felt the fall of the great Tribune as a personal misfortune. “Some,” he exclaimed, “can still rejoice in riches, some in intellect, and some in health; but for me, I see not what anything in the world can henceforth give me, save tears.” A sad avowal for the greatest scholar of his age, but a scholar whose character, whatever may be said of his genius, was utterly hollow and superficial. The mere man of letters--and whatever may have been his sincere regret for the graver irregularities of his youth,--we must add, the unworthy ecclesiastic, ever sensible in the midst of his literary triumphs of a want and a weariness, is a poor exchange indeed, with all his erudition, for the race of Christian scholars with whom we have hitherto been engaged. His last residence was fixed at Arqua, near Padua; and there, on the 18th of July 1374, he was found dead in his study, with his head leaning on an open book. He had been struck by epilepsy, and so, as has been said, passed from the quiet of his library to the quiet of the grave. He had been the first to inaugurate a vast intellectual revolution, and the restoration of classical studies, begun by him, was carried on in the following century by Poggio and his contemporaries. For Italy, at least, the age of mediæval darkness, had passed away for ever, and with it passed away also not a few of the old Christian traditions of thought, art, and taste. The mind of the coming generations was to be formed on pagan models, and from this time, as Hallam remarks, it became the main, if not the exclusive, object of an educated man, to write Latin correctly, to understand the allusions of the best classic authors, and to learn at least the rudiments of Greek. That the revived taste for ancient letters did eventually bring about a certain anti-Christian reaction in art and literature cannot be denied; and the character of many of those who became distinguished among the leaders of the Renaissance was such as scarcely entitled them to be numbered among “Christian Scholars.” Yet it would be most unfair to include under any sweeping censure all those who originated, or took part in, the classical revival, or to suppose that the movement was exclusively favoured by an irreligious party. The Augustinian friars and the Camaldolese monks of Florence were among the first encouragers of the new studies; and one of the earliest institutions of the nature of a literary academy, was that established in the Augustinian convent of the Holy Spirit at Florence. This convent adjoined the house where Giannozzo Manetti, then a mere boy, resided; and he contrived to make a door through the partition wall, by means of which he was able to enter the convent whenever he liked, and attend the conferences on literary subjects held among the brethren; the subjects of which were every day posted up in some conspicuous part of the cloister. Among the Camaldolese the same studies were introduced even before the death of Petrarch, and the monks of St. Mary of the Angels had among them men like Zenobio Tantino, who corresponded with all the literati of the day in poetical epistles. So heartily did they take part in the literary movements of their times that Ambrose Traversari, of whom Roscoe says that he had the best pretensions of any man of his age to the character of a polite scholar, was exclusively given up by his superiors to learned pursuits for the space of thirty years. Some, indeed, were to be found who dreaded the possible effects of reviving the study of Gentile writers, and it was scruples such as these which drew forth a graceful reply from Coluccio Salutati, the friend of Petrarch and the learned chancellor of Florence, whose achievements as a Latin poet won him the laurel wreath which was placed, not on his brow, but on his coffin, and whose unblemished life secured him a yet nobler reward in the friendship of St. Antoninus of Florence. He justly protested against the narrowness of supposing that a man could not be walking in the ways of God because he read the poets, and argued that in literature, as in all besides, we may find God, because all Truth and all Beauty is from Him, and to Him alone are they to be referred. That the restoration of good models, those same models which, as the historian Socrates informs us,[278] had been studied by Christians from the very first centuries of the Church for the sake of grace of elocution and the culture of the mind, was in itself lawful and desirable, does not appear a point requiring proof. Nevertheless, it is evident that the revolution effected in the studies of Christendom by the introduction of this new element, was one which demanded very powerful safeguards both on the side of faith and morals; and falling, as it did, under the direction of a race of captious and greedy professors, it resulted at last in grievous excesses which threatened little short of an extinction of Christian ideas altogether.

Already we begin to see the tide of learning dividing its waters into two streams, running in contrary directions. The close of the fourteenth century was illustrated, it is true, by a crowd of saintly men, who endeavoured to establish schools of sacred art and literature in the convents which they established or reformed. At Fiesole, St. Antoninus of Florence passed through his noviciate, in company with Beato Angelico, whilst, contemporary with them were St. Bernardine of Sienna, and St. John Capestran, the two Franciscan apostles, the former of whom drew half the Florentine grammar-masters to listen to his eloquence, while the latter terrified the fashionable ladies who thronged to his sermons into sacrificing their perfumes, dice, and false hair, of which he had the satisfaction of making several bonfires. An attentive study of the monuments, as well as of the literary history of the times, will, however, reveal significant tokens of the existence of a very different element from that which appears in the paintings of Angelico. It is remarkable that he formed no school, and found none to inherit his ideas. After his time, Christian art, the faithful exponent of the popular mind, daily lost something of the chaste severity of former times; there was a growing disposition in favour of more florid ornamentation in architecture, of a freer naturalism in painting, and of a capricious effeminacy even in sacred music, which destroyed the solemn religious character of the ancient chant. This latter abuse was severely reprehended by Pope John XXII. in his Bull, entitled Docta Sanctorum, wherein he complains of the innovations introduced by “certain disciples of a new school, who, employing their whole attention in marking time, endeavour, by new notes, to express airs of their own invention to the prejudice of the ancient chants.” In this, as in everything else, the mischief was chiefly effected by the professors, who were gradually assuming a sort of dictatorship in literature and the arts, and who, whether they lectured, sang, or painted, sought as their main object, not the solid instruction of their hearers, or the symbolism of divine truths, but merely the display of their own talents.

The literary movement did not at first extend itself very rapidly beyond the Alps, and in France particularly many circumstances combined to check for a time the progress of letters. King Charles V. had indeed a taste for the sciences, and founded a royal library at the Louvre containing 900 volumes, and forming what his accomplished biographer, Christine de Pisa, calls “une belle assemblée de notables livres moult bien escripts, et richement adornés.” She was the daughter of his Venetian astronomer, the authoress of fifteen volumes in prose and verse, and was, as Tiraboschi affirms, well acquainted with Greek. The king, however, found few among his courtiers to share his learned tastes. The knights and nobles who fought at Creçy piqued themselves on their ignorance of letters as a sign of their gentle blood, and it is no uncommon thing to find a formula like the following attached to public deeds of the fourteenth century:--“Lequel a déclaré ne savoir signer, attendu sa qualité de gentilhomme.” Eustache Deschamps, who wrote during the reigns of John and Charles V., bitterly complains of the ignorance of the upper classes as contrasted with those of an earlier generation. Formerly, he says, nobles studied the liberal arts until their twentieth year, before receiving knighthood; now they begin their education on horseback, abandon learning to men of meaner birth, and give themselves up to gaming and profligacy. He praises the older days of chivalry, when knights loved truth, virtue, and loyal love, and were not ashamed of being thought clerks, “car meilleur temps fut le temps ancien.” Alain Chartier, another writer of the same period, makes similar complaints. “Gentlemen live now,” he says, “as if they were only made to eat and drink; and everywhere you hear the ridiculous saying that it is unbecoming for a nobleman to know how to read and write. It used not so to be in the days when men held an ignorant king to be a crowned ass.” Nor are the accounts of the actual state of the University of Paris much more satisfactory. The schools were filled with teachers who introduced both philosophical and theological errors, and the Latinity of the Parisians is said to have been worse than that of their English neighbours. Discipline too was beginning to flag, and in 1366 the Faculty of Arts had to publish a decree of reformation, from which it appears that the regents had begun to open their schools at a later hour, and to introduce the hitherto unknown luxury of benches in place of the time-honoured bundles of straw. With the exception of a few great names, such as those of Gerson and Nicholas Oresme, this period is a dreary and barren one in the literary annals of France. And the sterility of her schools at this precise epoch is a remarkable and significant fact. It was exactly the period when the peculiar political doctrines of the Paris doctors appeared to have won their triumph. Adapting the principles of the old imperial jurisprudence to the circumstances of Christian Europe, if they did not actually identify the offices of Emperor and Pontiff, they yet put forth doctrines which virtually implied a species of royal supremacy. Gerson’s teaching on the same subject, if less absolute, was not more orthodox, and tended to make men regard the Pontifical dignity as a human thing which could be legislated for according to principles of human policy. National vanity came in to swell the pretensions of the Parisian doctors. France was the centre of Christendom, and the heart of France was the University. “Not Rome, but France,” said Nicholas Oresme, in his oration to Urban V., “is the country beloved by God. Charlemagne transplanted the liberal sciences from Rome to Paris, whose doctors may be compared to the stars of the firmament and the voice of many thunders; and on that holy soil, therefore, and not at Rome, ought the Pope to reside.” This sort of eloquence was continually reproduced in the treatises on the temporal and spiritual powers which poured forth from the pens of the Paris legists, who were the first to adhere to the Antipope, Clement VII., thus involving France in the guilt of the Great Schism, and whose influence, fifty years later, at the Schismatical Council of Basle, obtained the pretended deposition of Eugenius IV., and the election of another Antipope, Felix V. Nay, so thoroughly was the University of Paris in love with schism, that when, in 1438, King Charles VIII. ordered all his subjects to acknowledge the authority of Eugenius, she alone refused to obey: the Antipope had been a creature of her own fabrication, and she obstinately clung to his fortunes.

On schools which had thus deliberately cut themselves off from the source of benediction the blessing of fertility could not rest.[279] No dew fell on them, and it was as if the clouds had been commanded that they should rain no rain upon them. Moreover, the frightful wars that desolated France for 150 years were adverse to the spread of letters. In them even Protestant historians have recognised the marked and terrible retribution of sacrilegious crime. The long struggle between Philip le Bel and Pope Boniface VIII. terminated, in 1303, in what seemed the complete triumph of the Crown. Not only had Philip firmly asserted the independence of the temporal power, but to secure his victory he had calumniated the Vicar of Christ by accusing him before all Europe as a sorcerer, a heretic, an infidel, and a simonist. His two infamous satellites, William de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, had entered Anagni with the banner of France displayed, crying aloud, “Death to the Pope, and long live the King of France!” They seized the venerable old man of eighty-six, as he sat awaiting them, with passive courage, on his throne, with the cross in his hand and the tiara on his brow, and treated him with indignities which hastened, if they did not actually cause, his death. And then the seat of the Popes was transferred from Rome to Avignon, a calamitous event which weakened their independent power, and eventually plunged the Church into schism. Respect for the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff declined apace in the schools of France, and it became fashionable for her lawyers and doctors to discuss the question how far that authority extended, and to affix limits to it of their own devising. All this was doubtless a great victory, and seemed to be something very like the triumph of the secular over the spiritual power. But it was a triumph terribly avenged. At the time when these fancied successes crowned the daring policy of Philip le Bel, he was in the flower of his age, surrounded by his three sons, all inheritors of their father’s beauty, and promising to carry on the glories of his race to distant generations. But the King, in the forty-seventh year of his age, was killed by a wild boar; his sons, one by one, followed each other, heirless, to the tomb; at one and the same time the disgraceful crimes of their three wives were published to the world; and the crown passed from his family--and to whom? To the son of Charles de Valois, the friend and captain-general of Boniface VIII., who had refused to take part in his brother’s crimes, and always remained loyal to the injured Pontiff. But this was not all. A daughter of Philip le Bel still survived, the she-wolf of France, who, after dyeing her hands in the blood of her husband, King Edward II. of England, left to her son, Edward III., those fatal claims which brought upon France the outpouring of the cup of vengeance. Those golden fleurs-de-lys, which Dante had beheld borne in triumph through the gates of Anagni, were rolled and trampled in the dust for a century and a half by English descendants of that very king who had fondly thought to establish his royal power on the humiliation of the Vicar of Christ. France was brought to the very lowest abyss of ignominy, and had to witness the coronation in her capital of an English conqueror, who quartered those same dishonoured lilies on his shield. What more need be said? History teaches many lessons, but there is one which she repeats through all ages with unvarying fidelity. It is vain for the kings of the earth to stand up against the Lord and against His Christ. It is idle for them in their mad presumption to dash themselves against the Rock of Peter; for “whoso falls on that Rock shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.”

CHAPTER XVIII.

ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

A.D. 1300 TO 1400.

Although the French wars were hardly less injurious to the cause of polite learning in England than in France, the reigns of Edward III. and his successors are not without a peculiar interest in the history of our popular education. One after another those magnificent foundations were rising at the universities, the commencement of which has been noticed in a previous chapter; and the English collegiate system was taking root and attaining maturity. The threefold pestilence of Lollardism, the Black Death, and a rage for military glory, offered, it is true, some serious checks to the progress of letters; yet in spite of every such disadvantage, this epoch, so brilliant in the annals of chivalry, was hardly less important in those of English literature, which in Chaucer and Mandeville produced its first writers in prose and verse. And, indeed, if the reign of Edward III. was not a splendid literary era the fault is not to be charged to the deficient education of the sovereign. His great natural powers had been cultivated with extraordinary care under the direction of Richard Angervyle, or, as he is commonly called, Richard of Bury. The most learned scholar of his age, Richard was also a very great man as far as dignities could make him so: Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary of Lincoln, Salisbury, and Lichfield, Dean of Wells, and finally Bishop of Durham; Lord High Chancellor and Treasurer of the Kingdom, and Envoy Plenipotentiary for concluding the peace with France. Posterity, however, has forgotten his honours, and remembers him rather as the patron of learning, the correspondent of Petrarch, the founder of the Angervyle library at Oxford, and the author of the Philobiblion, a book in the compilation of which he was largely assisted by the learned Dominican Robert Holkot, and in which he gives full expression to that devouring passion for books, wherewith, says Harpsfield, “he was mightily carried away.” His library was the first public one ever founded in England. He bestowed it on Durham college, which he completed and partly endowed, and made the inheritor of his books, of which, says Wood, he had more than all the other bishops of England put together. All his palaces were crammed with them, and the floor of the room where he sat was so strewn with them that it was no easy thing to approach him. He kept three collectors constantly employed for him in France, Germany, and Italy. In his palace a staff of writers, illuminators, and binders were constantly at work under his own eye, and he gives ample details in his work of the incredible pains and expense he was at to complete his collection. It was undertaken in no light or capricious mood, but as a serious and solemn duty. “Moved,” he says, “by Him who alone granteth and perfecteth a good will to man, I diligently inquired what, among all the offices of piety, would most please the Almighty, and most profit the Church militant. Then before the eyes of our mind there came a flock of chosen scholars in whom God, the artificer, and His handmaid Nature, had indeed planted the roots of the best manners and sciences, but whom penury so oppressed that they were dried up and watered by no dew; and so they who might have grown up strong columns of the Church were obliged to renounce their studies. Deprived of the writings and helps of contemplation they return, for the sake of bread, to base mechanical arts. And the result of our meditation was pity for this humble race of men, and the resolution to help them, not only with the means of sustenance, but also with books for the prosecution of their studies; and to this end our intention ever watched before the Lord. And this ecstatic love so moved us that, renouncing all other earthly things, we applied ourselves to collect books.”

In his bibliographical researches the still unplundered monasteries afforded him an inexhaustible mine of literary treasures. Whenever he visited towns where there existed religious houses, his first visit was paid to their libraries; and he was not slow in examining their chests and other repositories where books might lie concealed. Often amid the greatest poverty he found the rarest stores; and the richest in this kind of wealth, as well as the most liberal in dispensing the use of it, were the Friars Preachers. Sometimes, however, he had complaints to make of the carelessness and indifference of those possessed of books, which he often found “turned out of their interior chambers and secure depositories, and given over to destruction for the sake of dogs, birds, and those two-legged beasts called women.”

No catalogue of the Angervyle collection now exists, and at the Reformation it was dispersed, and in great measure destroyed by the Protestant plunderers, who saw a vision of Popery in every illuminated manuscript. But there can be little doubt that it was rich in works of high literary value. For the good bishop was one of those who esteemed the liberal arts above the study of law, and he expressly tells us that he provided his students with Greek and Hebrew grammars. He gave them also very quaint and pithy directions how to use his books. They were to take care how they opened and shut them, not to mark them with their nails, or write alphabets on the margin of the leaves. He criticises the bad habits of indolent and careless youths, who lean both their elbows on their books, put straws and flowers to keep their places, and eat fruit and cheese over the open pages; and he exhorts those into whose hands his treasures may fall, to wash their hands before reading, and to take a little more care of their books than they would of an old shoe.

Several other prelates imitated the laudable example of Richard of Bury, and endeavoured to make provision for the wants of poor scholars by the foundation of public libraries. It is probable, however, that most of these collections were extremely limited in their range. The English universities were at this time almost exclusively resorted to by lawyers and ecclesiastics, or, in other words, by those who had chosen the calling of clerks. They were not, as they afterwards became, and as they continue to be in our day, places of liberal education for the sons of the gentry; and hence the education given in them had a certain professional narrowness; a defect which was further increased at this particular period, by the presence among the students of a very large proportion of beneficed clergymen, who having been appointed from an inferior class to fill up the vacancies caused by the ravages of the Black Death, were often found so ignorant as to render it necessary for their diocesans to require their spending a certain time at the universities, in order to acquire just so much learning as was actually indispensable for their office. Men of this sort, of course, spent little time on polite literature, and the influence of such a class of students was, naturally enough, to pull down the academical studies to a very low standard.

It will occur to every reader to inquire where the sons of the gentry received their education, if they were not as yet in the habit of frequenting the universities and public schools. And to furnish a reply, we must call to mind the habits which prevailed in feudal society, according to which every great baron or prelate presided over a huge household, including, besides his domestic servants and chaplains, a crowd of knights, esquires, and pages, among the last of whom a certain number of noble youths were always admitted, in order to receive the training suited to their rank. Chivalry, it will be remembered, was not an accident, but an institution, and one which was furnished with a rigorous system of graduation. A man who aspired to the profession of arms, had to be trained for it according to fixed rules, and to go through each successive degree with as much precision as the bachelors and masters in the schools. Indeed, the feudal castles may not unfitly be called schools of chivalry, and in them alone could the future knight be instructed in the duties of his state. As page in a baronial household, a youth was able to acquire an education far more suited to his future position in the world, than he could possibly have received at the universities. There he would have been chiefly called on to attend lectures on the Sentences, or on civil and canon law; but as page to a great lord, spiritual or temporal, he learnt how to serve and carve at table, to fly a hawk, manage and dress a horse, bear himself in the tilt-yard, and handle his arms. Noble youths generally began their education at the age of seven, when they were admitted to the service of the ladies of the family, and were styled Damoiseaux. They were under the immediate control of the lady of the house, and learnt from her at once their Christian doctrine and the laws of courtesy.[280] I say, the laws, for the teaching of this virtue was reduced to a science, and had a literature of its own. By the fair virtue of courtesy our forefathers understood something more than the mere outside polish of worldly refinement. The author of the “Lytylle childrene’s lytylle boke” informs us that according to cunning clerks--

“Curtesye from hevyn come, Whan Gabryelle our Ladye greete, And Elizabeth with Mary mette.”

“Alle vertues are closide yn curteseye,” he says, “and alle vices in vyllonie;” and he goes on to teach his pupils that they must love God and their neighbours, speak the truth, keep their word, and neither swear, quarrel, nor be idle. They are not to be proud or to scorn the poor, and are to speak honestly whether it be to the lord or to his servants. If his directions how to behave at table are somewhat homely, it cannot be denied that they are much to the point, and Dame Curtesye forgets not to remind her scholars that before eating they should think of the poor, because a full stomach wots little what the hungry ails.

As the boy grew older he came under the training of the seneschal and the chaplain. The first, who was generally some old veteran knight, taught him his martial duties, while the other imbued him with a reasonable amount of book-learning in Latin and Norman-French. The ignorance of French knights in Du Guesclin’s time must not be held to disprove this latter statement, for it is plain that ignorance was opposed to the older traditions of chivalry, and was commented upon as a sign of decay by writers of the time. Knights were certainly expected to know how to read and write, for the youthful aspirant to chivalric honours, who, in the twelfth century, wandered from land to land seeking goodly adventures, was always required to carry tablets, and note down the deeds which he witnessed most worthy of remembrance and imitation. He was required to know something of the tuneful art, whether the plain song of the Church, or the lays of the troubadours, and, as a matter of course, every well bred man was well instructed in the abstruse science of heraldry. Chaucer, in describing his squire, takes care to let us know that besides sitting his horse, carving at table, and jousting in the lists, he could sing, write songs, dance, “and wel pourtraie and write.” The education of his mind, then, was not entirely neglected, and still less was that of his manners. He was “courteous, lowlie, and serviceable;” and elsewhere the same authority informs us, that the young squire was often charged to be wise and equitable, godly in word, and reasonable, to be courteous in salute, and to abstain from all words of ribaldry, “and fro all pride to keep him well.” The last words are worthy of notice, for this eschewing of pride is greatly insisted on by all chivalric writers as one of the special characteristics of a gentleman. It is a point on which Chaucer constantly loves to dwell:--

But understand to thine intent, That this is not mine intendment, To clepen no wight in no age, Only gentyl for his lineage; But whoso that is virtuous, And in his port not outrageous: When such one thou seest thee beforne Tho he be not gentyl yborne, Thou mayst wel seem in sooth, That he is gentyl because he doth As longeth to a gentyl man, Of him, none other, deme I can.[281]

Exactly in the same spirit does the good king Perceforest in the old romance instruct his knights: “Si me souvient d’une parolle que ung hermite me dist une fois pour moy chastier. Car il me dist que si j’avois autant de possessions comme avoit le roy Alexandre, de sens comme le sage Salomon, et de bravoure comme le preux Hector de Troy, seul orgueil, s’il regnoit en moy, destruieroit tout.” And in a book of instructions on the duties of Chivalry, we find the following: “Louange est reputée blâme en la bouche de celluy qui se loe, mais elle exaulce celluy qui ne se attribue point de louange, mais à Dieu. Si l’ecuyer a vaine gloire de ce qu’il a fait, il n’est pas digne d’étre chevalier, car vaine gloire est un vice qui destruit les merites de chevalerie.”[282] In the same Treatise the virtues of chivalry are declared to be the three theological and the four cardinal virtues, and a good knight will hold the opposite vices in horror; he must keep himself from villanous thoughts, and be unstained within and without, and must withal be modest, “the first to strike on the battle-field, but the last to speak in the hall.”

Schools in which maxims such as these prevailed, and in which the duties of religion were strictly enforced, must be admitted to fill an important place in the system of Christian education. It may be doubted, too, whether Eton or Rugby could bestow a more careful polish than was inculcated by that minute etiquette which chivalric usage demanded. The grace and manliness, the “pluck” and spirit which Englishmen prize so highly, and purchase at so dear a rate, were certainly not disregarded; but they were tempered with a certain admixture of lowliness which has not retained an equal place in our esteem. Despite all the extravagances of Chivalry, and the exaggerated and injurious effect of some of its maxims, such as those which inculcated a heathenish sensitiveness on the point of honour, it enforced a law of self-restraint, a polite diction and etiquette, and a government of the exterior man, in all which the education of our own day is fatally defective. “One of the essential principles of chivalry,” says Godwin, speaking of the education bestowed on noble youths in these baronial households, “was, that no office was sordid that was performed in aid of a proper object. It was the pride of the candidate for knighthood to attend upon his superiors, and perform for them the most menial services. The dignity of the person assisted raised the employment, and the generous spirit in which it was performed gave it lustre and grace. It was the office of a page or an esquire to spread the table, to carve the meat, to wait upon the guests, to bring them water to wash, and conduct them to their bed-chamber. They cleaned and kept in order the arms of their lord, and assisted him in equipping himself for the field. There is an exquisite beauty in offices like these, not the growth of servitude, not rendered with unwillingness and constraint, but the spontaneous acts of reverence and affection performed by a servant of mind not less free and noble than the honoured master whom he serves.”[283] The truth and justice of this observation will be readily admitted, and we stop and ask ourselves what substitute has our increased civilisation furnished for this beautiful element in the education of the Middle Ages? Where, except among the fags below the fifth form, does a noble youth of our day learn anything of these “lowly and serviceable” courtesies; and are they there performed in that spirit of “spontaneous reverence and affection,” which renders them not sordid, but illustrious? We must leave it to our public schoolmen to reply.

Such an education as has been described above, taught exactly what a secular youth of good birth now goes to the universities to acquire--it taught him to be a gentleman. And it is probable that in these chivalric households he received the culture suited to his position with more safeguards to faith and morals than would have been found in the schools of Paris or Oxford. In those days the government of the family was the active, earnest business of the lord and lady; noble rank was not held to dispense a baron and a baron’s wife from seeing to very homely details with their own eyes; and the everyday habits of their retainers were regulated by them in a way which put into their hands a vast parental power. Doubtless this “wondrous middle age” had plenty of barbarous violence, and was disgraced by much gross immorality; nor do we aim at painting it other than it was. But, whatever were its failings, it had one merit,--the Family Life was then a reality and not a name.[284] Most readers are familiar with the beautiful picture of the household of Sir Thomas More, which all his biographers agree in holding up as a model and pattern, though possibly an exceptional form of excellence. It was exceptional, however, only in its extraordinary cultivation of letters; in every other respect it did but present the old Catholic type, of which we might adduce innumerable specimens both in earlier and later times. Let us see what sort of rules were drawn up by a French earl of the fourteenth century for the regulation of his household, just premising that this is not an exceptional case, but that any acquaintance with mediæval literature will convince the reader that Elzear de Sabran ruled his family as many a good knight of France and England besides him were doing at the same period. Elzear had the greatest of all blessings, a good mother, whose piety and charity had earned her the golden title of “The Good Countess.” When he was born she took him in her arms and offered him to God, and had him educated by his uncle in the abbey of St. Victor’s at Marseilles. But he did not become a monk or a clerk: on the contrary, he lived as a great baron, fought as a brave soldier, administered justice to his feudal retainers, and was employed as ambassador from the King of Naples to the court of France. He was at the head of the State Council of Naples, and fought two pitched battles against the Emperor Henry VII., so that I think we need have no mistaken notion as to his being a mere pious recluse. Like other nobles of the time, he received a number of youths into his house, among whom was the eldest son of King Robert himself: Duke Charles of Calabria, a circumstance which induces us to think that a certain instruction in letters must have been given to the pages, for this King Robert was the same who acted as examiner to Petrarch, and was used to say that if he must choose between his crown and his studies, the latter should have the preference. Surius tells us that Elzear took great pains with the duke’s education, explaining to him the principles of piety, justice, and clemency, making him frequent the Sacraments, and advising him to keep flatterers at a distance. His wife, Delphina of Glandeves, was worthy of directing a Christian household; she looked to all things with her own eye, banished brawls and tale-bearing, and was honoured by her servants as a mother and a saint. When first they began to keep house at Puy-Michel, in Provençe, Elzear drew up rules for the regulation of his family, of which the following is a short abridgment:--

“Every one in my family shall daily hear Mass. Let no one curse, swear, or blaspheme, under pain of chastisement. Let all persons honour chastity, for no impure word or deed shall go unpunished in the house of Elzear. The men and women shall confess their sins every week, and communicate every month, or at the least at the chief festivals, namely, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and on the feasts of our Lady. No one shall be idle, but in the morning, after prayers, let all go to their work, the men abroad, the women at home. The life of the pious woman is not merely to pray, but to ply her work, and take care of her household. Therefore, the ladies shall read and pray in the mornings, and afterwards spend their time in useful work of some kind. Every evening all my family shall assemble for a pious conference, in which they shall hear something said for the salvation of their souls. And let none be absent on pretence of attending to my affairs. I have no affairs so near my heart as the salvation of those who serve me. I will have no playing at dice or games of hazard; there are plenty of innocent diversions, and time passes soon enough without being thrown away: yet I do not wish my castle to be a cloister, nor my people hermits. Therefore, let them be merry, but without offending God. If any quarrel fall out, let not the sun set before it be appeased. And I strictly command all under my jurisdiction to hurt no man in goods, honour, or reputation. I will not have my coffers filled by the emptying of others; we shall be wealthy enough if we fear God.”

The nobles educated in such households are often spoken of in after-life as evincing a certain love of polite letters, such as Count Capranica, whom Petrarch describes as living in his feudal castle, “governing his vassals with justice and love, cultivating the Muses, and seeking the society of the learned.” Ordinarily speaking, however, the merits of the mediæval system of education for the upper ranks lay less in its intellectual than in its moral training. It is true indeed that all great barons and their wives were not Elzears and Delphinas, but it is probable that the families usually chosen as homes for the young were those which were held in highest repute as virtuous and well-ordered. And in such families we are justified in saying that, as a general rule, the grand Christian traditions were certainly upheld; that children were taught to be subject to parents and governors, and parents were held bound personally to superintend the education of their children; that there was a real parental rule, that priests were had in worshipful honour, the poor regarded as the members of Christ, women treated with respect and courtesy, and elders had in reverence. The domestic virtues were taught after another fashion than among ourselves, and whilst the education of a gentleman aimed at making him brave, clement, courteous, and devout, a high-born lady was trained to a life of vigorous practical utility. She learnt to fill the responsible office of head of the family, which demanded in those days no small capacity of government. She was instructed in a hundred details of domestic life, which ladies are now-a-days content to entrust to their servants. No great variety of accomplishments was of course expected of her; and the author of the “Advice to Ladies,” written in 1371, enumerates reading, church music, embroidery, confectionery, and surgery as among the most useful branches of female education. As to writing, he considers it superfluous, and thinks it better if women “can nought of it.”

In the same spirit the good housewife is addressed in the “Menagier de Paris,” and exhorted to take both pains and pleasure in her household duties. She is expected to know something about gardening and tillage, to be able to choose grooms, porters, and other servants, and look after labourers, pastrycooks, bakers, shoemakers, and chambermaids; to see that the sheep and horses are taken care of, and the wines kept clear. Moreover, she must know what to order for dinner and supper, and must understand how to make all manner of ragôuts, and pottages for the sick. Much account was made of early rising in all the books of instruction addressed to ladies. The “Menagier” humorously complains of those sluggards whose Matins are, “I must sleep a little longer,” and their Lauds, “Is breakfast ready yet?” But in general it was the habit to rise with the lark, and give the early hours, as in Elzear’s household, to prayer and reading. Thus an old French poet describes it--

Le matin se donne à l’estude, Chacun demeure en solitude, Après avoir dedans les cieux Fait monter l’offre de ses vœux.

Such homely duties as those enumerated above might seem to leave but little room for cultivation of letters. Probably the writers of these treatises made the most of their subject, but it is quite clear that the “Valiant women” of olden time were not mere homely housewives, innocent of intellectual culture, and with no ideas beyond their distaffs and their confectioneries; on the contrary, many of them were learned in their way, like the saintly Isabel of France, sister to St. Louis, who was an excellent spinster, but was also well read in St. Augustine. Froissart incidentally lets us know that many of the noble ladies he names in his Chronicle were lovers of learning; such as Mary de Bohun, the first wife of Henry Bolingbroke, who, as he tells us, was well skilled in Latin and Church Divinity. And the character of not a few of those grand heroic women, whose names so beautify the page of history, might be summed up in the words with which Gabrielle de Bourbon is described by the biographer of Bayard. “She was,” he says, “devout, religious, chaste, and charitable; grave without haughtiness, magnanimous without pride, and not ignorant of letters, specially delighting in reading and hearing read the Sacred Scriptures.” The considerable part taken in the foundation of the English Colleges by noble ladies of the fourteenth century shows that they were, at any rate, not indifferent to learning. I have already spoken of Ella Longspée and the Lady Devorgilla, and in the following century their noble example was followed by Philippa of Hainault, the foundress of Queen’s College, Oxford, and Mary de St. Pol, the widowed countess of Pembroke, who founded Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was chosen on account of her virtue and learning to direct the education of Queen Philippa’s daughters. No one can study the histories of those times without being frequently struck by the superiority which appears in the characters of their illustrious women. Their education, however slender it may have been in a merely literary sense (and, if less showy, it was perhaps quite as solid as what finds favour among ourselves), evidently fitted them to take an active and intelligent part in domestic and social life. The old chroniclers often allude to the happy influence exerted over their lords by such queens as Eleanor of Castile, and the Good Queen Maud. Not a few English countesses merited the praises bestowed on Ildegard by the historian Donizzo, who calls her docta, gubernatrix, prudens, proba, consiliatrix. The practical mind of Philippa of Hainault was employed in introducing useful arts into England, just as, a few years later, the intelligence and commanding powers of Margaret, “the Great Countess” of Ormonde, were similarly exercised in Ireland, where she planted weavers and other artisans, built schoolhouses, and “was ever showing herself liberal, bountiful, and devout.” They who would understand the character of a true Catholic household, presided over by a wise and intelligent mistress, may find it depicted in countless beautiful pictures, both of history and romance. Thus, in one of the works translated by Caxton, the Knight of the Tower holds up for the imitation of his daughters the example of the Lady Cecily of Balleville, whose daily ordinance was to rise early and say matins with her chaplains, and then to hear High Mass and two low Masses, “saying her service full devoutly.” Then she walked in her garden, and finished her other morning devotions, and betimes she dined. After dinner she visited sick folk, and caused her best meat to be brought to them, and spent her day in other charitable and useful works. After hearing vespers she went to supper, and betimes to bed, making great abstinence, and wearing haircloth on all Wednesdays and Fridays. In the same volume we find that the maxims of courtesy and humility which found place in the training of a gentleman were equally inculcated on noble ladies. The Knight of the Tower reminds his daughters that courtesy is to be shown to persons of low degree as well as those of gentle blood, and even more scrupulously, and he gives his reasons. “Courtesy shewn to those of low estate,” he says, “is more honourable than that shewn to the great, because it the more evidently proceedeth from a frank and gentle heart.” He cites the example of a certain great lady whom he once saw in company with some fine knights and ladies, and who humbled herself to curtsey, as she passed, to a poor tinker; and when her gay companions asked her why she did so, she replied, “I would rather miss shewing such courtesy to a gentleman than to him.” And this, he says, is what all understand and practise who know the laws of true courtesy.

What has been said of the character of domestic life in the Middle Ages will doubtless seem a partial view to those who consider that we ought to gather our notions of the state of society then prevailing from the debased literature of the jongleurs and troubadours, which is universally acknowledged to have been exceedingly bad. It will be remembered, however, that the “goliardi,” as they were called, were a distinct class in society, the dead branches of the universities, men who followed no profession save that of buffoonery, and had gathered just so much education in school as enabled them to give point to a licentious song or story. They wandered about from city to city and from castle to castle; and in days when no places of public amusement existed, there were plenty of knights and nobles ready to receive such guests, and to while away the dulness of a winter’s evening by listening to their narratives. The appetite for recreation in an unregenerate world is hardly less clamorous in its demands than the appetite for food, and the goods which are produced to supply such a demand, are seldom, even in our own more refined age, of the choicest description. But to take the offensive literature produced by a corrupt and excommunicated class, for such the “goliardi” really were,[285] and draw thence any conclusions respecting the manners of the higher classes in ancient times, is about as fair as it would be to judge of the state of society among ourselves by the plot of a “sensation” novel or a French vaudeville. Even allowing the character of their fictions to be taken as evidence of the existence of widespread scandals, at least equal weight must be attached to the bonâ fide historical descriptions of households such as those of Elzear or Charles the Wise, of whom Christine de Pisa says that he suffered no pernicious book to remain in his palace for a single day; nor any person whose language was not pure and innocent. Mr. Wright expresses his surprise at the inconceivable corruption of a society which could endure the goliardic tales to be recited in its presence. But it would be easy to match the instances which he brings forward with others which show us the domestic circle amusing itself in a very different manner, like that in the castle of Count Charles of Flanders, who entertained three monks, doctors of theology, that they might daily, after supper, read and explain the Scriptures to his family; or like that again, of the good king named above, who always kept readers in his palace to relieve the winter evenings by reading aloud “les belles ystoires de la sainct Escripture, ou des fais des Romains, ou moralitées de philosophes, et d’autres sciences;” and examples of this sort are by no means exceptional.

What, however, we are chiefly concerned with, is not so much the practice of this or that individual, as the character of the education by which they were trained. Our inquiry is what were the principles and the standard of morals enforced in the chivalric system of education. And the fact that this standard was far higher than what exists among ourselves, has been acknowledged by writers whose sympathies are all in another direction. Thus, M. Guizot, whose study of European civilisation has certainly not been superficial, expresses his admiration at “the moral notions, so delicate, so elevated, and above all so humane, and so invariably stamped with a religious character,” which are to be found in the oaths and obligations imposed by the laws of chivalry. “Crimes and disorders abounded in the Middle Ages,” he says, “yet men evidently had in their minds lofty desires and pure ideas. Their principles were better than their acts. A certain high moral ideal always soars above the stormy element.” He goes on to remark that this pure tone of morality which prevails in the laws of chivalry must be traced to the influence of the clergy, who, though they did not invent that institution, made it an instrument for civilising society and introducing “a more enlarged and vigorous system of morality in domestic life.” Expressions like these, which are abundantly confirmed by a study of the ancient monuments, justify us in claiming for the mediæval system of education the merit of at least presenting to the world a lofty standard of right and wrong. That the acts of the pupils often fell far below their principles, is saying no more than that they were men. But it cannot be supposed that society could be permeated with a high moral ideal, and that the strict obligations of that class to which every man of gentle blood belonged, should be redolent of a spirit at once “delicate, scrupulous, and humane,” without effecting some practical results. The young were trained to reverence a whole class of virtues which popular writers declare must be regarded in our own day as “dead.” The system of education which prevailed, presented them with a high ideal of moral excellence, a lofty standard of thoughts and desires, precisely that, the loss of which among ourselves is so bitterly deplored. And what is all education but the formation of such an interior standard? A teacher can do little more than grave on the soul principles which may survive many practical shortcomings, and may eventually recall a wanderer to better things. This is a point which non-Catholic writers can hardly be expected to appreciate as it deserves, bound up as it is with a class of ideas, and even of dogmas, to which they are necessarily strangers. But whilst acknowledging the contrast too frequently observable between the profession and the practice of Christians in the Middle Ages, another remarkable feature in those extraordinary times ought not to be overlooked,--I mean those numerous episodes in history which exhibit its great criminals in the light of great penitents. There had been early impressed on those fierce hearts a fear of God, a sense of sin, and a living faith in the possibility of obtaining pardon; nay, we will add, a certain capacity of self-humiliation, which evoked grand heroic acts of contrition from many whose previous lives had been a tissue of enormities; and thus a man like William Longspée needed but the look and the word of a saint to feel all the old teaching reawaken in his soul, and with a rope about his neck “to abhor himself in dust and ashes.”

To return from this digression, which is yet intimately connected with our subject, let us proceed to examine a little more closely the actual schools for rich and poor existing in England in the fourteenth century. Besides the universities and monastic schools, there were, as we have already seen, others presided over by independent masters. Schools of greater or less pretension were attached to most parish churches, and the scholars assembled either in the church, or the porch, or “parvis.” Thus in 1300 we read of children being taught to sing and read in the “parvis” of St. Martin’s, Norwich. Endowed schools in connection with hospitals and colleges were also springing up, of which we shall speak more fully in another chapter, and in all these schools, as well as in the universities, the studies, up to the latter part of the reign of Edward III., were carried on in Latin and French. Ralph Higden, a monk of Chester, who wrote his Polychronicon somewhere about the year 1357, informs us that in his day French was the only language which schoolboys were allowed to use, except Latin. The passage as translated by John de Trevisa in 1387 is as follows: “Children in scoles agenst the usage and maner of all other nations beeth compelled for to leve thir own language, and for to construe thir lessons and thinges in Frenche. Also gentylmen children beeth taught to speke Frenche, from the time that they beeth rokked in thir cradel. And uplondish men (i.e. country people) will lyken hymself to gentylmen and soundeth with gret besynesse for to speke Frenche to be told of.” When Ralph was protesting against this custom its knell was about to sound. In 1362 the celebrated statute was passed which ordained that all pleadings in the Royal courts should now be made in English instead of French, a change for which we stand indebted to the spirit of nationality called forth by the continental wars. By the time therefore that John of Trevisa wrote his translation of the Polychronicon, a great revolution had taken place, so that he thought it necessary to introduce this correction into the body of his work: “This maner (the use of the French language) is now som dele ychaungide: for John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, chaungide the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frensch, into Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner of teching of him, and other men of Pencriche; so that now the yere of oure Lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde king Rychard after the conquest, in alle the gramer scoles of England, children leveth Frensch, and construeth and lerneth in Englisch, and haveth therby avauntage in one side and desavauntage in another. Ther avauntage is, that thei lerneth ther gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont to do; desavauntage is, that now children of gramer scole knoweth no more Frensch than knows thir left heele; and that is harm to them, if thei schul passe the see and travaile in strange londes, and in many other places also: also gentylmen haveth now myche ylefte for to teche thir children Frensch.” It is evident that John of Cornwaile and Richard Pencriche, were, like the author himself, Cornish men. John of Trevisa was a Cornish priest, one of the earliest students at Exeter College, or, as it was called at that time, Stapleton Hall, Canon of Westbury in Wiltshire, and Vicar of Berkeley. His translation of the Polychronicon was undertaken at the request of his Patron, Thomas Lord Berkeley, and was afterwards modernised and continued by Caxton. At the request of the same noble friend he is said to have undertaken an English translation of the Old and New Testaments. Warton, and after him Craik, have stated that no account of this work is known to exist, and doubts have even been raised whether it were ever really written. One antiquarian, quoted by Lewis in his History of the Translations of the Bible, assures a “learned friend” that Trevisa translated no more of the Scriptures than certain sentences painted on the walls of Berkeley Castle, which sentences turn out to have been painted in Latin and French. But the existence of the translation is uniformly alluded to by early writers as a well-known fact, and Dr. Ingram informs us in a note appended to his Memorials of Oxford that in 1808 he was actually presented with a copy of the work.[286]

There was the less excuse for the English gentry having eschewed the use of the national tongue, from the fact that the language had long since been redeemed from the character of a barbarous idiom by the labours of the monks. Their rhyming chronicles and a vast quantity of beautiful and pathetic poetry, attributed by critics to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, must be regarded as the real first-fruits of English literature; and the adherence to what Chaucer lets us know was exceedingly bad French, in preference to good English, was simply a remnant of Anglo-Norman pride. Chaucer himself had to apologise for his use of the vulgar idiom, and in the prologue to one of his prose treatises, he protests against the speaking of “poesy matter” in French which, in the ears of Frenchmen, is about as agreeable as a Frenchman’s English. “Let Frenchmen endite their quaint terms in French,” he says, “for it is kindly to their mouths; but let us show our fantasies in such words as we learned of our dames’ tongues.” His example, of course, had great influence; yet such was the force of this sentiment of gentility, that at the universities the Oxonian and Cantabrian French (which was not much better than that spoken at “Stratford-atte-Bowe”) held its ground for some years; but in the primary schools the English tongue asserted its supremacy, and primers and grammars began to be divested of their foreign clothing. A great many fragments of English school literature exist belonging to the fourteenth century, some of which may furnish amusement to the reader. All perhaps may not have a very clear idea of what an ancient Primer really was. It was something very different from the school books to which we ordinarily give the name. For in the dames schools, of which Chaucer speaks, children were provided with few literary luxuries and had to learn their letters off a scrap of parchment nailed on a board, and in most cases covered with a thin transparent sheet of horn to protect the precious manuscript. Hence the term “horn-book” applied to the elementary books in use by children. Prefixed to the alphabet, of course, was the holy sign of the Cross; and so firm a hold does an old custom get on the popular mind that down to the commencement of the present century alphabets continued to preserve their ancient heading, and derived from this circumstance their customary appellation of “the Christ-cross row,” a term so thoroughly established as still to find its place in our dictionaries. The mediæval primer is, however, best described in the language of the fourteenth century itself. The following passage occurs in the introduction to a MS. poem of 300 lines, still preserved in the British Museum, each portion of which begins with a separate letter of the alphabet:--

In place as men may se When a childe to schole shal sette be A Bok is hym ybrought, Naylyd on a bord of tre, That men cal an A, B, C, Wrought is on the bok without. V paraffys grete and stoute, Rolyd in rose red. That is set, withouten doute, In token of Christes ded. Red letter in parchymyn, Makyth a childe good and fyn Lettres to loke and see, By this bok men may devyne, That Christe’s body was ful of pyne, That dyed on wod tree.

After the difficulties of the primer had been overcome, a great deal of elementary knowledge was taught to the children, as in Saxon times, through the vehicle of verse. For instance, we find a versified geography of the fourteenth century, of which the two following verses may serve as a specimen, though it must be owned the second is not very creditable to our mediæval geographers:--

This world is delyd (divided), al on thre, Asie, Affrike, and Eu-ro-pe. Wol ye now here of A-si-e, How mony londes ther inne be?

The lond of Macedonie, Egypte the lesse and Ethiope, Syria, and the land Judia, These ben all in Asya.

The following grammar rules are of rather later date, and belong to the fifteenth century:--

Mi lefe chyld, I kownsel the To forme thi vi tens, thou avise the, And have mind of thi clensoune Both of noune and of pronoun, And ilk case in plurele How thou sal end, avise the well; And the participyls forget thou not, And the comparison be in thi thought, The ablative case be in thi minde, That he be saved in hys kind, &c.

There is something in this last fragment very suggestive of the rod. What would have been the fate of the unhappy grammarian, if in spite of this solemn counsel he had failed to have his ablative case in his mind, we dare not conjecture. Our forefathers had strict views on the subject of sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Thus one old writer observes of children in general:--

To thir pleyntes mak no grete credence, A rodd reformeth thir insolence; In thir corage no anger doth abyde, Who spareth the rodd all virtue sette asyde

Yet the strictness was mingled, as of old, with paternal tenderness, and children appear to have treated their masters with a singular mixture of familiarity and reverence. And it is pleasant to find among the same collection of school fragments a little distich which speaks of peacemaking:--

Wrath of children son be over gon. With an apple parties be made at one.

There is good reason for believing that schoolboys of the fourteenth century were much what they are in the nineteenth, and fully possessed of that love of robbing orchards, which seems peculiar to the race. Chaucer has something to say on this head, but Lydgate’s confessions are exceedingly pitiful:--

Ran into gardens, applys there I stol, To gadre frutys sparyd kegg nor wall, To plukke grapys in other mennys vynes, Was more ready than for to seyne matynes, Rediere chir stooney (cherry stones) for to tell, Than gon to chirche or heere the sacry belle.

I must, however, add a few school pictures of a graver and sweeter character. Chaucer, who painted English society as he saw it with his own eyes, has not forgotten to describe the village school where “an hepe of children comen of Christen blood,” acquired as much learning as was suitable to their age and condition:--

That is to sey, to singen and to rede, As smal children do in thir childhede.

And among these children he describes one, “a widewe’s lytel sone,” whom his pious mother had taught whenever he saw an image of Christ’s Mother, to kneel down and say an Ave Maria; and he goes on to tell us how

This lytel childe, his litel boke lerning, As he sate in the scole at his primere, He Alma Redemptoris herde sing, As children lerned the Antiphonere; And as he derst, he drew him nere and nere And herkened ay the wordes, and eke the note Til he the first verse coulde al by rote.

He was too young, however, to understand the meaning of the words, though, be it observed, his elder schoolfellows were more erudite than himself:--

Nought wist he what this Latin was to say, For he so yong and tender was of age, But on a day his felow gan to pray, To expounden him this song in his langage, Or tell him why this song was in usage.

And when “his felow which elder was than he,” had expounded the sense of the words, and made him understand that it was sung in reverence of Christ’s Mother, the little scholar makes known his resolve to do his diligence to con it all by Christmas, in honour of Our Lady.

In these parochial schools, as we have elsewhere seen, children of the lower orders, even from St Dunstan’s time, were taught grammar and church music gratuitously. It has been very constantly affirmed that the education here spoken of was exclusively given to those intended for the monastic and ecclesiastical states. But there is direct evidence, that the parochial schools were frequented by the children of the peasantry indiscriminately, and by those of the very lowest and poorest condition. The proof of this is to be found in the statutes of the realm. About the year 1406 a law was passed, wherein, after complaint being made that in opposition to certain ancient statutes, a vast number of the children of husbandmen, who laboured with cart and plough and had no lands, were apprenticed to handicraft trades, and thereby induced a great scarcity of husbandmen and labourers in many parts of the country, it was enacted that henceforth no one should be allowed so to apprentice his child to any trade, unless he rented land to the annual value of twenty shillings. The object of this blundering and tyrannical piece of legislation was, of course, to keep down the lower orders from endeavouring to raise themselves in the scale of society, and to oppose that upward movement which had been one of the results of the enfranchisement of so large a number of feudal serfs in the reign of Edward III. But whilst decreeing that day-labourers with the cart and plough should thus be kept back from advancing, or helping their children to advance, in point of station and wealth, the very same statute encourages them to send their children to school. “Every man or woman, of whatever state or condition they be, shall be at liberty to send their son or daughter to take learning in any kind of school that pleaseth them within the realm.” This clause seems to have had reference to a petition which had been presented to parliament by certain lords in the reign of Richard II., to the effect that children of serfs and the lower sort might not be sent to school, and particularly to the schools of monasteries, wherein many were trained as ecclesiastics, and thence rose to dignities in the State. The statute aimed at appeasing the jealous pride of the nobles, who regarded with dismay the prospect of bondsmen and husbandmen emerging from their state of servitude; whilst at the same time, the influence of the ecclesiastical body was strong enough to preserve for the lower classes their hitherto undisputed right of receiving such education as circumstances placed within their reach. I need not pause to comment on the light which such a passage of history sheds on the supposed solicitude of monks and clergy to check the spread of learning for the furtherance of selfish ends. But it is clear that the permission formally granted by this statute would have been a simple mockery, unless schools existed adapted to the class in question; and it may satisfy us of the fact that village schools, in Chaucer’s time, were really frequented by much the same class of scholars as in our own; and that not merely in special and more populated localities, but in remote rural districts. William Caxton, who was born about the time of the passing of this statute, tells us that he learned his English in the Weald of Kent, a tract of country which, fertile as it now is, was, even a century later than Caxton’s time, a waste wilderness, thinly inhabited, save by herds of deer and hogs, and a few adventurous men who undertook to clear the forest and break up the land with the plough.[287] Yet in this wild country Caxton learnt his English, “a broad and rude English, as is anywhere spoken in England.” And in after-life, apologising to his readers for the plain unadorned style which his “simple cunning” uses, he speaks of his early education, “whereof I humbly and heartily thank God, and am bounden to pray for my father’s and mother’s souls, who in my youth sent me to school.” His education, we know, was carried on in London at a later date, but it must have been begun in some very primitive parochial school of Kent, where his companions could only have been rustics. The teaching in such schools was, doubtless, simple enough, but however small may have been the amount of secular learning acquired by the scholars, all received instruction in Christian doctrine, and learnt their prayers; the duty of providing such instruction for the poorer members of their flocks being earnestly pressed on the parish priests in the visitation articles and synodal decrees of John of Peckham and other English prelates.

Prayers and instructions, both secular and religious, were often taught to those who could not read, in a versified form, as had been the custom in Saxon times. Thus there is a curious poem of this period addressed to “Those who gete their lyvynge by the onest craft of masonry,” in which the young mason is instructed, rather minutely, how to behave himself when he comes to the house of God. Wherever he works, he is to come to Mass when he hears the bell. Before entering church he must take holy water, and is to understand that in doing so devoutly, he quenches venial sin. Then he must put back his hood, that is, uncover his head, and as he enters the church, look to the great Rood, and kneeling down on both knees “pull up his herte to Christe anon!” He must stand and bless himself at the Gospel, and avoid carelessly leaning against the wall; and when he hears the bell ring for the “holy sakerynge,”--

Knele ye most both ynge and olde, And both yer hondes fayr upholde, And say thenne yn thys manere, Fayre and softe withouten bere; Jhesu, Lord, welcome Thou be Yn forme of bred as y The se; Now Jhesu for Thyn holy name, Schulde Thou me from synne and schame. Schryff and hosel, grant me bo, Ere that y schall hennus go.

Versified instructions of this kind were capable of being remembered by many who never learnt to read, and were evidently in very common use. We find them in all languages and on all subjects. Thus the old French treatise entitled “Stans puer ad mensam,” selected by Caxton for one of his translations, and another called “Les contenances de la table,” which exists in a great variety of forms, give excellent rules for behaving at table and saying grace:--

A viande melz main ne mette, Jusques la beneisson soit faitte, Enfant, dy benedicite Et fait le signe de la croix.

After dinner he is reminded to pray for the dead:--

Prie Dieu pour les trespassez, Et te souviengne en pitié Qui de ce monde sont passez, Ainsi que tu es obleigez, Prier Dieu pour les trespassez

And the child is thus gently warned against the bad habit of noisy disputes at table:--

Enfant, soyes toujours paisible, Doulx, courtois, bening, aimable, Entre ceulx qui sierront à table, Et te garde d’estre noysible. Il est conseillé en la Bible Entre les gens estre paisible.

Teaching of some sort the peasantry certainly received, whatever means may have been used to convey it; they probably knew little of grammatical analysis, or the relative lengths of the European rivers, but it may be doubted whether, with all our cumbrous machinery of State education, we have hit on any system which is likely to form the Christian character so successfully in the hearts of our people as that which existed in the days of St. Anselm or Chaucer. “The majority of husbandmen are saved,” writes the former, “because they live with simplicity, and feed the people of God with their hands; and therefore they are blessed.”[288] And the poet who never paints a fancy picture, thus portrays from the life the character of his poor ploughman:--

A true worker and a good was he, Living in peace and perfect charity; God loved he best, and that with alle his herte, At alle times, were it gain or smart; And then his neighbour right as himselve. He wolde thresh, and thereto dyke and delve For Christe’s sake, for every poor wight Withouten hire, if it lay in his might. His tithes paid he full fair and well, Both of his proper work, and his cattel.

Have we not a right to say that such a character had somewhere and by some means received a thoroughly Christian education, even though he may never have learnt to read or write, and were wholly innocent of grammar?

I must not be tempted to enter on the endless theme of school sports and customs. But it is proper to mention that English schoolboys had their patron saints, of whom St. Gregory the Great was one. So we learn from the--shall I call it poetry?--of the Puritan, Barnaby Googe, who tells us that

St. Gregory lookes to little boyes to teach their a, b, c, And make them for to love their bookes, and schollers good to be.

On his feast the boys were called into school by certain songs; presents were distributed, to make them love their school, and one of their number was made to represent the bishop. But a yet more universally acknowledged patron was St. Nicholas of Myra, in honour of whom schoolboys of all ranks and conditions elected their boy-bishop, and played pranks in which jest and earnest were strangely blended together. The “childe bishope” preached a sermon, and afterwards received welcome offerings of pence. And this custom was one of those to which the people clung with the greatest tenacity, so that it continued to survive down to the close of Elizabeth’s reign.

The character of the studies followed at this time in the higher English academies, may perhaps be best gathered from an examination of the kind of learning displayed by the poet already so often quoted. If Chaucer is to be taken as in any way a fair representative of an educated Englishman of his time, it is plain that there was, in a certain sense, no want of learning in the English schools, though his critics acknowledged that however varied and extensive his reading may have been, it was loose and inaccurate. In this respect the English were far behind the Italians. I am not aware that Dante has ever been convicted of a blunder in his classical allusions, but in Chaucer such solecisms abound. “All through the poem,” says Craik, in his critical examination of the House of Fame, “there runs the spirit of the strange, barbarous, classical scholarship of the Middle Ages. The Æneid is not wholly unknown to the author, but it may be questioned if his actual acquaintance with the work extended much beyond the opening lines. An abridgment, indeed, of the story of Æneas follows, but that might have been got at second-hand. The same mixture of the Gothic and the classic occurs throughout that is found in all the poetry of the period, whether French, English, or Italian.” He proceeds to quote lines, in which “the harper Orion” is made to do duty for Arion; Mount Cithæron is supposed to figure as the individual “Dan Citherus;” the musician Marsyas, who was flayed alive, appears as “Mersia, that lost her skin,” and so on. However, it is agreed that Chaucer was, in a certain inaccurate way, familiar with the stories of the Latin classics, and possessed of whatever learning was to be acquired in the schools of London and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, in all of which, according to Leland, he had “gained great glory.”[289] At the universities, moreover he had learned men for his cronies; his two most familiar college friends were John Gower and Randolph Strode, both of whom, like himself, afterwards attained poetic fame. It is to them that he dedicated his Troilus and Creseide, addressing them as “the philosophical Strode” and “the moral Gower.” The name of Gower is too well known to require any comment, but all readers may not be equally familiar with that of Strode, so we will briefly state that he was a Scotchman by birth, a fellow of Merton, afterwards a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and the author of a poem in the vernacular, entitled “Phantasma,” which critics scruple not to place on a level with Chaucer’s verse. He finally entered the Dominican Order, and greatly distinguished himself in the controversy against Wickliffe, thereby earning the distinguished honour of some very coarse abuse from the pen of Bale.

Chaucer was educated for the law, and Speght records the doubtful tradition that he was at one time a member of the Inner Temple, at which period of his career he is said to have been fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. At any rate, his education was that of a “clerk,” and the office he eventually filled under the Crown was that of Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies of wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London--an office about as suitable to him as that of gauger was to Robert Burns. He seems to have felt its incongruity with a poet’s sensitiveness, and its necessary “reckonings” are often alluded to in his verses as sad trials of patience. He was perfectly at home in the French tongue, and his familiarity with Italian is stoutly maintained by some, and as vehemently denied by others. Lydgate says that he translated Dante, but no fragment of such a work is known to exist. He was an incessant reader, as he is never weary of letting us know. When he had done his “reckonings,” his manner was to go home to his house and sit at his books, “as dumb as any stone,” and read till he was half blind. Once, he tells us, he spent a whole day reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, from the Commentary of Macrobius. He had a great liking for old books, and expresses it sweetly enough--

For out of old fields as men sayth, Cometh all this new corn from yere to yere, And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all this new lore that men lere.

He seems to have had a decided taste for mathematical and scientific pursuits. The writings and example of Roger Bacon had given a great stimulus to these pursuits in England, and Hallam mentions the names of several Englishmen of the fourteenth century who distinguished themselves as mathematicians, such as Archbishop Bradwardine, the profound Doctor, as he was called. Among Chaucer’s prose works is a Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for the instruction of his youngest son, Lewis, who was studying at Oxford under a tutor. He dedicates the work to his boy in the following words:--

“Lytel Lewis, my sonne, I perceive well by certaine evidences thine abilitie to learne sciences touching numbers and proportions, and also wel consider I thy busie prayer in especiall to learne the Treatise of the Astrolabie ... therefore I have given thee a sufficient Astrolabie for an orizont, compounded after the latitude of Oxenford.” He has compiled it, he adds, because the charts of the Astrolabe that he has seen were “too hard for thy tender age of ten yeares to conceive,” and he has written it in English, “for Latine ne canst thou nat yet but smal, my lytel sonne.”

In one of his poems he gives an exposition of the theory of gravitation, and appeals to Aristotle and “Dan Plato” in confirmation of his philosophy. He also explains the propagation of sound, which he declares to be produced by a series of undulations of air like those that appear when you throw a stone into the water. He was familiar with the jargon of the astrologers and alchemists, and his commentators assure us that he displays a very considerable knowledge of the real science of chemistry as well as of its quackery, which last does not escape his lash. For quacks of all sorts indeed he has no indulgence, and spends his humour on the doctor of physic, whom he describes as “well grounded in astronomy,” able to help his patients by his knowledge of magic, no great reader of his Bible, which was not a very fashionable study with the followers of Averrhoes and Avicenna, but on excellent terms with his apothecary, and ready to help him to get rid of plenty of drugs and electuaries. It will be remembered that at the time when Chaucer wrote, the “Doctor of Physic,” though a graduate of the universities, and a very important person in his way, had no great claims to the character of a man of science. John Gaddesden, a fellow of Merton, and court physician to Edward, wrote a book called the “Rosa Anglica,” on his great and successful method of treating patients for the smallpox, which consisted in hanging their rooms and enveloping their persons in scarlet cloth! He informs us that, with the blessing of God, he purposes writing another book on Chiromancy, or fortune-telling by the hand, condescends to give directions to the court ladies for preparing their perfumes, washes, and hair-dyes, and interlards his quack recipes with scraps of original verse.

In his treatment of religious subjects Chaucer represents the tone of feeling which prevailed among a very large class of Englishmen in his day. He was a political partisan of John of Gaunt, and therefore gave the Lollards a certain kind of support. To a man of free life and coarse humour it was both tempting and easy to exercise his wit on fat monks and lazy friars, and to grumble like a true Englishman at their demands on his purse. Doubtless there were plenty of unworthy representatives of both professions to stand as the originals of his poetical caricatures, and broadly enough did he paint their unseemly features. But that was all; and his biographer, Godwin, admits that, so far from sharing any of the heretical opinions of the Lollards, his poems unmistakably prove his adherence to the Catholic dogmas, especially those which they most malignantly attacked, namely, the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist; while his devotion to the Blessed Virgin is expressed in a thousand passages, such as the following:--

Lady, when men pray to the, Thou goest before of thy benignitie, And getest us the light of thi prayere To giden us to thi Sonne so dere.

Occleve, his disciple, himself no mean poet, bears testimony to the fact that his lamented master was a devout client of the Queen of Heaven:--

As thou wel knowest, O blessed Virgyne, With lovynge hert and high devocion, In thyne honour he wroot many a lyne, For he thi servant was, mayden Marie, And let his love floure and fructifie.

Contemporary with Chaucer, the father of our poetry, was Sir John Mandeville, who commonly enjoys the credit of being the father of English prose, and whose travels let into the popular mind a glimmering light as to the whereabouts of Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, Chaldea, and Ethiopia, all which he visited, besides some Eastern lands that he calls by the name of “Amazoyn,” “Ind the Less and the More,” and “many isles that be abouten Ind.” In his “Itinerary” he describes his visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, apologising for possible inaccuracies by reminding the indulgent reader that “thynges passed out of long time from a man’s mynd turnen soon into forgetting; because that the mynd of man ne may not be comprehended ne withholden for the freelty of mankind.” The “Itinerary” was written in Latin, and translated by the author first into French, and from thence into English, and enjoyed great popularity. And the publication of these travels, together with those of Marco Polo, stimulated an interest in the study of geography, so that we begin to find more frequent mention in the catalogues of monastic libraries of maps and charts. The whole science of map-drawing, it may be observed, had developed in the cloister; the German monks showing themselves indefatigable in improving this branch of science. About the year 1370 Prior Nicholas Hereford of Evesham Abbey, after collecting a fine assortment of books, caused a great map of the world to be executed, at the cost of six marks, for the use of his convent. And a certain Camaldolese monk, named Fra Mauro, made use of the information derived from the writings of Marco Polo, and produced a grand Mappamondo, wherein he depicts the sea rolling round the southern extremity of Africa. On the margin of his map appear some learned notes, referring the phenomena of the tides to the moon’s attraction--a piece of natural philosophy, however, which, as we have seen, was not unknown to Bede.

It has been already said that during the reign of Edward III. the English universities had to sustain the twofold attack of Lollardism and the Black Death, by the united effects of which they were reduced to so low a condition, as at one time to have ceased to be regarded as seats of learning. Nine tenths of the English clergy are said to have been swept away by the terrible plague, together with the population of entire cities, and the necessity of the case obliged the bishops to fill the vacant benefices with men of inferior education, a practice which for the moment told severely on the state of the schools. But the effects of the pestilence were less fatally disastrous than those caused by the heresy of Wickliffe. When in 1361, that celebrated man, then master of Baliol College, Oxford, first made himself notorious by his attacks on the mendicant orders, he seems to have done little more than repeat the old threadbare calumnies of William de St. Amour and Richard Fitz Ralph. His views were of course exceedingly relished by the secular doctors, and his reputed talents induced the primate, Simon Islip, to offer him the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, then newly founded, partly for secular and partly for monastic students. In order to make room for him, the former warden, Woodhal, a Canterbury monk, had to retire, and three other monastic students who held scholarships in the college were at the same time removed. Langham, the successor of Islip, pronounced these proceedings irregular, and restored Woodhal to his post. The matter was referred to the decision of Pope Urban V., who decided in favour of Woodhal, and from that day Wickliffe became the deadly enemy of the papal power. The university, or rather the secular regents of the university, immediately took part with him against the Pope and the Friars, and in 1372, to mark their adherence to his cause, elected him Professor of Divinity. He succeeded, moreover, in obtaining the powerful support of John of Gaunt, and on occasion of a congress, held at Bruges, to settle various points in dispute between the English Government and the Holy See, the name of John Wickliffe appears in the list of Royal Commissioners. All this time there had been no whisper of heresy, nor was it until after his return to England, when he was promoted to a prebend in the collegiate church of Westbury, and a little later was presented by John of Gaunt to the rectory of Lutterworth, that he began to disseminate his pernicious doctrines. Besides his peculiar views regarding the possession of property, he had started views on the subject of predestination, analogous to those afterwards embraced by Calvin, and attacked the supremacy of the Pope, and the doctrines of penance, indulgences, the worship of the saints and of holy images, and prayer for the dead. He and his followers propagated their opinions by a sort of popular preaching suited to the tastes of the common people, and accompanied by a certain low buffoonery, in all ages specially attractive to rude audiences of the Anglo-Saxon race. The coarse invectives levelled against the clergy found eager reception among such hearers; for there is perhaps to most men an irresistible fascination in doctrines which aim at bringing down any dominant class of society to a lower level. The English commons were at this period seething in a chronic state of insurrection, and the Lollard denunciations of the priests and land-holders were extremely to the taste of the Socialists of the fourteenth century. It is therefore quite easy to understand how it was that Hob Miller and Colin Lout should have thought it an excellent joke to ridicule and despise their betters; but that Wickliffe should have found warm supporters in the university of Oxford is a fact that may well surprise and startle us. But Lollardism had a double aspect, its theological heresies were at first as little relished at Oxford as at Rome, but its enmity to the religious orders happened to chime in with the views of the secular faction, and therefore they gave it their support. An appeal had already been made, not to Rome, but to Parliament, for a law to prohibit any member of the university joining a religious order before his eighteenth year, and the Oxonian divines were not ashamed to accept, together with the desired statute, a prohibition to carry the matter to Rome. They next established the rule that no religious, whether monk or friar, should be admitted to graduate in arts, while at the same time, by the university statutes, no one could fill a theological professorship without so graduating. The monks appealed to the Holy See, and obtained a dispensation from this unjust law, and thus increased the ill-will of their thwarted and malicious adversaries. The struggle was at its height when Wickliffe raised his cry against the mendicant orders, whom he declared to be Antichrist, and proctors of Satan; and he at once found plenty of grave divines who were willing to regard him as a useful ally, and forgive both his heresies and his nonsense for the support he furnished to their side of the quarrel. Hence, in 1377, when Gregory XI. sent Bulls to the Archbishop of Canterbury the Bishop of London, and the university of Oxford, calling on them to take active measures for the condemnation of the heresiarch, we are assured by Walsingham that the heads of the university deliberated whether or no they should receive the Bull, nor does it appear certain that it ever was received. At last, however, in 1381, Wickliffe startled even his Oxford allies by his attack on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and a decree was drawn up, and signed by William de Burton, the chancellor, and twelve of the chief divines, condemning his errors, and forbidding them to be promulgated in the university. Hereupon Wickliffe scrupled not to appeal to the Crown and Parliament, but the English people were not yet quite prepared for such a step, and the act caused general scandal. Even John of Gaunt, who had hitherto, from political motives, given him his countenance, now withdrew his protection, and declared his teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar to be a “doctrine of devils.”

Oxford, however, had not yet entirely given up his cause. In 1382, when Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, set on foot vigorous measures for the eradication of the new heresies, he met with stout resistance from Rigge, who had succeeded De Burton in the office of chancellor of the university, and who flatly refused to silence a Lollard professor. Courtenay at last obtained a royal mandate, in virtue of which Wickliffe and his most obstinate adherents were expelled the university, a good number of professors purchasing immunity, however by a ready recantation of their errors, for few evinced any desire of becoming martyrs in the cause.

The steps taken by Courtenay vindicated the authority of the Church but they were far from being sufficient to purge the university from the heretical leaven, or remedy the evils caused by these internal troubles. So far is Ayliffe’s statement that the Wickliffites restored sound learning at Oxford, from possessing a shadow of truth, that the period when this heresy was rampant among her doctors was precisely that when her schools had confessedly sunk to their very lowest state of decay. The authorities were themselves perfectly aware of the fact, and represented it as one of the unhappy effects produced by papal provisions. But the statutes of Provisors, passed in the reign of Edward III., by which all such provisions were forbidden under severe penalties, instead of applying a remedy to this evil, only hastened the decline of learning. It was found that the Crown was far less disposed to promote men of learning than the Popes had been; and, to quote the words of Lingard, “experience showed that the statutes in question operated to the depression of learning and the deterioration of the universities.” Accordingly in the year 1399 petitions were presented to Convocation from Oxford and Cambridge, setting forth that while the Popes were permitted to bestow benefices by provision, the preference had always been given to men of talent and industry, and that the effect of such preference had been to quicken the application and increase the number of the students; but that since the passing of the Act against Provisors, their members had been neglected by the patrons of livings, the students had disappeared, and the schools were nearly abandoned.[290] Sixteen years later the House of Commons awoke to a sense of the suicidal character of their own policy, and petitioned King Henry V. that, to save the universities from destruction, he would suffer the statutes against Provisors to be repealed. The King referred the matter to the bishops, who, however, had no wish at all to interfere with the existing legislation, and contented themselves with passing a law in convocation obliging every patron of a benefice for the next ten years to present a graduate of one of the universities.

These facts may serve as sufficient reply to the vaunted “restoration of learning” achieved by the Lollards. The effect of their influence in the universities, coupled with that of an anti-Roman course of legislation, had been to bring those institutions to the very verge of ruin, and that in spite of the extraordinary efforts which were being made by private munificence to enlarge and perfect the collegiate system of education. Indeed, though Wickliffe himself was a man of undoubted ability, the attempt to convert him into a restorer of humane letters, savours of the absurd.[291] His learning was precisely the same which, when found in the possession of friars and other scholastics, earns for them such bitter taunts and gibes as “locusts,” who devoured all the green things in the land, and darkened it with bad Latin and captious logic. Wickliffe’s Latin was not better than that of his adversaries, and his logic was of that true Oxonian temper which Wood qualifies as “frivolous sophistry whereby scholars could at any time be for or against anything proposed.” The well-known ballad in which an Oxford student puzzles his simple-minded parent by proving a pigeon and an eel pie to be convertible terms, seems hardly a caricature when we read the shifts, or, as Wood terms them, the “screws” by which the Lollard chief sought to prove that he meant the precise contrary of what he had been convicted of saying. “He so qualified his doctrines with conditions,” says Lingard, “and explained them away by distinctions, as to give an appearance of innocence to tenets the most mischievous. On the subject of the Holy Eucharist he intrenched himself behind unintelligible distinctions, the meaning of which it would have puzzled the most acute logician to detect.”[292] And Rohrbacher observes that instead of appealing to the Scriptures explained by the Fathers, he took refuge in “arguments and dialectic subtleties, wrapped up in an obscure and barbarous phraseology;” in other words, he exhibited precisely the same description of learning, the display of which has earned so many hard epithets for the academic “locusts.”

Wickliffe’s literary fame rests chiefly on his translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, often incorrectly spoken of as the earliest English version. It is not clear that he himself ever translated more than the Gospels, for of the various manuscripts which bear his name, some are now admitted to have been the production of later Lollard writers. His English is declared by Mr. Craik to be “coarse and slovenly,” and far more harsh and obscure than that of Mandeville or Chaucer. His version was made the vehicle for conveying his peculiar tenets, by means of corruptions of the Sacred Text, and was accompanied by certain Prologues or Glosses, explaining it in an heretical sense. On this account it was enacted by Archbishop Arundel, in a Provincial Synod held in 1408, that “no one should hereafter translate any text of Holy Scripture into English by way of a book, and that no such book, composed lately, in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death, shall be read.” This decree has been erroneously interpreted as a prohibition to the laity to read the Scriptures. But its real meaning is very clearly explained by the Canonist Lyndwood,[293] a contemporary of Arundel’s, as being, first, a prohibition to any private person to translate the Scriptures into English without authority; and secondly, a prohibition to use or read any such unauthorised and incorrect versions. And he expressly adds that from the terms “newly composed, in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death,” it is evident that the Lollard versions only are prohibited, but that every one is still at liberty to read those formerly translated from the text of Scripture into English or any other modern idiom. Lyndwood died in 1446, and was living when the decree in question was first published. His testimony as to its meaning as then understood and interpreted, as well as to the fact that other earlier versions did exist at that time, cannot therefore be called in question. Moreover, Fox the Protestant martyrologist, tells us, on the authority of Polydore Vergil, that this same Archbishop Arundel, who is so often accused of prohibiting the reading of the Scriptures, preached the funeral sermon of Queen Anne of Bohemia, and mentioned among other things in her praise that she was a diligent reader of the Four Gospels written in Bohemian, English, and Latin, with divers expositions, which book she had sent to him to be viewed and examined.

If this account be correct, it equally vindicates Arundel from the charge of prohibiting the Scriptures, and Queen Anne from that of Lollardism on the ground of reading them, for it will be observed the copy she used had been first submitted to the archbishop’s approval, and his formal permission had been obtained. We have also another interesting testimony to the existence of these earlier versions, and an explanation of the decree against those of the Lollards, in the words of Sir Thomas More, who, in his Dialogue, notices the prohibitory Constitution of Arundel in the following terms:--

“Ye shall understand that the great arch-heretic, Wickliffe (whereas the Holy Bible was long before his time by virtuous and well-learned men translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly people, with devotion and soberness, well and reverently read) took upon him, of a malicious purpose, to translate it anew. In which translation he purposely corrupted the Holy Text, maliciously planting therein such words as might in the reader’s ears serve to the proof of such heresies as he went about to sow; which he not only set forth in his own translation of the Bible, but also in certain prologues or glosses, which he made hereupon. So that after it was perceived what harm the people took by the translations, prologues, and glosses of Wickliffe’s, and also of some others who after him helped to set forth his sect, then, for that cause, it was at a council holden at Oxford provided, upon great pain, that no man should henceforth translate the Scriptures into the English tongue upon his own authority by way of book or treatise, nor no man should read such books as were newly made in the time of Wickliffe, or since, or that should be made any time after, till the same translation were by the Diocesan or Provincial Council approved. But that it neither forbade the translations to be read that were already well done of old before Wickliffe’s time, nor condemned his because it was new, but because it was naught, nor prohibited new to be made, but only provided that they shall not be read if they be made amiss, till by good examination they be amended; except they be such translations as those of Wickliffe and Tindal, which the malicious mind of the translator hath so handled that it were lost labour to go about to mend them.”

He goes on to say that he has seen, and, if necessary, could show, copies of English Bibles, “fair and old,” approved by the Diocesans, which have been left with lay men and women, and used by Catholic folk with soberness and devotion, and that the clergy never kept any Bibles from the laity save those that were “naught,” and not so approved; that is, those in which heretical corruptions of the text had been introduced, or to which were attached the pernicious Lollard glosses. And he explains how it was that no printer had yet ventured to print an English Bible, a great and expensive undertaking, which might, after all, have been unsaleable, through the question which might have been raised whether it were printed from a version made before or since the days of Wickliffe. The whole passage is sufficiently explicit, both as to the fact of approved English versions of the Scriptures existing before the time of Wickliffe, and also as to the received interpretation of Arundel’s decree. We have the very explicit testimony of Cranmer to the same effect. “It is not much above a hundred years,” he writes, “since Scripture hath not been accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue within this realm; many hundred years before that it was translated and read in the Saxon tongue, and when that language waxed old and out of common usage, because folks should not lack the fruit of reading it, it was translated again into the newer language.”[294] It is, however, by no means easy in all cases to distinguish these early versions from their later imitations. All the translations of the Scriptures preserved in manuscript in the Oxford libraries have been commonly assigned to Wickliffe, although Dr. Thomas James is of opinion that a close examination of some of them would show them to be of much more ancient date. He is also disposed to think that one of the prologues ordinarily assigned to one of Wickliffe’s disciples belongs to an earlier translation. Lewis, in his “History of the English Translations of the Bible,” supposes this prologue to have been written in 1396 by John Purvey, one of Wickliffe’s most learned followers; but its allusions to the care taken to consult St. Jerome, and the gloss of Nicholas de Lyra, do not seem to harmonise very well with this theory. Dr. James considers that the copies preserved in the Bodleian Library, and in Christ Church Library, are of ancient Catholic versions, that in Queen’s College Library alone being properly assigned to Wickliffe. Lewis opposes this view, yet he admits that the Bodleian and Queen’s College versions are different from that of Christ Church. Warton claims one of these for John of Trevisa, and Weever assigns one to the Venerable Richard of Hampole, an Austin hermit, who lived about the year 1349, near the Monastery of Hampole in Yorkshire, and, according to Camden, wrote many books full of “heavenly unction,” and whose translation of the Psalter is still preserved. Whatever may be the real history of these three versions (and it is evident that critics are by no means unanimous as to their authorship), several fragments exist of different books of Scripture which are admitted to be of ancient date. In the library of Bennet College, Cambridge, a translation is preserved of two of the Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles, with a gloss, written in the English spoken after the Conquest. In Sydney Sussex College are portions of the Old Testament commented on in like manner. A translation of the Psalter, with a gloss, is in the Harleian Library, besides the Psalter of Richard of Hampole, mentioned above, to which is prefixed a prologue, in which the author explains that he has sought no strange English, but only that which was commonest and easiest, and has been careful to consult the holy doctors. There are also, according to Lewis, other translations extant of the Psalter, the New Testament, and the Church Lessons and Hymns, all made before the time of Wickliffe. It must be borne in mind that the manuscripts preserved in our libraries are mere fragments accidentally saved from destruction, and can scarcely be taken as evidence of what existed in England before the Reformation. The pious visitors of Edward VI., in their zeal to purify the university of Popish service books, destroyed every manuscript they could lay hands on, which exhibited illuminations or other ornaments, without the slightest reference to its contents. Whole libraries were then sold for waste paper, and bought by bakers to feed their ovens, or for other base purposes. But among the scanty relics that escaped the hands of these worse than Vandals, stray leaves are to be found of sermons, treatises, and mutilated hymns, many of which are in the vernacular English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One of these interesting fragments has been printed by Messrs Wright and Halliwell in the Reliquiæ Antiquæ, and is assigned by them to the fourteenth century. The preacher appears to have been familiar with some English version of the Canticle of Canticles, and introduces a passage which may be quoted as a beautiful specimen of our ancient English idiom:--“Behold my derlyng speketh to me; arys, come nerre my beautiful, now wynter is passid; that is, the coulde wynd of worldly covertise that mad me hard y-froze as yse: the floures scheweth them on erth, the voys of the tortel is herd in our herber; that is, the soule that the kyng of heven has y-lad to his vyne celler, syngeth chast songes of mornyng for hir sinnes and for deth of Christ hir mate: she will no more sette on grene bows lovynge worldlye things, bote fedeth hir with love of Christ, the clene white corne, and fleeth up to the holes of His five woundes, lookyng with sympel eyne into the cler waters of holie writ.”

From what has been said, it may be gathered that before the time of Wickliffe, the Scriptures were in no sense shut up from the laity; that considerable portions of them were rendered into English, and are known to have been actually in the possession of lay persons, and that it was not until the corrupt versions and glosses of the Lollards were made instruments of disseminating pernicious errors, that any decrees were made on the subject. Even then the restrictions were not prohibitions: the laity were still allowed to read approved Catholic versions: though it is very probable, that at a time when so large a portion of the population was infected with Lollardism, and when there was a disposition to make the Sacred Text, interpreted by each man’s whim, the rule of each man’s belief, the private reading of the English Scriptures by lay persons was not greatly encouraged. In fact, prohibitions or restrictions of this sort were never promulgated by the ecclesiastical authorities, until rendered necessary by the perverse misuse of the Sacred Volume by heretics. Thus, in France no such restrictions existed until 1229 when the extravagant doctrines which the Albigenses pretended to adduce from Scripture, obliged the Council of Toulouse to forbid the translation of the Sacred Books, the use of which had, up to that time, been freely permitted. In no case was the Latin Bible withdrawn from the laity,[295] and it must be remembered that in those days the majority of those who could read at all, could read Latin. Lewis, indeed, would have us believe that before Wickliffe’s time, even the Latin Bible was not allowed in common use; and gravely assures us, that the monks and friars collected copies and laid them up in their libraries, not (as one might suppose) for the obvious purpose of reading them, but “to imprison them from the curates and secular priests, and so prevent them from preaching the Word of God to the people.” Nonsense of this sort is scarcely worth refuting, though it finds a place in very grave writers, and by certain readers is often enough believed. Bibles were, of course, comparatively rare and expensive books, and not within reach of every poor curate’s purse. But so far from any conspiracy existing to make them rarer, it was a common devotion among those who possessed such a treasure, to bequeath it by will to some public church, there to be set up and chained, ad usum communem. This practice is often supposed to have originated with the Reformers, and a modern artist has depicted, with great skill, the grey-haired peasant approaching the chained Bible set forth by order of his sacred majesty king Edward VI., and turning over its pages with pious awe. It was, however, a good thought stolen from the ancients, as there is abundant evidence to show. Thus, in 1378 a Bible and Concordance were left by will by Thomas Farnylaw, to be set up and chained in the north aisle of St. Nicholas’ Church, Newcastle; and in 1385, a Bible and Concordance were to be found chained in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.

These Bibles were, of course, copies of the Latin Vulgate, for it is not pretended that any effort was made to place a version of the Scriptures, in the vulgar tongue, at the command of the unlettered laity. The Catholic system of education did not aim at enabling every poor man to read his Bible, but rather at making him know his faith. Nevertheless, so true is it that a strong Scriptural element has always predominated in the teaching of the Church, that the first attempts to provide the poor with cheap literature of any sort were called Biblia Pauperum, or the Bibles of the poor. They were rude engravings of Scriptural subjects, or stories of the saints, taken off carved wooden blocks, and accompanied with texts of Scripture, or pious verses. These were known as block-books, and were reproduced at a much cheaper rate than books written out by hand. Of course they were not Bibles, but they show that even in the age most tainted by the Lollard heresy, there was a disposition on the part of Catholic teachers to supply the people with instruction into which a certain Biblical element had been infused. The block-books were likewise used to strike off small school manuals of grammar, and a book of this sort was technically called a “Donatus.” If the grammars were welcome boons to schoolboys, the Bibles of the poor were not less convenient for the use of preachers, who could not carry so cumbrous a volume as a whole Bible into the pulpit, and were often glad to help their memory by a selection of suitable texts. Specimens of these block-books are preserved as curiosities by modern bibliopolists, and the contrivance seems to have been the immediate forerunner of the more important invention of printing. But in mentioning them we are somewhat departing from the order of time, as they can hardly be assigned an earlier date than the beginning of the fifteenth century.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE RED AND WHITE ROSES.

A.D. 1386 TO 1494.

The close of the fourteenth century witnessed the establishment in England of two new schools, the importance of which caused them to be regarded as models for all subsequent foundations of a similar kind in this country. These were William of Wykeham’s twin colleges at Oxford and Winchester the first of which, opened in 1386, may be said to have perfected the collegiate system of our universities, while the second, which was not completed till seven years later, laid the foundation of another system, more peculiarly national--that of our English public schools. The object of these two institutions was to furnish a complete course of free education to two hundred scholars, who were to be led from the lowest class of grammatical learning, to the highest degrees of the various faculties. And at the same time that their intellectual training was thus amply provided for, they were subjected to a strict rule of discipline, and the religious element of education was given a much larger development than it had received in any collegiate foundations which had yet appeared. Chapels had, indeed, in some cases been attached to colleges before the time of Wykeham, though they do not seem to have been regarded as any essential portion of such institutions; but now the choral office and the magnificent celebration of ecclesiastical rites were provided for with no less scrupulous care than the advancement of studies; and thus the founder set his seal to one great principle of the earlier monastic education, namely, that habits of devotion, and those too of a certain liturgical character, ought to be infused into the training which is given to the children of Holy Church. And in many ways these foundations reflected the spirit of more ancient times, in what regarded discipline. When the universities began to be frequented in place of those monastic and cathedral schools, which up to the twelth century had been the chief academies resorted to by students, clerical or lay, no provision at all had been made for the government of the scholars; a fact which sufficiently explains the scandals and disorders which fill up the early history of Paris and Oxford. Nor need the want of such provision excite any surprise, if we bear in mind that the first universities were not institutions, founded at any particular period according to some sagacious scheme; but that they sprang up of themselves out of small beginnings, and developed, like the grain of mustard seed, into a mighty tree. Scholars and professors came first, and it was not till they had insensibly grown into a population, and had committed the excesses of which most lawless populations would be guilty, that authority stepped in with statutes and decrees, and endeavoured to give shape and method to the unwieldy mass. The collegiate system, as we have seen, semi-monastic in its character, and undoubtedly formed in partial imitation of the religious houses of study, was called into being in order to struggle with the monster evils which had arisen out of the university system; it was an attempt to return, in some measure, to the ancient paths, and to reassert the principle that intellectual education, when separated from moral and religious training, is no education at all. Wykeham adopted this principle in all its fulness, and herein lay the special value of his work. But with an admirable discretion he contrived so to adapt it to the wants, the feelings, and the habits of his age, that it assumed the appearance, not of a retrogression but of an advance: nay more, he managed so thoroughly to root his system in the English mind that it stood the brunt of many revolutions, and even in our own day obtains a traditionary kind of honour, encrusted as our old foundations have become with the overgrowth of three Protestant centuries.

The Wykehamist colleges were not only the most splendid academies of learning founded at this time, but they opened the way to other foundations of a similar description; and a kind of fashion set in for founding schools and colleges, which, during the reigns of our Lancastrian kings, multiplied over the land. The alarm excited by the spread of Lollardism had something to do with this movement, and it is remarkable that one Oxford college, that of Lincoln, was founded by a prelate, Richard Fleming, who at an earlier period had taken part with Wickliffe, but who, thoroughly startled out of his partisanship, hastened to make amends for his fault by raising what he hoped would become a nursery of learned divines, who should confute the errors of the wily heresiarch. That Fleming was thoroughly in earnest in his change of views was manifested at the Council of Constance, when we find him distinguishing himself by a very able opposition to the Hussites.[296] His kinsman, Robert Fleming, travelled into Italy, and there studied in the school of the young Guarini. He was one of the earliest English scholars who took part in the revival of classical learning, and during his foreign travels collected great store of books for Lincoln College, some of which he transcribed and illuminated with his own hand, being in fact a very skilful limner. He was the author of a Greek and Latin dictionary, as well as of a Latin poem entitled, “Lucubrationes Tiburtinæ.” In 1438, Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had already shown himself a patron of learning by the erection of a free school at Higham Ferrars, and of St. Bernard’s College at Oxford for the use of the Cistercian students, laid the foundation of his noble college of All Souls, most liberally endowed, and furnished with books, chapel furniture, and every requisite for the use of the students. And in 1448 William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, obtained the royal grant empowering him to erect his college of Magdalene, in which the collegiate system was more perfectly carried out than in any previous or subsequent foundation.

Besides these Oxford colleges, those of Eton, and King’s at Cambridge, owed their foundation to the zeal of Henry VI., being in avowed imitation of the plan, already adopted by Wykeham, of uniting a public school to a house of higher studies at the university, thus providing an entire course of instruction for elder and younger scholars.

Having elsewhere[297] given a more particular account than space will here admit of the foundations of Wykeham, Waynflete, and Henry VI., so important in the history of English education, it will not be necessary to dwell on them more at length in this place; but it should be remembered that these, if the most splendid, were very far from being the only educational institutions of the period. Our ancient school-system had ramifications which extended into every grade of society and we are, generally speaking, but little familiar with the method by which that system was worked, because we are equally unaccustomed to study the grand system of our ancient Catholic charities. A class of magnificent foundations formerly existed in England, of which there only remain such scanty ruins as escaped the rapacity of Henry VIII. and the Protector, Somerset, but the multitude and real nature of which is hardly appreciated. I refer, of course, to the hospitals and collegiate establishments, which administered a vast revenue, voluntarily made over by private charity, for the discharge of all the works of mercy.

Some amongst my readers may be able to look back to early days, whose first associations are blended with the thought of a venerable pile, which seemed altogether out of proportion in size and magnificence to the purposes of a simple parish church. On Sunday afternoons when the psalm has been unusually long, or the preacher unusually drowsy, their childish fancies have, it may be, been busy, among the bosses of the fretted roof, speculating as to the possible meaning of its wondrous embellishments, and perplexed to account for the fact that they should be summoned week after week to worship in what had the outward grandeur of a cathedral, whereas the town or village clustered round the minster walls seemed wholly undeserving of such a dignity. Attached to the church there is probably a school, as at Ottery, or Southwell, or Crediton, or Doncaster, or Shrewsbury; and if tourists come that way to inspect the encaustic pavement, or to take rubbings of the fine old brasses, and wonder to find so huge a building in so insignificant a locality, they are content to receive the information given them by their guide book, that “the church was once collegiate.” How vast a meaning may be enclosed in a simple phrase! “The church was once collegiate!” Yes: it was attached to one of those creations of Catholic piety which did the work of almshouse, schoolhouse, workhouse, hospital, and parish church, or rather, which did a great deal more than any or all of those put together, and did it with a magnificent profuseness of liberality, which strikes one dumb with astonishment and admiration. Thus, the great Lancastrian College at Leicester, known as the Newark, or College of St. Mary’s the Greater, the remains of which still cover many acres of ground, was originally founded for a dean, twelve secular canons, twelve vicars, three clerks, six choristers, fifty poor men, as many poor women, ten nurses, and other officers and attendants, all plentifully provided for. It had, according to Leland, an exceedingly fair “college church, large and fair cloisters, some pretty houses for the prebendaries in the college area, and stately walls and gates,” much of all which is still standing. That of St. Cross at Winchester was founded by Henry de Blois, Bishop of Winchester, for the maintenance of thirteen poor men, and the daily feeding of a hundred others, who were to enjoy their loaf of good wheaten bread, weighing three pounds, their three quarts of good small beer, and two messes either of fish or flesh, as the day should require, in the Hundred-mennes-hall; and as the allowance was more than any ordinary capacity could dispose of at table, the statutes judiciously permitted them to carry home what they could not eat. Cardinal Beaufort enlarged this noble foundation by providing for the maintenance of thirty-five additional brethren, and appointing three religious sisters to attend the sick, and bestowed on it the beautiful title of the “Almshouse of Noble Poverty.” Here, too, we find a grand collegiate church, with a warden, four chaplains, thirteen clerks, and seven choristers, for whose instruction provision was made by keeping up a school. Sometimes the school appears as the chief object of the foundation, as in the College of Ottery St. Mary’s in Devonshire, which Bishop Grandison erected in 1337, for a warden, eight prebendaries, ten vicars, a master of music, a grammar-master, two parish priests, eight secondaries, eight choristers, and two clerks. Sometimes the corporal and spiritual works of mercy were blended together, as at the hospital of St. Leonard’s at York, which maintained a master, thirteen poor brethren, four secular priests, eight sisters, thirty choristers, two schoolmasters, two hundred and six bedesmen, and six servitors. The whole was governed by semi-monastic statutes under the rule of St. Austin. Most of the smaller hospitals of York had likewise schools attached to them.

Sometimes, again, as at Beverley and Ripon, the magnificent collegiate establishments seem principally designed for the celebration of the divine offices with a splendour which could not be carried out in parochial churches; and the schools and other charities attached to these foundations were not the primary idea. The same seems to have been the case in the great college of Stoke-by-Clare, the statutes of which are so very precise and rigorous as to the quality of the plain chant to be sung in choir; but here, too, there was a school in which boys were to be taught “grammar, singing, and good manners.” The endowments are not always on so sumptuous a scale as in these last-named colleges; yet often in very remote villages and rural parishes we find a modest hospital designed for the support of a few bedesmen of honest life, and a grammar-school, wherein, as in St. Gabriel’s Hospital at Brough, in Westmoreland, the chaplain was required to teach grammar and singing to the children of the place. Thus, too, at Ewelme, in Oxfordshire, De la Pole and his duchess had founded an almshouse, called God’s House, wherein a priest was appointed as schoolmaster to teach their grammar to the children of the Ewelme tenantry; and a very similar foundation existed at Bentley, in Derbyshire, where the family of Mountjoy erected a small college for seven old servants of the lordship, who were to have pasture for seven cows, wood from the lord’s manor, and a new gown and hood every third year, on condition of their saying our Lady’s Psalter twice a day for the founder in the chapel of the hospital. This last item in the constitutions sealed its fate at the time of the Reformation, and it was abolished, as being mixed up with “superstitious observances.” In foundations of this sort, which were exceedingly numerous, the great proprietors educated the children of their own tenantry at the same time that they provided for their superannuated servants.

There is much in the character of these ancient institutions that is suggestive and instructive to ourselves. What a vast machinery, what an enormous disbursement for, comparatively speaking, small results! Surely thirteen poor brethren could be fed and clothed without its being necessary for Dame Isabel Penbridge to found that great college of Tonge, in Shropshire, with its establishment of clerks, and chaplains, and choristers, and to supply them with that body of solemn statutes which regulates their community life and choral office with the exactness of a religious rule! Turn again to St. Giles’ Hospital at Norwich, and reckon what endowments it must have taken[298] to support a master, deacon, and subdeacon, eight chaplains, wearing the habit of St. Austin’s canons, four lay brothers, and seven choristers, who were to be scholars likewise; together with four religious sisters, in order to take care of eight infirm folk and a few poor superannuated priests, and daily to entertain thirteen non-resident poor at the common table. A liberal foundation, it may be said, for a few insignificant paupers; but it is clear the founder had in his mind the celebration of High Mass and the choral office; and that providing for the celebration of holy rites with becoming solemnity was reckoned then a good work as pleasing to God as the feeding of the poor.

Again, in what a beautiful light were the poor themselves regarded. They were not “paupers,” but “brethren.” They were not kept alive with water gruel, but fed with meat and ale, and good “mostrell.”[299] They were not assigned a narrow bench in a distant corner of those grand collegiate churches, but often enough had stalls like so many canons. Such stalls are still to be seen, or at least were so a few years since, in St. Mary’s Hospital, Chichester, and, I am glad to say, were still occupied by their lawful owners--the thirteen poor brethren. The church was their church; its numerous staff of clerks and choristers were assembled there to sing the divine office for them; they were honoured, not despised; and in their turn they felt an honest pride in wearing that reverend garb--the black gown or overcoat, with its red, white, or silver cross--such as may still be seen in the hospitals of Winchester or Worcester.

And, as to the schools attached to such foundations, what must have been the effect produced on the mind of the scholars whose earliest and most abiding lesson was, that nothing was too great or too good to give to God or the poor! For God, the stately minister, the magnificent vestments, and the solemn chant, which made up the daily business of a whole college of priests, clerks, and choristers.

And for the poor, a home in their old age, the care of religious women in time of sickness, generous maintenance, kindness, honour, and respect. What a prodigious amount of moral and religious education was conveyed in schools for the young, annexed to such hospitals and colleges, wherein the two duties of prayer and almsdeeds made up a portion of the daily life, and in which the instincts of reverence must have become a sort of second nature!

In the fifteenth century we find these foundations rapidly multiplying, and their scholastic character assuming a larger development. To the masters of grammar and singing is now frequently added a third for writing; the grammar-master is not unfrequently provided with an usher, which seems to argue that the scholars were becoming more numerous, and the salary of the masters is fixed higher than that of the other priests. In the College of Bradgate in Kent no chaplain was to be admitted who had not three qualifications--bene legere, bene construere, et bene cantare. The great English prelates had a special love for founding colleges of this description in the places of their birth. Thus Thomas Scott, Archbishop of York, founded the college and school of Rotherham; and Kempe, Archbishop of York, and cardinal, who was a poor husbandman’s son, converted the parish church of Wye, his native place, into a college for the education of youth, and for perpetual prayer to be made therein “for the sowles of them that set hym to schole.” And Chichele of Canterbury, as has been already said, founded the college of Higham Ferrars in Northamptonshire. This formerly occupied a grand quadrangle with two great wings. The schoolhouse, in the florid style of Gothic architecture, is, I believe, still standing; but the remainder of the stately and beautiful buildings were a few years since laid waste by the steward of a noble earl, and the site occupied by barns and hunting stables. Choral schools appear moreover to have been attached to the private chapels of great households. Thus there was a “Maister of the childer” among the officers of the Earl of Northumberland’s chapel, and the eight children belonging to King Edward IV.’s chapel had likewise their “Maister” who was to draw them not only to the study of prictsong, but also to that of their facet or grammar, “and suche other vertuous things.” Moreover his household accounts contain the pay and livery of the “Scholmaster’s teaching, given in the house.” Besides this choral school the same king maintained a sort of Palatine Academy at his court, formed of six or more young gentlemen, or henxmen, as they are called, whose master was to teach them “to read clenely and surely, to learn them their harness;” and moreover to teach them “sundry languages, and other vertuous learnings, such as to harp, to pipe, to sing and to dance, each to be trained to that kind of vertue that he is most apt to learn, with remembrance dayly of Goddes Service.”

Another proof of the increasing interest which was being felt in the work of education, is the occasional transformation of charitable, into educational, institutions. Reading school was originally one of those numerous hospitals which the lordly abbots had established in their town. It was designed for certain poor women serving God day and night, who prayed for the king’s estate and the soul of the founder, the good abbot, Hugh. They had a fair chapel for divine service, bread, meat, and drink from the abbey, and an annual sum of money and outfit of clothing. The sisters were widows of respectable persons in the town who had fallen into poverty; they had a quasi religious character, and the formulary of their admission included prayer, sprinkling of holy water, the blessing of the veil and mantle, and the giving of the kiss of peace. In 1446, Abbot Thorne suppressed this hospice, though as he applied its revenues to the use of the almoner, we will hope that they were expended in charity. “On a tyme, however,” says an anonymous and rather discontented writer, “Kyng Edward IV. cam through Redyng to Woodstock,” and expressed himself much displeased that “Saint Johny’s House,” as well as another house for lazars, had been diverted from its original purpose. He commanded Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, to institute a reform, but he was unable to do so, and departed “ful ylle content.” However, some years later, at the suggestion of Henry VII., the hospital was re-endowed as “a fre scole,” and although when the nameless author, above quoted, wrote, there was as yet “neither scole, nor man, nor woman, nor chyld, relieved there,” yet in due time the master and usher were appointed, and the school attained no inconsiderable renown as a place of learning. It is remarkable that among the privileges of the abbots of Reading was that of granting school licenses. No one was permitted to open a school of any description in the town without the approbation of the Abbot and Convent, who exercised within certain limits the same authority as a diocesan chancellor.

At Bury, again, the abbots had so early as 1193 founded in the town a free school for forty poor boys. The building was near the present shire house whence the street still retains the name of School Street. This school was still flourishing in the reign of Henry VI., for we find a letter addressed by Abbot Curteys, a great friend of that amiable and scholar-loving king, to Master William Farceaux, graduate in grammar and arts, and master of the School of Bury. And not to weary the reader with the enumeration of names and places, I will only add that all the large abbeys appear to have maintained not one, but several of these endowed free schools in various parts of their domains.

The greater variety of seminaries now existing was gradually introducing a greater separation of classes; hitherto students of all ranks had mingled under the same master, but now aristocratic distinctions began to be made. Eton soon became the favourite resort of the sons of the gentry, though not a few continued to be prepared for the universities at the monastic schools, especially at Glastonbury and Pollesworth. The latter was found in an admirable state of discipline at the time of the suppression, when the commissioners testified to the fact that the town which had sprung up round the monastery was almost entirely peopled, by “artifycers, laborers, and vitellers, that lyve by the said house, and the repayre and resorte that ys made to the gentylmennes children and studiounts that doo ther lif to the numbre of xxx. or xl. and moo, that ther be right vertuously brought upp.” At Hyde Abbey eight noble youths were received as students, who always ate at the abbot’s table. Winchcombe likewise retained its character for learning, and Abbot Kidderminster, by his wise government and encouragement of good letters, is said to have made his school flourish so much that it became equal to a little university.

If we put together the different classes of schools enumerated above, it will, I think, appear that in the fifteenth century England was quite as amply provided with the means of education for rich and poor as she is in the present day. There were, it seems, two large public schools for the gentry, other schools for the upper classes attached to monasteries and the larger colleges; monastic and collegiate schools for the middle classes, and other endowed free schools of a similar grade, and schools attached to smaller hospitals, evidently for a yet humbler class, such as the children of the neighbouring villages, or the tenantry of the founder; and lastly, there were the priests’ or parish schools, usually governed by a dame.

A more general interest was being felt in the work of education among all classes, and an attentive study of the household accounts of noble families of this period will discover among the items of expenditure a more frequent mention of “pennes,” “ynke,” and “bokes.” Hallam notices that the Paston letters, all written by members of a private family during the reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III., are not only grammatical, but fluent and elegant in their style, and he remarks that it is a proof how unfairly we should measure the refinement and education of an age merely by its published literature. England in the fifteenth century was in too troublous a state for men to have much leisure for writing books; and hence though there was evidently an increased relish for literary pursuits under our Lancastrian princes, we are not surprised to find few additions to our national literature during this period. Yet some writers there were, such as the poets Occleve and Lydgate; the former a disciple of Chaucer, and author of a poem on the education of princes; whilst Lydgate, the monk of Bury, enjoyed an immense reputation in his own day, and in ours has been equally undervalued. He was educated at Oxford, and was a man of varied learning, familiar with the literature of France and Italy, both which countries he had visited, a mathematician and a classical scholar, and altogether well qualified to fill the post of professor in his own abbey. Here he taught the sons of the nobility “the art of versification, elegancies, poetry, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, and theology.” He was equally esteemed by the pious king Henry VI., who visited him in his monastic cell, and by the London goldsmiths and citizens, who employed him in writing verses, and contriving quaint devices for their May games and city pageants. Of his two hundred and fifty poems none have been judged worthy to find a place in the various collections of the British poets, published during the last century. Halliwell has published a selection of his minor pieces, but his “Court of Sapience,” a noble poem extending to several hundred stanzas, remains still in MS., or in the early Caxton editions. The student of English literature is often perplexed to understand the principles which appear to have directed the choice of our modern editors. With the exception of Chaucer and Gower, whose claims were too great to be disallowed, no ante-reformation poets are admitted into the collections of Southey or Chalmers, with the exception of Hawes and Skelton, whose doggerel is tolerated, possibly on account of its scurrility. Even Occleve, though but a second-rate versifier, is better than these, but Lydgate’s “Court of Sapience” is incomparably superior to anything that appeared between the times of Chaucer and Spenser. Its tone, however, is essentially Catholic, and even theological, and this, together with the monkish titles of some of his works, such as the Lyf of our Ladye, and the Legende of St. Edmund, seem to have occasioned his exclusion by collectors, who have not been ashamed to rake together all the rubbish, and worse than rubbish, of our Restoration and Georgian periods. If the ancient religious poetry of this country should ever find an editor, readers who are accustomed to suppose that intelligible English dates from the time of Spenser, would be amazed at the power and pathos possessed by earlier writers. When we examine such poetical fragments as are still preserved, the wonder perhaps ceases, that they should have found small favour from modern editors. For the most part they are devoted to celebrate the glories of the Blessed Virgin, or the Mysteries of the Passion. The first subject has, of course, no chance of indulgence from a Protestant public, and the second is hardly more popular when treated precisely in the same spirit as it is presented to us in the prayers of St. Bridget, or the devout productions of antique Christian art. To Catholics, however, it is a joy and a solace to look back into past centuries, and remember that there were days when our poets drank of a purer fount than that of Castaly; and made it their pride to celebrate in their verse, not Dian, nor Proserpine, but the Immaculate Queen of Heaven. Of Chaucer’s devotion to this theme I have already spoken, but other poets before his time delighted in dedicating their verses to her who, as she has inspired the most exquisite designs of the artist’s pencil, has also claimed not the least beautiful productions of the poet’s pen. Thus, one sings of her as “Dame Lyfe,” and describes how

As she came by the bankes, the boughs eche one, Lowked to the Ladye, and layd forth their branches, Blossoms and burgens (new shoots) breathed ful swete, Floures bloomed in the path where she forth stepped, And the gras that was dry greened belive.

Others, according to their quaint fashion, mixed up English and Latin rhymes in a style which, barbarous as it is, is certainly not deficient in harmony. One little poem, ascribed to a writer in the reign of Henry III., commences thus:--

Of all that is so fayr and bright, Velut maris Stella; Brighter than the day is light, Parens et puella. I crie to The, Thou se to me, Levedy, preye the Sone for me, Tam pia, That Ich mote come to The, Maria.

Another class of poems is dedicated to the sorrows of Mary; from one of which, apparently of the fourteenth century, entitled “The Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin,” I extract but two verses, the exceeding pathos of which can hardly be surpassed. Our Ladye is supposed to be addressing her complaint to some happy mother, and drawing a contrast between her joys and her own sorrows:

O woman, a chaplet chosen thou hast Thi childe to wear it does the gret likynge, Thou settest it on with great solas, And I sit with my Sone sore wepynge, His chaplet is thornys sore prickynge, His mouth I kis with a sorrowful cheer, I sith wepynge, and thou sit synnynge, For now lies ded my dere Sone dere.

Thou hast thi sone ful whole and sounde And myn is ded upon my kne, Thi childe is lose, and myn is bounde, Thy childe is lyf, and myn--ded is He! Whi was this, doghter, but for the? For my Childe trespast never here; Me think ye be holden to wepe with me, For now lies ded my dere Sone dere.

The mystery, entitled “The Wepynge of the Thre Maries,” is a dramatic paraphrase of the Gospel history, told in the same homely and pathetic strain. It is thus that St. Mary Magdalene describes Our Ladye at the foot of the Cross:--

When she herd Hym for His enmyse preye, And promesid the thefe the blissis aye, And to hirself no worde wolde saye, She sighed, be ye sure; The Sonne hynge, and the Mother stode, And ever she kissid the drops of Blode That so fast ran down.

And when after the Resurrection she runs joyfully to tell the holy women that she has seen her risen Lord, and the second Mary asks

But have ye seen our Lord, Sister, are ye sure?

Her reply is from the heart:--

Sister, I have sene mi gretest tresure, He callit me Mary by my name, And spake with me homlye.

Warton, in his “History of English Poetry,” has published a few fragments of poems on the Passion, which he ascribes to the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I. There is a harmony in the versification of the following that one scarcely looks for at so early a date:--

Jhesu for thi muckle might Thou gif us of Thi grace, That we may day and night Thinken of Thi face: In myn herte it doth me gode Whan y thinke on Jhesu blod, That ran down bi ys syde; Fro ys herte don to ys fot, For us he spradde ys hertis blod, His wondes wer so wyde. * * * * * Ever and aye He haveth us in thought, He will not lose that He so dearly bought.

And again:--

Now sprinketh[300] rose and lylie flour That whilen ber that swete savour, In somer, that swete tyde: Ne is no queen so stark and stour, Ne is no Ladye so bright in bower, That ded ne schal by glyde: Whoso wot flesh lust forgo, and heven’s blysse abyde On Jhesu, be is thought anon, that therled[301] was in ys syde.

I will give but one fragment more, which is taken from a sort of dialogue between our Lord on the Cross and the devout soul:--

Behold mi side Mi woundes spred so wide Restless I ride, Lok on me, and put fro ye pride: Dear Man, my love, For my love sinne no more.

Jhesu Christe, mi lemman swete, That for me deyedis on rood tree, With al myn herte I The biseke For Thi woundes two and thre; That so fast in my herte Thi love rooted might be, As was the spere in Thi side When Thou suffredst deth for me.

A great number of the Church hymns and other devotions are also to be found translated in a versified form for the use of the laity, such as the Veni Creator, the Popule mi, quid feci? and other portions of the Holy Week office. These fragments, which are mere indications of the rich stores of religious literature possessed by our ancestors, must not be lost sight of when studying the subject of popular education. Were we to credit the majority of writers on ancient manners, the poetry of the Middle Ages was exclusively furnished by the profane and licentious jongleurs, whose productions have been very diligently sought out and republished for the edification of the curious, whilst the very existence of a vast body of popular religious poetry is systematically ignored. Yet the one class of writings is surely as characteristic of the age to which it belongs as the other; and we are bound not to condemn the morals of our forefathers from the study of that portion of their literature which is corrupt and reprehensible, without also receiving the evidence furnished by poetry of a totally opposite description.

We must not conclude our notice of the English writers of the Lancastrian period without briefly noticing the names of two learned monks. The first was John Capgrave, author of the Legenda Sanctorum Angliæ, which Leland says was chiefly derived from an earlier collection of saints’ lives by John of Tynemouth, a monk of St. Alban’s, who died in 1370. Capgrave also produced other learned works, a MS. copy of one of which, a commentary on the Book of Genesis, is preserved in the library of Oriel College, and contains in its initial letter a portrait of the author presenting his book to Duke Humphrey, whose autograph is at the end of the volume. The other religious writer was Walter Hilton, a Carthusian monk of Shene. His “Scale of Perfection,” an invaluable spiritual treatise, which formed the favourite study of Sir Thomas More, has been reprinted, but a considerable number of his other spiritual works exist in manuscript in the British Museum, and yet await an editor.

If the English did not compose many books at this period, they bought and transcribed them with great diligence. More books were copied during the first half of the fifteenth century than during any previous century and a half. Book collectors were enterprising enough to take journeys into Italy, and returned laden with literary treasures; among whom, besides Fleming, already noticed, were Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, the friend of Pius II.; John Free, a British ecclesiastic, afterwards Bishop of Worcester; Millyng, Abbot of Westminster; and Sellynge, Prior of Canterbury; all of whom had studied the classical literature at Padua, or in Guarini’s Florentine school. In the household accounts of Sir John Howard, founder of the house of Norfolk, is a bill for the transcribing, illuminating, and “flourishing” of books. Enormous sums were spent by literary dandies on bookbinding. Edward IV. is said to have spent as much on binding a book as was then the price of an ox, and “caused thereafter to be delivered to his binder six yards of velvet, ditto of silk, besides laces, tassels, and gilt nails.” The Lancastrian princes were all patrons of letters: Henry V., as we know, was a scholar of Queen’s, though, judging from his life after leaving the university, we can hardly suppose him to have been at that time much of a reading man. At a later period, however, he seems to have had literary tastes, and in order to gratify them he did not always return the books he borrowed. After his death, petitions were presented from the Countess of Westmoreland and the Prior of Christchurch, praying that certain books borrowed of them by the King might be restored. Those lent by the Prior consisted of the works of St. Gregory. His son, Henry VI., was the very type of a scholar; whilst his uncle Beaufort, Cardinal and Bishop of Winchester, and his two brothers, the Regent, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, were all distinguished as men of learning. Duke Humphrey was beyond all doubt the most munificent patron of letters that had yet appeared in England, and did his best to redeem her schools from the charge of barbarism brought against them by Poggio and the other classic scholars of Italy. He was a great book collector, and the copies he caused to be transcribed were all of the most costly and splendid description, written on vellum and adorned with illuminations: 129 such manuscripts[302] were bequeathed by him to the University of Oxford, of which one, and one alone, remains. All the others were destroyed by the pious visitors of Edward VI., who considered that everything that was enriched with illuminations must be a popish missal, and therefore only fit to be cast to the flames. The solitary survivor is a copy of Valerius Maximus, the index to which is written by the hand of Humphrey’s dear and learned friend Whethamstede, Abbot of St. Alban’s.

Humphrey’s patronage was not confined to English scholars. Heeren prints a Latin epistle, addressed by him to the Italian Decembrio, who had presented him with a translation of Plato De Republica. He employed several learned French and Italian translators, and to him Leonard Aretino dedicated his version of Aristotle, the presentation copy of which is preserved in the Bodleian. Pope Pius II., in a letter written about the middle of the century, mentions the fact that the duke had sent into Italy and procured several professors to explain the Latin poets and orators in his own country. And Vossius speaks of a certain master from Ferrara, to whom he gives the name of Titus Livius, and who, he says, came into England by the invitation of the Duke of Gloucester, and while there wrote a life of Henry V., and dedicated it to his son Henry VI. This life has been republished by Heeren. The real name of the author is unknown, and he probably assumed that of the Latin historian to indicate that he imitated his style.

Duke Humphrey’s chief assistant, however, in his literary labours was the learned abbot named above, John Whethamstede of St. Alban’s. He was originally a monk of Tynemouth, in Northumberland (which was a cell of St. Alban’s), whence he removed to Gloucester Abbey; then he was made prior of Gloucester College at Oxford, in which office he had every opportunity for indulging his taste for study and his equally characteristic liberality; for he spent a considerable sum in the erection of a new library, on which he bestowed many books prefixed with verses, warning off the fingers of pilferers. He also adorned the college with painted windows, set up inscriptions under the Crucifix and other holy images, and poured out so many other benefactions on the house that he was formally declared to be its second founder.

He was elected Abbot of St. Alban’s for the first time in 1420, and having resigned his office in 1440, was elected a second time in 1451. It would be no easy matter to catalogue all his good deeds, for Whethamstede was a great reformer and builder, and setter to rights of decayed offices. In fact, he united in a very uncommon degree the literary and the practical gifts, and while busy with his books and libraries, did not forget the repairing of brew-houses and enclosing of kitchen gardens; in spite of which services, the monks very unjustly accused him of neglecting their affairs, and giving all his time to study. Weever enumerates all the multifarious decorations in the shape of painted windows, gilded and illuminated verses, and other ornaments which he set up in his abbey. “Our Lady’s Chapel,” he says, “was very curiously trimmed and depicted, and letters dispersed therein in gold.” The north part of the abbey church being somewhat dark, he made it glorious with new windows, introducing, with taste more classical than suitable, the figures of such heathen philosophers as had testified of Christ. He also expended great sums in books for the abbey library, “as well for the use of the brethren of the cloister as for the scholars;” an expression which shows that the monastic school was still kept up. These books exceeded eighty-seven in number, besides which he caused to be begun the copying of Nicholas de Lyra’s great commentary on the Bible, and employed Lydgate to translate the metrical life of St. Alban into English verse. He also added many of his own compositions, such as his Granarium, a sort of theological commonplace book, in five volumes, dedicated to Duke Humphrey. The duke was fond of visiting the abbey, to which he was a great benefactor, and employed Whethamstede in collecting books for him; and after his death, St. Alban’s was very fitly chosen as the place of his interment.

We must now for a time leave the company of princes and abbots, and take our way through the streets of London--a city which, even in the days of Henry II., was thickly populated with schoolboys, and which, thanks to his pious namesake Henry VI., kept up its name as a place of good learning in the fifteenth century. We have already seen something of the university and domestic education of Old England, but we have yet to make ourselves acquainted with the schools and scholars of the middle class. The English Commons were at this precise period fast rising in wealth and importance, and the number among them who sought a good education for their children was every year on the increase. The London citizens particularly were men of intelligence and enterprise, fully conscious of the weighty position they held in the State, and perfectly well qualified to fill it. Nor let the fastidious reader scorn the idea of scholarship as associated with that of a community of mercers and fishmongers; for it is a fact of which England has no cause to be ashamed, that many of her greatest public men, and not a few of her best scholars, have risen from the mercantile and working classes. Lord mayors and aldermen have not unfrequently spent the wealth they have amassed by trade in foundations of charity or learning. Thus, Elsing Spittal, at Cripplegate, was founded in 1329, by a London mercer, for the sustentation of a hundred blind men; St. Lawrence’s College, in 1332, by Lord Mayor Poulteney; St. Michael’s College, by Sir William Walworth, of Wat Tyler-slaying celebrity; and Leadenhall College, by Sir Simon Eyre, another lord mayor and draper, who provided that a school should be attached to his college under the care of three schoolmasters and an usher. His wishes do not seem to have been carried out, but in 1446 his beautiful chapel was given over to the newly-established confraternity of the Holy Trinity; and some of the priests belonging to this society, says Stowe, celebrated divine service in this chapel every market day for the market people.

So again in 1418, William of Sevenoaks, who from a foundling had made his way to civic honours, built and endowed a college in his native place, and a free school for the townsmen’s children; and, not to multiply examples, the renowned Sir Richard Whittington, mercer and Lord Mayor of London, after founding his noble College and Hospital of St. Michael’s Royal, and repairing St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, built at his own expense the great library of the Grey Friars, and expended a considerable sum in furnishing it with reading pews, and causing to be transcribed a fair copy of Nicholas de Lyra for the friars’ use. Men of this stamp were solicitous to see their city provided with good schools, and in 1446 we find a petition presented to Parliament by four city priests, begging the honourable Commons to take into consideration the great number of grammar-schools that had formerly existed in the metropolis, and the fact that many of them had lately fallen into decay. The petitioners go on to say that many persons now resort to London to be informed of grammar, through lack of good schoolmasters in the provinces, “wherefore it were expedient that in London were a sufficient number of scholes and good informers in grammar; for where there is gret number of lerners, and few techers, the maisters wax rich of money, and the lerners poorer in cunning, agenst all virtue and order of weal publik.” They entreat therefore that schools may be opened in each of their parishes, and persons learned in grammar set over them “there to teach to all that will learn.” In compliance with this petition, we find the good king Henry VI. founding no fewer than eight grammar-schools in this and the following year. And Mercers’ School was likewise established in connection with the Mercers’ Company.

Stowe describes the grammatical disputations kept up between the scholars of these academies even in his time, and lets us know that the scholars of St. Paul’s were wont to call those of St. Anthony’s “Antonie pigs,” by reason that St. Anthony is usually figured with a pig following him; and that they in their turn retaliated on their rivals the sobriquet of “pigeons,” many such birds being wont to make their haunt in the spire of St. Paul’s church. And it was their custom when they met one another in the street to provoke one another to disputation with the words Salve tu quoque; placetne disputare? To which, if the answer were Placet, they fell to words, and soon to blows also, the satchels full of grammars serving as convenient weapons, which oftentimes bursting in the fray, the books were scattered about in heaps to the great trouble of the passers-by. The least admirable thing recorded of the London schoolboys, however, is their taste for cock-fighting. On Shrove Tuesday every schoolboy in London brought a cock to his master, and the whole of that forenoon, says Fitz Stephen, “is spent by them in seeing the cocks fight in their schoolroom.” No wonder that Colet, among other retrenchments, prohibited his scholars of St. Paul’s from taking part in these Shrovetide cock-fightings, as a description of sport eminently fitted to foster in the boyish nature those brutal tendencies which are perhaps indigenous to the soil. That a taste for learning and a generous disposition to encourage it were to be found among not a few of the London citizens of this period is sufficiently clear; and among many names that might be given of founders of schools and lovers of letters, that of John Carpenter, town clerk of London in the reigns of Henry V. and Henry VI., must not be omitted. He was executor to Whittington, and the personal friend of two at least of those four priests above named who had petitioned Parliament for the establishment of more schools. These were Thomas Neel, Master of the Hospital of St. Thomas de Acon, and Incumbent of St. Mary, Colechurch; and William Lichfield, Rector of Allhallows the Great. Lichfield was a considerable writer both in prose and verse, whom Stowe calls “a great student and a famous preacher.” These two excellent ecclesiastics took part in many good works with John Carpenter, and probably assisted him in making that collection of books, afterwards mentioned in his will. Carpenter seems also to have had a taste for the arts; for the famous Dance of Death painted in the cloisters of old St. Paul’s, was placed there at his expense, with accompanying verses from the pen of Lydgate. It is, however, as an encourager of liberal education that he claims a place in these pages, and the benefaction by which he left certain tenements in the city “for finding and bringing up four poor men’s children with meat, drink, apparel, and learning, at the schools in the universities, for ever,” was the foundation which has since grown into the City of London School.[303]

But after all, the mind is trained by other things than schools and pedagogues; and the London apprentice, no less than the university undergraduate, drew in no small part of his education from the scenes and daily life that went on around him. Old London, no less than old Oxford, had a teaching of her own; she was not altogether that place of smoke and trade and unceasing business which we think of now when we name “the City:” she had a fairer,--I had almost said a poetic--side, and her old historians grow eloquent when they describe it. Who would suppose that it is the great Babylon that Fitz Stephen is speaking of when he praises the picturesque beauty of the suburbs, “with the citizens’ gardens and orchards planted with trees tall and sightly, and adjoining together. On the north side,” he continues, “are pastures and meadows, with brooks running through them, turning water-mills with a pleasant noise. Not far off is a great forest and a well-wooded chase, having good covert for harts, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a hungry, sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase, and filling the barns with corn. And there are near London abundance of wells, sweet, wholesome, and clear, such as Holy-well, Clerken-well, and St. Clement’s-well, much frequented by scholars and youth of the city in summer evenings when they walk forth to take the air.” Stowe likewise speaks of these pleasant walks in the suburbs, and adds a feature of touching beauty to the picture:--“Near a fair field in Houndsditch, belonging to the Prior of the Holy Trinity, were some cottages and little garden-plots for poor bed-rid people, built by some prior of that house; and in my youth I remember devout persons were accustomed, specially on Fridays, to walk that way to bestow their alms on the poor, who lay in their beds near the window, that opened low, and on it was spread a fair linen cloth and a pair of beads, to show that there lay a bed-rid person unable but to pray only.” Within the walls were 130 churches, besides convents, priories, and hospitals innumerable. In Westcheap, near the north door of St. Paul’s, stood the great Crucifix surrounded by figures of saints, where the choristers of St. Paul’s had a goodly exhibition for singing on certain days the responsory, Sancte Deus fortis, and thither on all feasts of St. Paul’s came the chapter in embroidered vestments and wearing rose garlands on their heads. This last ornament was very commonly worn in English processions, specially on the summer festivals of Whit-Sunday and Corpus Christi, and not only by canons and choristers, but also by young scholars, as we learn from Matthew Paris. There were city companies then as now, and there were guilds and confraternities, which gave to their members “gret commodyte and surety of lyvyng,” and which recreated the citizens with their gorgeous processions, while they provided support for their poor brethren during life, and after death, burial, prayers, and masses. On the feast of the patron saint, the guild brethren had a dinner, of course, and generally an interlude or sacred drama; and Fitz Stephen assures us that the citizens of his time preferred those which were from sacred subjects, such as the Passion, or the martyrdom of a saint. Clerkenwell received its name from the Fraternity of Parish Clerks, who yearly assembled there to play “some large history of Holy Scripture,” and in the reign of Henry IV. enacted one which lasted eight days, and was “of matter from the creation of the world.”

But, to use the words of our old historian, “a city should not only be commodious and serious, but also merry and sportful,” and London had nothing to blame herself for on this head. During the Easter holidays there were sham fights on the river, with leaping, dancing, shooting, and cock-fighting, and great twisted trees were brought in from the woods to adorn the house of every man of worship. The great May-pole hung in Westcheap, and on May morning every citizen went forth early into the country to seek the May. All through the summer months bonfires were kept up on the eves of great festivals, and tables set out in the streets with meat and drink plentifully provided by the wealthy householders, who invited the neighbours and passers-by to eat and be merry with them with great familiarity, and so thank God for His benefits. And Rome herself never witnessed a more graceful celebration of the feasts of St. John Baptist and the Holy Apostles than that which used to be held in the streets of London, where “every man’s door was shadowed with green birch, fennel, and St. John’s-wort, together with white lilies and such like, and garnished with garlands of beautiful flowers, among which lamps of glass burnt all the night;”[304] while some hung out huge branches of iron, curiously wrought, whence hung hundreds of lamps at once, and this was particularly the custom in New Fish-street. At Christmas, of course, the houses and conduits were decked with a profusion of evergreens, and the Christmas revels must be left to the imagination of the reader.

When the holidays were over, came sports and contentions of another sort. The masters of the different schools held solemn meetings in the London churches, and their scholars disputed logically, grammatically, and demonstratively. The disciples of rival academies “capped or potted verses one with another, nipping and quipping their fellows with pleasant rhymes, which caused much laughter.” The poets sometimes addressed their fun and their verses to their masters, expending their wit in hopes to obtain a holiday. And, however it may be explained, I find more notices of versifiers among the London scholars than elsewhere. Indeed, we must fain suppose that the citizens had a naturally poetic vein when we read of their gorgeous and fanciful devices. Chaucer tells us that the good shopkeepers of the Cheap had weary work with their apprentices, who, when there were any “ridings” or royal entries, would leap out of the shop, and not return till they had seen all the sight, and had a good dance into the bargain. And really, when we read how the fifth Harry rode into London with little birds fluttering round his helmet, green boughs cast in his way, priests, with gilded copes, swinging censers, and every street exhibiting a castle, or a giant, or a legend of some saint, we cannot wonder that it was sometimes a difficult matter to keep the ’prentices behind the counter.

Surely too there must have been scholars among the citizens to devise such scenes as were exhibited at the entry of Henry VI., when a tabernacle of curious work arose on Cornhill, wherein Dame Sapience appeared, surrounded by the seven liberal arts; and when divers wells poured forth goodly wine to the passers-by, appropriately named the Well of Mercy, of Grace, or of Pity. But, in fact, most of such pageants were designed by men of letters, and no one was more frequently called on for this purpose than the monk of Bury. He was exceedingly popular with the London citizens, and whether a disguising was intended by the company of goldsmiths, a May game for the sheriffs, or a carol for the Coronation, it was generally Lydgate who supplied the poetry. And he, in his turn, loved the citizens, and ever spoke well of them in his verse:--

Of seaven things I prayse this citty, Of true meaning and faithful observance, Of righteousness, truth, and equity, Of stableness aye kept in legiance.

A testimony to which we must add that delivered two hundred years earlier by Fitz Stephen. “I do not think,” he says, “that there is any city to be found wherein are better customs in frequenting the churches, in serving God, in keeping holidays, in giving alms, in entertaining strangers, in solemnising marriages, in furnishing banquets, celebrating funerals, and burying dead bodies.” He adds, however, that London had some “inconveniences,” such as the immoderate drinking of some foolish persons, and the frequent fires.

Such then were some of the scenes in the midst of which the young citizen grew up, and which supplied him with many ideas beyond those of his shop wares and his reckonings. Sometimes he passed over to France or Flanders to procure his stores of silks and velvets, or fine Paris thread; and on such occasions, book collectors, like Duke Humphrey, or Tiptoft of Worcester, did not disdain to employ the services of an intelligent merchant to procure them choice copies of foreign works. Treaties of commerce were generally negotiated by merchants, who were thus brought into contact with courtiers and politicians, and not unfrequently the commercial treaty was but the veil to conceal more profound political intrigues. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find a commission issued by Edward IV., in 1464, to Richard Whitehill and William Caxton, conferring on them the quality of ambassadors at the court of Burgundy, to reopen the trade with that country, which had been suspended in consequence of certain prohibitive decrees issued by Philip the Good. All that we know of Caxton up to this time was, that he had begun his education in a poor school of the weald of Kent, and had probably perfected it in some one of the London grammar-schools; that he had been apprenticed to Master Robert Large, a mercer of Cheapside, who became Lord Mayor in 1440, and dying the next year, left the sum of twenty marks to his servant William Caxton. Then he appears as a travelling agent of the London mercers in Brabant, and Holland, and Flanders, in which countries he spent thirty years of his life, and at last we find him at the court of Burgundy, to which the Flemish provinces were then subject. When his mission was ended, he continued to reside at the court, and was at Bruges in 1468, when the marriage took place between Duke Charles the Bold and Margaret Plantagenet, sister to Edward IV. He probably received some office in the household of the Duchess, but he seems to have had little to do, and to fill up his time the English mercer took to literary pursuits; considering, as he says, that every man is bounden by the counsel of the wise man to eschew sloth and idleness. He therefore resolved to translate into English the “Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,” by Raoul de Fevre, wherein he had great delight, both for the novelty of the same, and the fair language of the French; and having concluded to begin this work, he forthwith took pen and ink, and set to work; but after writing five or six quires, fell into despair over his task and put it aside. Duchess Margaret, however, at this juncture came to his aid: she had heard of his proposed translation, and required the quires to be brought to her for inspection; praised them, found fault with the English here and there, and finally commanded the translator to continue and make an end.

“I might not disobey her dreadful command,” says Caxton, “seeing that I was a servant of her Grace, and received of her yearly fee.” Dibdin, in his “Typographical Antiquities,” endeavours to prove that Caxton had printed the original French book before translating it into English; but this is mere conjecture, and there seem no satisfactory grounds for supposing him to have turned his attention to the new art of printing before the year 1471, when his English translation of the “Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye” was printed by him at Cologne. We are not told how he acquired a knowledge of the art, which had then been in operation for about twenty years, but the motive which led to his first applying himself to it was, as he tells us, the desire to multiply copies of his book, which was in request with divers gentlemen. Three years later he returned to England and set up the first English printing-press in the Almonry of Westminster Abbey, the learned abbot Millyng being his first patron, and evincing a lively interest in his success. Caxton’s earliest works were mostly his own translations; “The Game and Play of Chess” was the first production of his Westminster press, and its second edition was adorned with woodcuts. Another was “The Doctrine of Sapience,” also translated by him from the French, and intended “for the use of parish priests, and for the erudition of simple people.” “The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers” was a translation from the pen of his accomplished friend Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, who had so high an opinion of his printer’s literary powers that he permitted him to overlook and correct the sheets. This accomplished nobleman, the chosen “champion” of the English ladies, the best scholar, the best poet, and the best jouster of King Edward’s court, helped to set the types with his own hand, and afterwards presented both the book and the printer to his royal brother-in-law.

Caxton did not altogether pursue his art in the spirit of a tradesman. He evidently had it much at heart to provide his countrymen with good and useful books, and took considerable pains in their selection. In spite of Gibbon’s sneer at the number of saints’ legends[305] and romances that issued from his press, we have every reason to admire the variety of subjects to be found in the sixty-four works which he lived to publish. They embrace religion history, poetry, law, ritual, and romance. No original work of the Latin classics appears on the list, which does not argue much for the scholarship of the English reading public at that time, and offers a striking contrast to the state of things in Italy, where the first works printed at the Subiaco press were “Lactantius,” St. Augustine’s “City of God,” and Cicero’s “Rhetoric;” and these were followed a little later by twenty-three editions of ancient Latin authors. But in England, though a few individuals had shown an interest in the classic revival, the nation at large was, at this time, wholly indifferent to the subject, and Caxton had to consult their taste, at the same time that he attempted to raise and refine it. He himself was no classical scholar; nevertheless, he chose a certain number of French versions of ancient authors for translation into English, such as the Treatise “De Senectute” of Cicero, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,”[306] Boethius’ “De Consolatione,” the “Fables of Æsop,” and Cato’s “Morals.” The last he recommended as the best book that could be used by children in schools. He likewise translated a French narrative of Virgil’s “Æneid;” and contemptible as this sort of literature may appear to scholars, it helped to give his readers a certain acquaintance with the names and subjects of classical authors, and prepared the way for the study of the originals.

On the other hand, the number of English works which he produced, and the care he expended on presenting them to his readers in clear and simple language, “casting away the chaff of superfluity, and showing the picked gram of sentence,” gave a powerful stimulus to his native literature. His own favourite author was Chaucer, in printing whose works he grudged neither care nor expense: and he incidentally gives us to understand that the English gentry of that period had, like himself, a marvellous love for their great poet. He had no slight difficulty in getting a correct MS. to print from, and his first edition of Chaucer’s poems was, therefore, full of inaccuracies. A young gentleman criticised its defects, and offered, if he would print another edition, to supply him with a certain very correct copy, which was in the possession of his father, who loved it much, and would not willingly part with it. Caxton agreed to the proposal, by which, of course, he lost considerably as a tradesman, but gained in the esteem of the learned: and one is glad to find that the young gentleman, in fulfilment of his part of the bargain, did not purloin the book from his father but “got it from him full gently,” and delivered it to the careful custody of the honest printer.

Not content with the labour of printing and translating, which he carried on with so much eagerness that, as he tells us, his eyes were half blinded with continual looking at the white paper, the indefatigable old man undertook, at the age of seventy, to compose his “Chronicles of England,” and “Description of Britain,” which books he intended to convey to English readers a certain amount of information about the history and geography of their own country. He had plenty of critics while engaged on these works; some wanted him to use only “old and homely” terms; others, who were finer clerks, begged him to write the most curious words he could find. Caxton good humouredly complains of the difficulty he found in pleasing everybody, and remarks on the variable character of the English language, which gives ground for supposing that the English people must be born under the domination of the moon, never steadfast, but ever wavering. His own good sense, however, decided that the best English for any writer to use is that common phraseology which is more readily understood than what is antique or curious. He never assumed the airs of a scholar, and in his preface to a modernised version of Higden’s “Polychronicon,” calls himself “William Caxton, a simple person,” and modestly apologises for his attempt to render the rude old English of his author into more intelligible language.

One of his translations from the French, entitled “The Mirror of the World,” gives an outline of as much natural philosophy as was at that time known. This book was printed at the request, and at the cost, of Hugh Brice, a London alderman, and the choice speaks well for the intelligence of that worthy citizen. Caxton seems to have taken considerable pains over it, and says he has made it so plain, that every reasonable man may understand it, and begs his readers’ indulgence if there be found any fault in the measurements of the sun, moon, or firmament. To assist the intelligence of his “reasonable” readers, he added twenty-seven diagrams explanatory of scientific principles, and woodcuts representing the seven liberal arts. In these woodcuts we observe that the schoolmaster generally appears seated, while his scholars kneel before him. The grammar-master is furnished with a rod, which need not cause dismay, for perhaps it was but the ferule, part of the academic insignia of a master of arts. The logician’s book rests on a reading-desk, and he is expounding its contents to his kneeling pupils.

Dibdin calculates that Caxton’s translations alone would fill twenty-five octavo volumes, and that they extend to over 5000 closely-printed pages. His biographer Lewis bears witness to the fact that in his original writings he constantly expresses himself as “a man who lived in the fear of God, and desired much to promote His honour and glory.” But he thinks it necessary to regret that he should have been carried away by the superstitions of his times so far as to print saints’ legends, advocate pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and proclaim himself an enthusiastic admirer of the Crusades. Mercer and printer as he was, Caxton was indeed thoroughly informed with the spirit of chivalry. It was this that directed his choice of “The History of Godfrey de Bouillon,” “The Book of Chivalry,” and the “Histories of King Arthur.” In his preface to the first, the venerable printer makes an appeal to all Christian princes to establish peace and amity one with another and unite for the recovery of the Holy City, where our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ redeemed us with His Precious Blood; to encourage them to which “he emprised to translate his book.” In the second he utters a lament for the good days when the knights of England were really knights, “when each man knew his horse, and his horse knew him.” And in the third he confesses his conviction that Arthur was no fabulous character, but a real man; and exhorts his readers to study his noble deeds, “for herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil undone, and it shall bring you good fame and honour.”

Lewis informs us that the progress of printing terribly alarmed the ignorant and illiterate monks, who saw in the advancement of learning their own impending ruin. If so, they took a very strange way of expressing their alarm, for they were the first to patronise the new invention; so that in a very few years after Caxton had set up his press in Westminster Abbey, other printing-presses were at work in the monasteries of St. Alban’s, Worcester, Bury, and others. The monk who first introduced printing at St. Alban’s was the schoolmaster; his name is not known, though Sir H. Chauncey styles him “Insomuch.” Bale and Pits tell us that he was a reader in history, and say that he had collected materials for a history of England, but died before it was completed, that his papers fell into Caxton’s hands, who printed them under his own name. But this is evidently incorrect. The St. Alban’s printer was still working his press in 1486; and Caxton’s chronicles were printed six years earlier. Before the death of Caxton, several other printers, both English and foreign, were established in London, and among the latter was the celebrated Fleming Wynkyn de Worde. An Oxford press was at work so early as 1478, and seven years later the Latin translation of the Epistles of Phalaris issued from the press, to which is affixed a Latin couplet, boasting that the English who had been wont in former times to be indebted to the Venetians for their books, now themselves exported books to foreign countries:--

Celatos, Veneti, nobis transmittere libros Cedite; nos aliis vendimus, O Veneti.

However, I have no intention here of tracing the history of English printers, and have only said thus much of Caxton, because he presents us with an admirable example of an intelligent Englishman of the middle class--a practical persevering man, full of the healthy energy which belongs to a life of labour; a vigorous, homely writer who desired, in his day, to serve his country in so far as he had the needful “cunning;” whose plain broad sense is illumined by a ray of piety, and warmed into a touch of generous enthusiasm, which makes his name more dear and venerable to us than that of many a profounder scholar. Is it fancy or partiality which makes one detect in the fair large type that he uses, so clear and readable, a reflection of his own simple and genuine character; a character which, making allowance for the difference of station, reminds us of that of the great Alfred, to whose written language also that of Caxton bears a remarkable resemblance.

He died in the year 1492, at the age of eighty, having two years previously completed his translation of “The Craft how to Die Well,” from which the following is an extract:--“When it is so, that what a man maketh or doeth, it is made to come to some end, and if the thing be good and well made, it must needs come to good end; then, by better and greater reason, every man ought to intend in such wise to live in this world in keeping the commandments of God that he may come to a good end. And then out of this world, full of wretchedness and tribulation, he may go to heaven unto God and His saints, into joy perdurable.”

Two years after writing these lines he was laid to rest in the Church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, not far from the spot where for eighteen years he had carried on his noble and useful labours.

CHAPTER XX.

THE RENAISSANCE AT FLORENCE.

A.D. 1400 TO 1492.

Eastern travellers tell us of certain richly-irrigated soils in tropical lands, whereon the seeds that are cast spring up in a single night, covering, as if by magic, vasts plains, which before appeared barren wastes, with a mantle of tender green. Something like this was the rapid fertilisation exhibited in the world of letters after the death of Petrarch. More than a century, indeed, had to elapse before Italy could produce any names fit to compete with those of Dante, Petrarch, or Bocaccio; but the freshly-awakened enthusiasm for ancient learning, to which the writings of the two latter had so largely contributed, gave birth to a generation of scholars whose labours communicated a new direction to European studies. They did not leave behind them, as monuments of their genius, epic poems or philosophical discoveries, but they disinterred forgotten manuscripts, restored their corrupted texts, revived the study of Greek, and at the same time made known to Western Christendom the works of the great Greek authors by means of their own laborious Latin translations. They were, in short, a generation of grammarians, critics, and pedagogues, and were the instruments of achieving an intellectual revolution hardly less momentous than the religious and political revolutions which were to follow in after years.

The watered soil and the fruitful seed did not fail to be cherished by the sun of princely favour. The fifteenth century was not more remarkable for its learned men, than for its noble patrons of learning. In Naples there was Alphonsus of Arragon, who, in the midst of his warlike campaigns, had the Commentaries of Cæsar read to him daily, and whose displeasure against the Florentine Republic was appeased by the timely present of a copy of Livy. When Gianozzo Manetti was sent to him as ambassador from Florence, and delivered to him his opening oration, the king, out of respect to so great a scholar, would not so much as raise his hand to brush away a troublesome fly; and on one occasion, when Manetti had joined in a dispute which Alphonsus was carrying on with certain learned men of his court on the subject of the Holy Trinity, he so won the royal heart by his skill and eloquence that the king exclaimed, “Had I but a single loaf, I would divide it with Gianozzo!” He was one of the greatest book collectors of his time, and loved to surround himself with scholars, such as Antony of Palermo, commonly known as Panormita, who is said to have cured his royal master of a fever by reading to him the Life of Alexander, by Quintus Curtius. Perhaps it was after his recovery that Alphonsus despatched Panormita to Venice for the singular purpose of begging from the Venetian senators an arm of the Roman historian, with which classical relic he triumphantly returned to Naples. Most of the other men of letters who then flourished in Italy, such as Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, and George of Trebizond, were at one time or other attached to his court, and magnificently rewarded for their literary labours; and Pius II., in his “Description of Europe,” numbers Alphonsus himself among the philosophers of the day, and says that he could discourse both learnedly and gracefully on the most abstruse theological questions.

At Ferrara, Nicholas of Este not only refounded the university of that city, but succeeded in gaining possession of two great teachers, Guarino the Elder, and John Aurispa, who directed the education of his son Lionel, and whose schools were frequented by students from every European land. Lionel repaid their care by himself becoming an elegant scholar, and establishing at his court an academy of poetry; and his brother Borso, who succeeded him, proved, perhaps, a yet more splendid patron of letters, though he had not himself received a learned education. A new poem of Leonardi, a map of the world, or a correct copy of Ptolemy’s geography, were treasures which won from Duke Borso many a golden florin for the scholar fortunate enough to present them; and the archives of Ferrara and Modena became crowded with decrees for the protection of scholars, which Tiraboschi assures us are no less remarkable for the elegant Latinity in which they are drawn up, than for the munificent spirit in which they are conceived.

The Gonzaghi held rule at Mantua, and there an academy flourished under the princely patronage of the Marquis John Francis, concerning which I must speak a little more particularly, as its master in some respects stands alone among the pedagogues of the Renaissance. Who has not heard of Victorino da Feltre, and the “Casa Giojosa,” in which he taught his crowd of princely pupils, contriving to mingle in their ranks not a few poor scholars, the perpetual objects of his generous solicitude; whose fame was so widely spread, and whose blameless character was so respected, that in those days of bitter scholastic jealousies all the greatest masters of Italy offered him their gratuitous services, and counted it an honour to direct a class in the “Joyous House” of Mantua? The house derived its name from the beauty of its situation, and the care which Gonzaga had taken to adorn it with everything that could contribute to the pleasure or instruction of its inmates. It contained galleries and arcades, all painted with pictures of children at prayer, at study, or at play; around it stretched delicious gardens and woods well stored with game, and the graver lectures of the master were relieved by lessons in riding, dancing, fencing, and every other graceful accomplishment suitable for noble youth. Victorino, on assuming the direction of the academy, did not entirely discountenance these pleasant pastimes, nor did he turn the Joyous House into a Castle Dismal; he contented himself with introducing such reforms as banished habits of self-indulgence, and prepared his pupils, not only to become elegant gentlemen, but hardy soldiers. He reduced the princely banquets to a reasonable limit, confiscated sweetmeats, and showed himself pitiless upon all coxcombry in dress. It is remarkable, that though he left not a line behind him as a monument of his scholarship, his celebrity has survived to our own day, and certainly equals that of the greatest of his contemporaries, resting as it does solely on his merits as a teacher of youth. Not merely was he distinguished as a lecturer in Greek, Latin, and mathematics (though even in that capacity he had few equals), but as one who trained the heart, formed the manners, and established, as the basis of all education, a strict observance of religious duties, victory over the passions, and the mortification of pride, selfishness, and sensuality.

A no less passionate admirer of the ancient authors than his friend Guarino, who often assisted him in his school, Victorino was careful to guard his pupils from the paganising tendencies which he discerned in the spirit of the age. Along with the Greek and Latin classics, therefore, he presented to their study the Fathers of the Church, and the Divine Scriptures, and when lecturing on the heathen poets and historians, he was wont, in a few luminous words, to lay before his hearers the grand Christian principles which were never to be effaced from the soul by Gentile sophistries and eloquence. Those principles he taught yet more by example than by precept. Two hours before his classes opened, Victorino might have been found in the hospitals and prisons of Mantua, relieving and comforting every form of distress. He founded among his noble pupils an association of charity, for enabling poor scholars to pursue their studies with greater facility, and this he did, not merely as a means of carrying out his favourite work of charity, but yet more with the view of training the sons of the Italian noblesse from their earliest years to care for the inferior classes, and to give to the poor out of their abundance. His whole life was marked by a total disregard of his own private interests. The good Marchioness, Paula Gonzaga, never made but one complaint of him, and that was, that often as she tried to furnish him with a better wardrobe, he frustrated her charitable attempts; for so soon as he found himself possessed of two coats, one went to clothe a poorer man than himself. It may be added, that though a simple layman, he embraced a stricter rule of life than was followed by many an ecclesiastic of the time. In an age when the practice of frequent communion was far from common, he approached the holy table twice every week, and encouraged his pupils to communicate every Sunday. It is said that in the early part of his scholastic career, his intercourse with St. John Capistran and St. Bernardine of Siena had awakened in his soul a strong desire to enter the cloister, from which he was deterred by the arguments of his learned friend Ambrose Traversari, who assured him that his vocation was to remain in the world, and there train souls for heaven. And as a divine vocation he embraced it; and cast over the scholastic profession a grace, a dignity and a beauty of holiness which made Eugenius IV. exclaim, when he was presented to him at Florence, “If my rank as Supreme Pontiff permitted it, I would rise from my seat to show honour to so great a man!”

However, it must not be supposed that Victorino was a mere devotee, or that his school was of a retrograde class, excluding the new lights of classical literature. He was the friend and correspondent of all the scholars of his day, and the pupils of the “Casa Giojosa” were no whit behind their countrymen in classical acquirements. Ambrose Traversari, who was considered to equal Leonard of Arezzo as a Latinist, and to surpass him in his knowledge of Greek, has left an account, in his “Hodœporicon” and in his epistles, of a visit which he paid to the school of Victorino, and a kind of friendly examination to which he subjected its pupils. “I reached Mantua,” he writes, “where I was welcomed with singular kindness by Victorino, the best of men, and my very dear friend. He is with me as much as his serious occupations allow; and not he alone, but the greater part of his disciples. Some of them are so well advanced in Greek, that they translate it into Latin. He teaches Greek to the sons and daughters of the prince, and they all write in that language.” Again, “Yesterday Victorino presented to me Gian Lucido, the youngest son of the prince of Mantua, a youth of about fourteen. He recited to me 200 Latin verses of his own composition, in which he described the pomp with which the Emperor Sigismund had been received at Mantua. The little poem was very beautiful, and rendered more so by the grace and correctness of its delivery. Then he showed me two theorems which the boy had added to the geometry of Euclid. There was also one of his sisters at the academy who, though only ten years old, writes Greek so well, that I am ashamed to say many of my own scholars cannot show anything to equal it.” This last-named pupil was Cecilia Gonzaga, whose learning afterwards became renowned throughout Italy. Her sister Margaret, also a pupil of Victorino, became the wife of Lionel of Este, but she herself consecrated her talents to God, and entered a convent of poor Clares, founded by her mother in the city of Mantua.[307]

While the smaller potentates of Italy were vying one with another in their encouragement of letters and learned men, the Sovereign Pontiffs were setting them the example on a yet more magnificent scale. From 1447 to 1455 the chair of St. Peter was filled by Nicholas V., who to extreme simplicity of manners united immense learning, and a mind capable of vast and magnificent designs. Whilst he was restoring peace to Italy putting an end to the schism which had sprung out of the Council of Basle, planning a fresh crusade, and laying plans for the rebuilding of Rome, on a plan realised only in the pages of Vasari, his agents were busy, all over the world, collecting, collating, or translating manuscripts, and giving to the world, in versions undertaken at his sole expense, those long-forgotten works of classical antiquity, the “History of Diodorus Siculus,” the “Cyropedia” of Xenophon, the histories of Polybius, Thucydides, and Herodotus, the “Iliad” of Homer, the geography of Strabo, many of the works of Plato, and the Greek Fathers of the Church. Most of the scholars of whom we shall have to speak in the following pages were employed by him as translators and secretaries, and were amply recompensed for their work. Poggio was thus enabled to complete his version of Diodorus. Lorenzo Valla received 500 gold scudi for his translation of Thucydides; 10,000 scudi, a house and estate, were promised to Filelfo for his translation of Homer, and when giving Perotti 500 scudi for his Latin Polybius, the Pontiff condescended to apologise for the smallness of the sum, which he owned was below the value of the book. He is known to have offered 5000 scudi for a Hebrew version of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which, however, was never found. In his early years he had often given utterance to the promise that if he ever found himself in the possession of riches, he would employ them in the multiplication of good books. He nobly kept his word; and, when he died, left, as his bequest to his successor, the Vatican library, furnished, through his munificence, with 5000 precious manuscripts.

The accession to the pontifical chair of Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who became Pope in 1458, under the title of Pius II., seemed to promise much for the world of letters. He had already acquired a European fame as a poet and historian, and had received the laurel crown from the hands of Frederic III. But his short pontificate was almost entirely absorbed in preparations for the projected crusade, which he had resolved to undertake for the recovery of the Eastern Empire, and death alone prevented his carrying out his grand designs, and accompanying the army into the East in order to encourage the soldiers with his presence. Meanwhile a flood of Greek refugees poured into Europe, contributing very largely to encourage the restoration of ancient learning, though they certainly had not given the movement its first impulse. Even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars had judged it prudent to pass over into Italy in order to escape the ruin impending over their country. Others, again, had been attracted thither by the Council of Florence, held in 1441, for the extinction of the Greek schism. Among the latter was the celebrated Bessarion, Archbishop of Nice, who, convinced of the fallacy of the Greek claims by the arguments of the Latin prelates, urged his countrymen to acknowledge the supremacy of the Holy See, and thereby incurred so much odium among them as to be forced to remain in exile. He was raised to the purple by Pope Eugenius IV., and employed in several important legations, but it was as a man of letters that he chiefly distinguished himself. His house at Rome became a sort of academy, and in it he trained a number of scholars, both Greek and Latin, not only in learning, but in piety and good manners; for Bessarion was as remarkable for his courtesy and virtue as for his erudition. His great library, collected at a cost of 30,000 golden scudi, was presented to the Republic of Venice, in return for the affection with which he had been received in that city; and though he only acquired a knowledge of the Latin tongue after his removal to Italy, he produced several works in that language, among which was a “Defence” of his favourite philosopher Plato.

But neither Rome nor Naples was destined to be the Athens of modern Europe, but a city, still proud of her republican institutions, though on the point of surrendering all but the name of sovereignty into the hands of a successful family of merchant princes. Many circumstances had combined to render Florence the focus of the great literary movement then in progress, and thither chiefly resorted the exiled Greek scholars--such as Argyrophilus, George of Trebizond, Theodore of Gaza, and Gemistus. Schools had been opened in this city so early as 1393 by Emmanuel Chrysoloras, which may be said to have given the first impulse to the revival of Greek studies. Emmanuel came over to Italy, in the first instance, in the quality of ambassador from Constantinople, to seek for aid against the Turkish arms among the princes of the West. But he found it more to his taste, and possibly also to his profit, to exchange his diplomatic functions for those of a professor of letters, and soon reckoned among his disciples a group of scholars who were in their turn promoted to chairs of Greek rhetoric in the universities of Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, and Naples. One of these, Guarino, had been formerly acquainted with Chrysoloras at Constantinople, whither he had travelled in 1388 in search of manuscripts. Guarino was at that time only eighteen years of age, and after acquiring the Greek language, he set out on his return to Italy, bearing with him two great chests filled with the treasures which he had collected. A storm overtook the vessel, and in his dismay the captain ordered the whole cargo on board the ship to be cast into the sea. In vain did Guarino throw himself at his feet, and conjure him to spare his precious volumes; they were ruthlessly hurled to the fishes, and when morning dawned the poor scholar’s raven locks were discovered to have turned as white as snow, such had been the anguish which his loss had caused him. However, if he had lost his books, he had not lost his learned gifts, and on reaching Italy, he became professor of rhetoric, first at Florence, and afterwards at Venice and Ferrara. John Aurispa was more fortunate in his researches, and succeeded, in 1423, in bringing back to Italy 238 Greek manuscripts. We have already spoken of him as lecturing at Ferrara under the patronage of the Este. He was secretary both to Eugenius IV. and Nicholas V., and before settling at Ferrara had also taught both at Bologna and Florence. He was succeeded in the chair of rhetoric in the latter city by the celebrated Filelfo, who had likewise made the grand tour of the East, and brought home a magnificent Greek library. This last-named scholar had studied at Constantinople under John Chrysoloras, brother to Emmanuel, whose daughter Theodora he married, a circumstance which swelled his already preposterous vanity, and which he never lost any opportunity of trumpeting to the Greek-loving world.

Filelfo, on returning to Italy, first selected Bologna as the happy spot which was to be blessed with his erudite presence. He entered the city in a sort of triumph, the enthusiastic populace giving him the welcome ordinarily reserved for sovereign princes, and erecting a chair of Moral Philosophy and eloquence for his express occupation, with the handsome annual salary of 450 gold scudi. Every day saw some new festa invented to do honour to the great Professor and his charming “Chrysolorine,” as he somewhat affectedly designated his Greek spouse; and for a brief space Filelfo declared himself satisfied with the amount of homage offered to his genius. “Bologna is a charming city,” he writes in one of his epistles; “the inhabitants are courteous, and not insensible to letters; and what specially pleases me is the consideration and affection which they display towards me.” In 1428, however, a popular revolution dissipated all these pleasing prospects; Filelfo, in company with the Papal Legate, had to fly for his life, and while the cities of Italy scrambled which should obtain possession of so rare a scholar, the coveted prize fell to the share of Florence, where Cosmo de’ Medici and his rival, Philip Strozzi, were just then struggling which should outshine the other in acts of princely munificence. The vanity of Filelfo was once more for a time amply gratified for the Florentines yielded him their hearty applause, and if we are to credit his own words, made him the great lion of their city. “All Florence runs after me” he writes in his letters; “everybody loves me; everybody honours me and lauds me to the skies; my name is in everybody’s mouth. Not only the first men of the city, but the noble ladies also give place when they meet me, and show me so much respect that I am really ashamed. I have every day 400 hearers, or more, and all of them persons of rank and importance.”

And it must be owned that Filelfo worked hard to gain their applause. The routine of his everyday work involved an amount of labour to voice and brain, under which any one but a professor of the fifteenth century must have succumbed. About daybreak he began by lecturing to a crowded audience on Cicero, Livy, or the Iliad. His explanations of Cicero were considered his greatest successes and by his ready and brilliant eloquence he seemed to reproduce the Roman orator to the eyes and ears of his hearers. Returning home, he gave audience to the favoured few who were happy enough to be on his list of private pupils; and at mid-day he was again in the public chair, commenting on Terence, or the Greek historians, Xenophon and Thucydides. Every evening there were literary reunions and learned academies to be attended, or private assemblies, in which Filelfo was, or, at any rate, considered himself to be, the great centre of attraction, and nurtured his good opinion of himself with the homage of an obsequious crowd. Even Sunday was no day of rest to him, for then, in the Church of Sta. Maria dei Fiori, he lectured and commented on Dante.

The fascination of such a life, however, had a make-weight of mortification. Filelfo was possessed with one of those bitter and malignant dispositions that turn the very sweets of life into poison. His very jokes were malignant, as, when disputing with another grammarian on the quantity of a Greek syllable, he offered to pay him 200 scudi if he were proved wrong, on condition that, if right, he might have the satisfaction of shaving off his adversary’s beard. The poor grammarian lost his wager, and, in spite of all his entreaties, Filelfo gratified his revenge in the true spirit of a literary Shylock. It was quite enough for any other scholar to be praised and honoured for him to become at once the mark for Filelfo’s spite. “What does Guarino know, of which Filelfo is ignorant?” he exclaims in one of his letters, his bile being excited by the fact that Guarino’s name was just then in everybody’s mouth. This intolerable presumption raised him enemies in every city; and, indeed, in those days it seems to have been the habit of literary men to spend the greater part of their time in biting and devouring one another. Filelfo, perhaps, may be regarded as the most venomous disputant of them all. He who talked so much of being “loved” by everybody, hated and made himself hated by the entire world. He hated the men of learning who shared with him the favour of the Florentines, because he regarded them as his rivals. He hated the great Cosmo, the Pericles of the New Athens, because his benefits were not exclusively showered on himself. He hated the good and honest citizen Niccoli, the founder of St. Mark’s public library, because he was a friend of the Medici. And he hated the very populace who gaped and wondered at his erudition, because his appetite for flattery growing as it was ministered to, they could not always satisfy its cravings, and at such times Filelfo was ready to denounce them all in that malignant language of which the elegant commentator on Tully was an accomplished master. He poured out his venom on Cosmo in a series of villanous libels, accusing him of attempting his life by poison and the dagger; yet, at the very time when he was inventing these calumnies against a man who had loaded him with favours, he was himself hiring assassins to attack his rival, Carlo Marsuppini, in the streets of Florence--a crime for which the Republic afterwards condemned him to have his tongue cut out, should he ever set foot again upon their territory.

To his other vices Filelfo added that of a grasping avarice: he was continually appealing to the different princes of Italy for larger money advances, and loading them with abuse if they did not satisfy his demands. He threatened Pius II. to turn Turk, if the pension granted by that Pontiff were not more regularly paid; and his contemporary scholars continually complained that, after promising them books, he would afterwards withdraw from his bargain, and demand back again from them what was not really his own property. But, in candour, it must be confessed that, in this last-named matter, Filelfo appears to have been more sinned against than sinning. A very bad habit prevailed at that time among literary men of borrowing books and never returning them. Francesco Barbaro is accused of keeping a chest of Filelfo’s books for thirty years; and similar peccadilloes are charged to the account of Aurispa and Giustiniani. Possibly, observes Tiraboschi, they regarded book thefts in the same light as monks had been used occasionally to regard the pilfering of holy relics. Anyhow, the injury was sensibly felt by the unfortunate owner, and did not improve the asperity of his temper.

Whatever infamy attaches to the character of Filelfo, he met with his match in one of the literary rivals whom he encountered at Florence. Poggio Bracciolini had received his education in his native city, and to a perfect knowledge of Latin and Greek literature added the rarer merit of being a good Hebrew scholar. For thirty-four years of his life he held the office of apostolic secretary under successive Pontiffs, and during all that time he never spent an entire year in any one city. He was present in his official capacity at the Council of Constance, and to while away the hours that hung heavy on his hands, made an excursion to the neighbouring abbey of St. Gall, and disinterred from a damp tower the mouldering manuscript of Quinctilian’s “Institutes.” From thence he passed over to England to pursue his researches in the monastic libraries of this country, but declares that they were full of nothing but “modern doctors, whom we should not think worthy so much as to be heard.” By his discoveries of classic authors, and his own critical and historical writings, he contributed more than any other scholar of his time to the revival of learning, so that some writers have gone so far as to confer on the first half of the fifteenth century the title of “the age of Poggio.” But his glory was sadly clouded by the furious quarrels in which he engaged with all his contemporaries, and the foul and disgraceful language which he poured out against every one who was unhappy enough to come into collision with him. Among the works of this great champion of classic Latinity are four “Invectives” against Filelfo, and five against Lorenzo Valla. The latter were written in revenge for certain criticisms which Valla had published of his Epistles, and are, says Tiraboschi, “a disgraceful monument to the memory of a writer who observes neither rule nor measure, but defiles his pen with every hideous abomination which malice could suggest against his adversaries.” Valla, who was a scholar of precisely the same temper, replied in his “Antidotes to Poggio,” and Filelfo in his “Satires”--all of which are said to be conceived in the same rabid and malignant strain. Nor was it only against such men as these that Poggio directed his venom. Guarino was made the subject of another ferocious onslaught, for no worse misdemeanour than having differed from Poggio in preferring the character of Cæsar to that of Scipio! George of Trebizond, a man of like temper to his own, was another of his opponents, and on one occasion the two disputants, after publicly giving each other the lie, came to blows, and were with difficulty separated by their hearers. And at last this detestable spirit grew on him to such a degree that, no longer content with attacking individuals, he published libels, if we may so say, on the literary world at large, and did his best in his “Dialogue against Hypocrites,” to slaughter the reputation of every man of virtue and celebrity in the world of letters, such as the Blessed John Dominic, Ambrose Traversari, Cardinal Luca Manzuoli, and the entire Franciscan Order. With all this, Poggio probably held the first place among the scholars of his time, unless the superiority be given to his adversary, Lorenzo Valla, who is generally held to have surpassed him in grammatical erudition. Erasmus, indeed, treated the merits of Poggio very lightly. “Poggio was possessed of so little real learning,” he says, “that, even if his books were less full of abominations than they are, they would not repay perusal; as it is, were he even the most erudite of writers, all good men must regard him with horror.” Nor can a much better character be given to Valla; in arrogance and vanity he equalled Filelfo; and in his famous “Treatise on the Elegance of the Latin Tongue,” gave the world to understand that he was about to explain a language which before his time had been understood by none. “These books,” he says, “will contain nothing that has ever been said by anybody else. For many ages past, not only has no one been able to speak Latin, but none have understood the Latin they read, the philosophers have had no comprehension of the philosophers, the advocates of the orators, the lawyers of the jurists,” and so of the rest. This kind of self confidence is, however, so universal among scholars of the age as hardly to call for special notice; but it was the least fault of which Valla stands charged. Passing over grosser accusations brought against him by adversaries whose habits of calumny render their testimony of little value, there was a taint of ingratitude in Valla’s character which is particularly offensive. Having, in his “Declamation against the Donation of Constantine,” attacked the claims of the Holy See in terms which Hallam himself admits could not be excused, be retired from Rome, and found a warm welcome at the court of Naples. Here, however, he soon got involved in difficulties with the Inquisition, in consequence of certain impieties to which he gave utterance on the subject of the Holy Trinity and other fundamental dogmas of the faith. He was only released from prison through the friendly interference of Panormita. Yet as soon as he recovered his liberty he engaged in a furious quarrel with his benefactor, and spared no calumnies by which he could bring discredit on his name and character. He treated it as a crime for any one to differ from him in any point of taste and criticism, and punished all such transgressions by blackening the fair fame of his opponents. Nevertheless, he met with far gentler treatment than he deserved, for it was after he had established his renown as the best Latinist, and, next to Poggio, the most malignant calumniator of his day, that Nicholas V. invited him back to Rome, made him a canon of St. John Lateran, and employed him in numerous translations, all of which were liberally paid for. Valla accepted the dignities and the money offered him by the Pope, and took advantage of his favourable turn of fortune to complete that attack on the papal sovereignty which he had before left unfinished; and he did so in a style which, Hallam informs us, rather resembles the violence of Luther than what might have been expected from a Roman official of the fifteenth century. The clemency shown him by the Pope was perhaps excessive, for he was suffered to live at Rome unmolested, and retained the office and pension of apostolic secretary to the day of his death.

It must be owned that the portrait gallery through which we are passing, has thus far been anything but pleasing, nor can it be denied that in their main features of malice and presumption, most of the scholars of the age exhibit a family resemblance to those noted above. Hallam observes that the inferior renown enjoyed by Giannozzo Manetti, is probably owing to the greater mildness of his character, which involved him in fewer of those altercations to which Poggio and Valla owed a great part of their celebrity. And Tiraboschi apologises to his readers for leaving some portions of his history somewhat obscure, on the ground that the calumnies and misrepresentations indulged in by almost all writers of the period, render it nearly impossible to rely on any of their statements, and to accept as facts anything which they may say unfavourable of one another.

Some noble exceptions, however, are to be found, and among them may be quoted the example of Leonard Bruni, or, as he is more frequently styled from the place of his birth, Leonard Aretino. Whilst Chancellor of Florence he one day engaged in a public philosophic dispute with Giannozzo Manetti, in which the latter gained the advantage over him. Stung with annoyance, Leonard let fall some injurious words, to which, however, Giannozzo replied with his customary good temper, and both returned to their respective homes. But Leonard was so pursued by remorse for his fault that he could not close his eyes all night, and so soon as morning dawned, he hastened to the house of Giannozzo, who was greatly surprised to see the first magistrate of Florence at his door at such an early hour. Leonard, however, only bade him follow him into the city, and conducting him to the great bridge over the Arno, then the most frequented thoroughfare, he publicly asked his pardon, and acknowledged he had had no rest since he had spoken injuriously of so noble an adversary. Giannozzo received his apology with a modesty which was equally admirable, and the friendship which from that day sprung up between these two great men, remained unbroken to the death of Leonard, on which occasion the funeral oration was spoken over his body by Giannozzo.

From the scholars of Florence let us now turn to her Mecænas, the merchant prince, who, for thirty years, held the first rank in the Republic, and deserved to obtain from his grateful fellow citizens the title of “Father of his country.” Cosmo de’ Medici was beyond all question the greatest of his illustrious race. Machiavel calls him the most magnificent and most generous of men, and Flavio declares that he surpassed all his contemporaries in wisdom, humanity, and liberality. His political career seems to have been for the most part free from the vice of selfish ambition; whilst as a patron of letters, even in that age of splendid patrons, he had no equal. In Florence alone he founded three public libraries, expending 36,000 ducats on that of St. Mark’s, which he enriched with 400 Latin and Greek manuscripts, whilst he appointed as librarian Thomas di Sarzana, afterwards Pope Nicholas V. A few years later he rebuilt the library, and added a collection of Hebrew, Arabic, Sanscrit, and Chaldaic books, collected at enormous cost. His love of literature was so genuine, and so superior to the selfishness of a mere bibliopolist, that even when in temporary exile at Venice, he could not help opening his purse-strings in favour of the Venetian library of St. George, and employed his fellow exile, the architect Michelozzi, in providing it with reading benches and other conveniences, presenting it also with many books. It was his wish to draw to Florence all the learned men of the day. He it was who invited thither the Greek Professor Argyrophilus, to the end that he might instruct the Florentine youth in the philosophy of Aristotle. A vast number of Greek exiles received from him a princely welcome, to say nothing of the crowd of native scholars who thronged his palace. Pages might be filled with the mere enumeration of the convents, churches, and hospitals which he built or endowed, not merely at Florence, but even at Jerusalem, where he founded a large hospital for poor pilgrims. He had stewards and administrators in every part of Europe, who helped him to dispense his treasures on worthy objects. Yet with all this, his own establishment was always conducted on the most modest scale, and he who enriched scores of Florentine families, never assumed a more brilliant appearance than that of an ordinary citizen. His liberality was altogether free from ostentation, and appears to have flowed from the purest and most Christian motives. “Never yet,” he complained to one of his friends, “have I been able to spend in God’s honour the sums for which, when I look over my ledger, I find myself indebted to Him.”

It was in the year 1438, whilst Pope Eugenius IV. was residing at Florence, and the Council was still sitting which had for its object the extinction of the Greek schism, that a certain Greek, named George Gemistus, arrived in the city, and one day entered the palace of Cosmo with a copy of Plato under his arm. This celebrated scholar had received the surname of Pletho, in consequence of his enthusiastic admiration of the academic philosopher, and is more commonly known by this sobriquet than by his patronymic. Pletho, as we shall therefore call him, read a few pages of his book to the enraptured ears of Cosmo, and very soon communicated to him a portion of his own enthusiasm. Until then Cosmo had been a stranger to all save the Peripatetic philosophy, and the ideas which now presented themselves to his mind seemed like the opening of some new world. In his delight he conceived the plan of establishing a Platonic academy at Florence, a design which was put into execution without delay. Platonism, however, was then so new in the schools of the West, that Cosmo could find no professor who seemed capable of filling the chair of philosophy to be attached to this academy; and he resolved to educate for that purpose a child whose talents had already attracted his notice. Marsilius Ficinus was the son of his physician; his tiny frame and delicate constitution seemed incapable of making head against the host of maladies with which he had been beset from the cradle. But Cosmo’s quick eye discerned the indications of early genius. “This boy,” he said, “is destined to cure, not the maladies of the body, but those of the soul.”

With his customary bounty, he became a second father to his future professor, and under his direction, Ficinus received a thoroughly Platonic education. He was carefully reared in the maxims and philosophy of the great master, to the end that having early imbibed the principles of Platonism as a kind of second nature, he might be qualified afterwards to become the head preceptor of the new academy. The whole scheme had something visionary about it, and no less so was the character of the man chosen to carry it out. From his boyhood he was a poet and a dreamer. He loved to wander at early daybreak by the banks of the Arno, and recite aloud to the woods and the stream the verses of Virgil’s “Georgics.” Light and country air were his two necessaries; he seemed to live in the sunshine, and on those rare occasions when the fair sky of Florence was overspread with clouds, he could neither write nor study. His work as a composer was exclusively carried on in the early morning hours; then it was that his genius seemed to wake with the sunrise; and if he also spent long night hours over his manuscripts, he only then applied himself to the labour of revision. Cosmo gave him a little lamp, which was often found burning when daylight dawned in the east; he also provided him with books, and specially with manuscripts of Plato procured from Venice at an enormous cost, and to these Ficinus applied himself with such incessant application, that his health almost entirely gave way; in fact, his life seemed always hanging by a single thread, and was preserved only by such extraordinary precautions as are bestowed on some exotic plant. At the age of twenty-three, the young student considered himself ready to read to a learned assembly, presided over by Cosmo, the first pages of his “Platonic Institutions.” When the lecture was over, his patron smiled and gently shook his head. Ficinus understood the gesture, but was not discouraged; he prepared for a fresh course of studies, and placed himself under the historian Platina, more illustrious for his Greek erudition than for his orthodoxy, but the latter condition was not greatly cared for by the young Platonist. In a few months he found that he had made such rapid progress, that, remodelling his work, he submitted it to the judgment of Marcus Musurus, the Greek professor of Venice, and the first editor of Aristophanes. He found Musurus sitting at his writing-table, and having engaged him to give an impartial opinion, began the reading of his manuscript. As the professor listened, he amused himself with turning over the various implements before him. Ficinus at last paused, and asked him what he thought of it.

“I think this,” said Musurus, and taking the ink bottle, he shook it over the open manuscript as if it had been sand. Ficinus betrayed no impatience, which is saying something for his philosophy; and retiring to the country house which Cosmo had presented to him, devoted himself to the task of a third revision. Before it was completed his great patron died leaving his son Pietro and his grandson Lorenzo de Medici to succeed him in his pre-eminence, both in the literary and political world. Pietro and Lorenzo showed themselves as eager to encourage the Platonic academy as its first founder had been; and their enthusiasm was shared by their contemporaries. All the scholars of Italy aspired to the honour of membership; Landino, Alberti, and John Picus of Mirandola, these met together, and contended for the silver laurel wreath, which was the prize of merit; and one of Pietro’s first acts was to establish a professorship, the chair of which was immediately bestowed on Ficinus. In the meetings of this academy the honours bestowed on Plato came very near to idolatry. Its festivals were the anniversaries of his birth and death, a lamp was burnt in his honour, and the professor, in lecturing to his fellow academicians, addressed them, not as “my brethren in Christ,” but as “my brethren in Plato.” It was, perhaps, unfortunate that Ficinus did not rest content with his professor’s chair and his academic reputation. In such a position his Platonic enthusiasm might have been productive of little injury, but at the age of forty-two he entered the priesthood, became canon of Florence, and took up the study of theology. Plato, however, was not laid aside for St. Paul. On whatever subject he wrote or spoke, says Tiraboschi, he seemed unable to refrain from tinging it with the doctrines of the academy. Gemistus, his first master, had been an avowed disciple of the Alexandrian school, and in the furious controversy then raging between the Platonists and the Aristotelians, had highly lauded not only the writings of the Greek philosopher, but those of Hermes and Zoroaster. In fact, as Hallam cautiously expresses it, “there were some grounds for ascribing to him a rejection of Christianity.” Ficinus cannot be charged with similar scepticism, though his lectures seem to have sown the seeds of religious doubt in the minds of some of his hearers. He believed the Gospels, but they were the Gospels Platonised. He went so far as to desire that his favourite author should be read in the Christian churches, and published eighteen books of what he called “Platonic Theology.” Hallam calls this work “a beautiful, but visionary and hypothetical system of Theism.” He did not attack the Christian dogmas, but he treated them as a philosopher rather than as a theologian. He was not content with gathering up and giving to the world the profound maxims of his illustrious master; but he undertook to harmonise the teaching of Plato and the teaching of Scripture, and attempted to prove that all the most prominent Christian mysteries were to be found in the Criton, which he regarded almost as a second Gospel.[308]

The extravagances in which Ficinus indulged were equally maintained in other learned academies. That which flourished at Rome under the direction of Pomponius Lœtus drew on its members the hostility of Paul II., who has been repeatedly charged with “persecuting the learned,” out of that natural antipathy to learning, of which Popes and cardinals are sometimes imagined to possess a kind of monopoly. The historian who originated the charge, however, is no other than Platina, the former master of Ficinus, whom Paul II. had made an enemy by suppressing the college of the Abbreviatori to which he belonged. He was himself a member of the Roman academy, the suppression of which has been differently related by different historians, but it appears certain that the alleged crime of the members was, not their learning, but a real or supposed plot against the Government and certain impious and anti-Christian tenets which they were reported to hold. Tiraboschi considers that their innocence of the charges brought against them may be deduced from the fact that, after a year’s imprisonment, they were all set at liberty, and that Platina in particular was afterwards honourably employed by Sixtus IV., who made him librarian of the Vatican Library. Possibly the impieties of which they were guilty might rather have sprung from the foolish conceit of pedants than any positive unbelief; yet still it must be owned that some of their acts had a suspicious character, and could not but have appeared reprehensible in the eyes of the Pontiff. Michael Canensius declares they were wont to affirm that the Christian religion rested on no sufficient evidence, but only on the testimony of a few weak-headed saints: that they laid aside the use of their Christian names, and adopted others chosen from the great heathens of antiquity; that they were in the habit of swearing by the heathen gods and goddesses; that they disputed concerning the immortality of the soul, and maintained many Platonic errors, that Pomponius disdained the Scriptures, and was wont to say that Christianity was only fit for barbarians, and that, in his enthusiasm for ancient Rome, he even raised and decorated altars to the god Romulus. Some of these charges the accused did not deny; but though examined under the torture, it does not seem that anything transpired which offered satisfactory proofs of the existence of a conspiracy.[309] Paul contented himself, therefore, with suppressing the academy, and thereby earned for himself immense obloquy, and the character of being an enemy of letters; a most undeserved reproach, for, besides maintaining a number of poor scholars in his palace, and being an eager collector of ancient manuscripts and monuments, his biographer tells us that he was accustomed to spend many hours of the night reading the ancient authors, and “that he loved all learned men, provided that to their learning were joined good manners.” This last condition was not always thought equally essential by patrons of letters of this period, who seem, as a general rule, to have cared but little what a man’s life was, provided he knew Greek. Filelfo, however, adds his testimony (which, in this instance, may perhaps be regarded as trustworthy), that Paul II. “was ever a favourer of learned men.”

We must not, however, suppose that the scholars of the Renaissance were exclusively made up of captious grammarians and philosophic sceptics. The movement had its fairer side; it was bewitching in its promise of literary excellence, and was not even devoid of its character of romance. Chivalry was not yet entirely extinct, and among the masters and scholars of the Italian schools some took up the cause of learning in a truly chivalrous spirit, and without a thought of self-interest, devoted themselves to study and teaching, as to a work by which they might benefit their kind. Their enthusiasm for their favourite pursuits appears sometimes in a more amiable character than that which it assumed in the hands of Poggio and his adversaries. Among the grammar professors enumerated by Tiraboschi we find the name of Piattino de’ Piatti, a noble youth brought up as a page in the household of Galeazzo Sforza, who for a very small offence caused him to be imprisoned for fifteen months in a frightful dungeon. We next find him figuring at a splendid tournament at the court of Ferrara, where he bore away the prize, and at the same time struck up an ardent friendship with the poet Strozza, who addressed some verses to him, praising him for knowing how to blend together the merits of the soldier and the scholar. For several years he bore arms under the Duke of Urbino, but his warlike occupations did not hinder him from cultivating the Muses, and he published a volume of Latin poems, which was one of the earliest works printed in Italy. Disappointed at not receiving the promotion he expected from the French kings Charles VIII. and Louis XII., he abandoned the profession of arms, and embraced that of schoolmaster in the little village of Garlasco, opening his humble academy with as much solemnity as if it had been a university, with a learned Latin oration. And we are assured that the number of good scholars then to be found in Italy was so great that many other villages besides Garlasco could boast of possessing as their schoolmasters first-rate professors of eloquence.

But the palm of Christian scholarship belongs, at this time, beyond all question, to John Picus, Prince of Mirandola, whose brief life closed in his thirty-second year, and whose acquirements probably surpassed those recorded of any other scholar. Whilst still a child he evinced so retentive a memory as to be able at once to repeat any verses recited in his presence, and displayed a sort of natural predisposition to the study of the belles-lettres. His mother, however, who wished him to embrace the ecclesiastical state, sent him to Bologna, to read canon law, at the age of fourteen, and after spending two years there, he proceeded to study philosophy in the principal schools of France and Italy. Besides a knowledge of the scholastic writers, he acquired during the next six years the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic tongues; but his enthusiastic and imaginative disposition led him to explore with eagerness the mysteries of the Jewish Cabala, a mass of mystic doctrine attributed to Esdras; on which idle fallacies, says Corniani, Mirandola expended a genius which was fitted to reach the most elevated truths of philosophy.

In his twenty-third year the young scholar appeared at Rome, and astonished the learned world by offering publicly to defend nine hundred theses on questions logical, ethical, mathematical, physical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabalistic; in short, de omni re scibili. Four hundred of these propositions were taken from Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic doctors; the rest were announced to be his own opinions, which he was prepared to defend, subject to the judgment of the Church. There was a dash of vanity in all this, excusable perhaps in so young a scholar, who could not but be conscious of his superiority, and who in his anxiety to display it, offered to pay the expenses of any learned man who might come to oppose him from the utmost parts of the earth. His propositions were meanwhile examined by order of Innocent VIII., and thirteen of them pronounced unsound; whereupon he published an “Apology,” explaining in what sense they were put forth, but wholly submitting to the judgment passed on them by authority. The Holy Father, therefore, while condemning the theses, forbade their author to be in any way molested, and when some of his enemies revived these accusations on the death of Innocent, his successor, Alexander VI., appointed a commission, which declared his innocence of the charge of heresy. He next appeared at Florence, the most brilliant of all the brilliant throng that was gathered in the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and was admitted to the closest friendship of that prince, and his favourite scholars Ficinus and Politian. Young, gifted in mind and person, and possessed of all the fairy favours of rank, wealth, and an honourable fame, Picus of Mirandola yielded at first to the fascinations of the world, which perhaps never assumed a more bewitching guise than in the court of the Medici. His ardent poetic temperament was sensitively alive to the seductions of pleasure, when pleasure came hand in hand with all that was graceful in art and polished in literature. But a few years of such life sufficed to withdraw the veil from his eyes; the pursuit after worldly honours and delights seemed after all, to use his own words, but a child’s chase after painted soap-bubbles; and the day came when, flinging all his lighter poetry into the flames, he prostrated before the altar of the Blessed Virgin, and vowed to dedicate the remainder of his life to the service of God alone. From that time he became as remarkable for his admirable virtues, as he had been before for his learning; his charities to the poor were dispensed on a princely scale, and so great a horror did he conceive for the vain glory into which he had been once betrayed, that he only allowed his writings to appear under the name of some other author. He refused every solicitation to engage in public disputations, and spent the remainder of his days in mingled prayer and study, to which latter exercise, says Paul Cortese, he generally devoted twelve hours a day.

It is remarkable that Picus of Mirandola, though so thoroughly imbued with the literary tastes of the Renaissance, was very far from sharing in that contempt for the elder Christian schoolmen, in which the scholars of the fifteenth century commonly indulged. When Hermolaus Barbarus, in one of his letters, gave vent to his sentiments of scorn for men who could write such bad Latin, Picus replied in an epistle, which Hallam quotes as affording a favourable example of the ease and elegance of his own style, and in which he puts a very good defence in the mouth of those despised barbarians; and Hermolaus had nothing better to say in return than that they would certainly have disowned their advocate for defending them in such classical language.

But we must now enter the school of another Florentine canon, who had the merit not only of being learned in Greek and Latin, but of possessing some of that original and poetic genius which, since the days of Petrarch, had been rare in Italy, overlaid, it may be, by the superincumbent weight of grammar learning. Angelo Politian had first made himself known to the world of letters by a graceful poem, composed when a mere youth on the occasion of a tournament, at which Julian and Lorenzo, the two sons of Pietro de’ Medici, appeared in the lists. The young poet, scarce fifteen years of age, was at once received into the Medici Palace, and astonished his tutors, Landino, Argyrophilus, and Ficinus, with his Latin epigrams. He was not much older when he undertook to translate Homer into Latin verse, and at twenty-nine we find him filling the chair of rhetoric at Florence, a distinction of which he was abundantly vain. Vanity was, in fact, his prevailing fault, and it raised him a swarm of enemies who could not forgive his airs of superiority, and those biting sarcasms which he knew how to clothe in the most elegant Latin. But even his enemies admitted that, as a professor of eloquence, he stood without a rival. Equally at home in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew eloquence, in the Platonic or the Peripatetic philosophy, in rhetoric or in jurisprudence, he amazed his hearers by the multiplicity of his acquirements, no less than by the facility of his style. No wonder that a lecturer of this stamp should succeed in drawing around him all the great intellects of that wonderful age. On the benches beneath that chair you might see the young prince Picus of Mirandola, and the grey-headed men who had been Politian’s own masters; a crowd of foreigners, too, such as the Englishmen Grocyn and Linacre, who were destined to carry back the seeds of polite letters to their own barbaric land, and other pilgrims from France, Germany, and Portugal, besides native scholars from all the cities of Italy. Lorenzo, who in 1469 had succeeded to his father’s wealth and dignities, would also join the learned throng, and hang on the honied words of the young professor. As every one knows, the Muses are not always so happy as to carry the Graces in their train, and Politian’s portrait has been drawn by Jovius in no very flattering terms. On first beholding him, he says, it was impossible to avoid an involuntary movement of surprise and disgust; his huge, unsightly nose, squinting eye, and awkward stoop, inspired no favourable impression; but no sooner had he begun to speak, than your senses were fairly taken captive, and closing your eyes, you willingly gave yourself up to the power of that graceful eloquence and the exquisite music of that voice, which very soon made you indifferent to the defect of other natural advantages in the speaker. “Yes,” you might have said to yourself as you listened, “this is indeed rhetoric; hitherto in that chair I have listened to grammarians and critics, but the Muses have at last taken pity on our grammar-beladen ears, and sent us one who can feel the sentiment of Virgil and Homer, as well as explain their syntax.”

It was, in fact, the possession of that inexplicable gift, the poetic sensibility, which raised Politian to an eminence differing so very widely from that of the Poggios and Vallas who had preceded him, and which made him more charming as a lecturer, and perhaps more amiable as a man. Instead of wrangling over verbs and cases, he loved to picture to his own and his hearers’ imagination, the rural scenes which Virgil painted; and seizing some happy phrase of the Latin poet, to expand, to colour, to revivify it till you wandered under the shade of the beech trees, and heard the very hum of the bees among the odorous limes. At such moments, laying down his book, with the skill of an Improvisatore, he would take you to the woods and fields, and make you listen to “the soft and soul-like sounds” of the wind, as it sighed among the pines, to the rustling of the oak leaves in Vallombrosa, to the merry chattering of the tiny brook over its bed of pebbles, and the lowing of the herds in the rich Tuscan pastures. All this, to the ears of the Florentines, so long condemned to a sort of intellectual aridity, was like fresh showers on a thirsty soil. To none was it more delightful than to Lorenzo, himself a poet of no mean ability, and keenly alive to the charm of rural sights and rural sounds; and after listening to such a lecture, he would wait in the hall, and taking the professor by the arm, would lead him out to that fair villa at Fiesole, which looked over the dome and towers of Florence, and over a varied landscape of mountains, woods, and gardens, all glittering in the sunset glories of a Tuscan sky. There were gathered day after day the choicest intellects and the most erudite minds, men of all nations and of all gifts: critics, artists, poets, antiquarians; Lorenzo had a welcome for each, and was as ready to reward the happy presentee of an ancient medal or a classic vase, as he was to add to his library a Greek manuscript brought from the farther end of Europe by Lascaris,[310] or a new treatise from the pen of Landino. Every day some fresh treasure was displayed to the admiration of his illustrious friends, some chef d’œuvre of ancient sculpture, or a heap of Eastern manuscripts, sold to him by a Jewish merchant for their weight in gold. “I love these books so dearly,” he once said, “that I would give my whole princely wardrobe to purchase them.” The arts were not forgotten. Perugino was among the honoured guests of Fiesole; and among the pupils of Politian was the young sculptor Michael Angelo Buonarotti, whom Lorenzo lodged in his palace, and treated as his own son. The Platonic academicians, too, found a warm supporter in the grandson of their founder, and Ficinus gratified to the full his thirst for sunshine, and his dreamy poetic tastes in that little chamber, where morning after morning he loved to throw open the windows, and listen to the song of the birds as they greeted the dawn, and drink in the fragrance of the hawthorn and the honeysuckle, and the thousand exotic plants which blossomed on the parterres and terraces. There, to use the exquisite similitude of the English philosopher, “the breath of the flowers in the open air came and went like the warbling of music;”[311] there the fountains threw up their graceful jets, and made a pleasant murmur to the ear, and the sensitive and highly-wrought organisation of the Platonic scholar was soothed and invigorated by contact with all that was beautiful to the eye and ear in nature or in art.

All this was delightful enough, nor is it to be wondered at that the grace and fascination of such scenes blinded the eyes of those who took part in them, and the judgment of those who have been their historians. But, in truth, there was another side to the picture. The revival of classic taste at Florence was a revival of practical Paganism. It was not a mere return to those principles which had been admitted in the Christian schools before the rise of Scholasticism, when the Latin poets were freely studied even in ecclesiastical seminaries, and the Greek learning of the monks of St. Gall earned for some among them the title of the Frati Ellenici. It was a great deal more than this. It not only restored the study of the classic writers, but also their habits of thought, and their gross sensuality. It revived the Pagan, and excluded the Christian ideas; Christ was no longer recognised as “the One Teacher of man;” on the contrary, even from the pulpit you heard quotations from Virgil and Juvenal quite as often as from the Gospels. A style of speaking had become fashionable, according to which a certain sort of barbarism was associated with the idea of Christianity, as though it were something Gothic and transmontane. The Saints and Fathers of the Church gradually disappeared from the schools; the touching representations of Christian mysteries were withdrawn from the public eye; and society, instead of being permeated, as in former centuries, with an atmosphere of the faith, was now redolent of heathenism. Christianity was looked on as unworthy of furnishing subjects to the pen or pencil of the scholar. In those trellised gardens where the wits of Florence assembled to listen to the graceful eloquence of Politian, were grouped fragments of ancient art or the copies of modern sculptors, the eager students of the new school of naturalism. Here it was an undraped Venus, there a Satyr or a Bacchanal. Sometimes Lorenzo appeared among the brilliant throng, and condescended to assign to the artists whom he entertained a new subject for their genius. To Pollajuolo he gave the twelve labours of Hercules, to Ghirlandajo the misfortunes of Vulcan, to Luca Signorelli all the gods and goddesses of Olympus, whose stories were to be represented with little of that reserve demanded by Christian modesty. Yet artists might have been found at that time whose genius was impressed with a more religious character, but they received no encouragement at Florence, where the school most in favour was that which substituted sensual for mystic beauty; and this debased heathenised taste equally pervaded the Florentine literature and schools.

The books admitted as class-books into the new academies were precisely those authors which have been in all ages proscribed as the most dangerous, but which were now placed in the hands of the young without restriction of any sort. And, indeed, what kind of moral safeguards were likely to be supplied by professors such as Filelfo, Poggio, and Valla, whose licentious language was unhappily rather the rule than the exception among the teachers of the day? The study of the Scriptures, which in earlier times had filled so large a place in the scholastic course, was now all but entirely laid aside; and we are assured that some would even ask, with astonishing simplicity, what use could be derived from the knowledge of events that had happened so many ages ago? As to that liturgical element which had hitherto mingled so largely in the scheme of Christian education, it had little chance of being preserved in an age when not lay professors alone, but even ecclesiastics, were so besotted with their devotion to Pagan models, as to show themselves ashamed of the language of the Church formularies. Whilst some escaped from the misery of reciting their Latin breviaries by obtaining permission to use a Greek or Hebrew version, others gave up reading the Epistles of St. Paul through fear of accustoming their ears to so unclassical a style; and numerous proposals were set on foot for what was called a reform of the Liturgy, which should have for its object the correction of its style and its adaptation to classical forms. But even these were not the worst excesses. Tiraboschi assures us that scepticism and open unbelief were becoming frightfully common among men of letters, and specially in the Italian universities which were declared in the following century to be hot-beds of infidelity. Yet so innate in the human soul is the craving for some kind of mysticism, that at the very time that faith in the Christian mysteries was being rejected, many were entangling themselves in the absurdities of the Jewish Cabala; and not a few addicted themselves to magical studies, practising rites and incantations of most shocking impiety. Even where these grosser disorders did not exist, the combined influence of heathenism and sensuality produced a certain irreligious and intensely worldly tone, more difficult, perhaps, to combat than open vice or infidelity; and it was of this that Savonarola complained when from the pulpit of St. Mark’s he first addressed the Florentines with his fervid Biblical eloquence, but found his glowing words fall, as he expressed it, upon hearts as hard and as cold as marble.

In other respects, also, the age of the Medici resembled but too closely that of Augustus. It was an age when a people were being cajoled to surrender their freedom into the hands of an absolute ruler, who used as his instrument for undermining republican institutions weapons far more deadly than the sword. Lorenzo had read Tacitus to some purpose, and thoroughly understood his maxim, that the easiest way to enslave a nation is first to corrupt it. He scrupled not to secure his political ascendancy in Florence by ministering to the baser passions of the populace. He amused them with shows and dances, carnival masquerades, and midnight processions, in which the flood-gates of license were freely opened, and heathen fables were represented in all their most unseemly crudeness; and in return they let him steal away their independence, and appropriate to himself the authority of the sovereign of Florence under the title of her First Citizen. Magnificent orgies were held by torchlight, wherein the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, or some other such subject, was enacted by bands of superbly-dressed masquers, singing those celebrated carnival songs composed by Lorenzo, which were, we are told, for the most part, immoral and indecent, expressing, not the graceful Platonism of a classical academy, but a mythological burlesque, flavoured for the grosser tastes of the populace.

It was against this flood of iniquity in the schools, the palace, and the public streets, that the bold eloquence of Savonarola was at this time directed, creating a moral reaction, which proved, however fallacious in its brilliant promise of reform. Taking the Scriptures as his weapon of warfare, he dealt rude and terrible blows at those who were sapping the very foundations of Christianity with their elegant Paganism. He complained that priests and doctors now thought of nothing but rhetoric. They studied Horace and Cicero to prepare themselves for the cure of souls. They gave up the study of the Scriptures in order to preach Plato from the pulpit. The very art and music which they encouraged were instruments of demoralisation rather than of popular instruction. Most terrible was the eloquence with which he attacked the authors of such abuses. “How have you renounced the Devil and his pomps?” he exclaimed in one of his sermons--“you, who every day do his works, and attend not to the law of Christ, but the literature of the Gentiles; declaring the Scriptures to contain only food fit for women, and demanding in their place the eloquence of Tully and the sounding words of the poets to be preached to you!” On no subject were his strictures more unsparing than on the education of the young. He built his hopes of reform not on his grown-up hearers and converts; but on the children, for whose benefit he sought to introduce a system of studies, the principles of which in the main coincided with those of the ancient Christian schools. He did not propose the exclusion of the heathen poets and philosophers, but demanded that no lesson in Pagan literature should be given without a simultaneous one from Christian sources; that the Scriptures should be ever in the hand of the professor; that St. Jerome and St. Augustine should be studied together with Homer and Cicero; that no book of immoral tendency should be tolerated in the schools; and that teachers should not fail to point out to their pupils the folly and impiety of the heathen fables.

Savonarola had the satisfaction of effecting not a few conversions among the men of letters who gathered round his pulpit. Ficinus became his warm apologist, and after listening to his sermons declared his intention of devoting the rest of his life to religion. Nicholas of Schomberg and Zenobius Acciajoli abandoned the world, and assumed the Dominican habit. Picus Mirandola sold all his estates and distributed the price to the poor, and even Politian on his death-bed received the habit of religion from the hand of one of his friars. But whatever were the success gained by the preacher among the Florentine courtiers, his eloquence was powerless over the mind of their master. Lorenzo and Savonarola each tried to gain the other, and each was doomed to suffer defeat. Lorenzo vainly tried to corrupt or silence an orator who was equally indifferent to threats or bribes; and when the prince lay on his death-bed, Savonarola, as vainly, strove to wring from him a promise to restore her liberties to Florence. After his death, indeed, which took place in 1492, a brilliant triumph seemed to crown the hopes of the popular friar, and under his leadership, Florence, having expelled the Medici, seemed about to exchange her debased republicanism for a theocracy, and her free life of pleasure for an almost puritanic severity of manners. But the tide of social corruption which had for a moment been thus forcibly dammed up, soon burst the barrier that opposed it, and swept away all traces of the seeming reform, the reformer himself being the first victim of its fury. Those very streets of Florence which had witnessed the Medicean carnival shows, and where a little later the Florentines, under the direction of their republican chief, had made solemn acts of reparation for past license, now saw the reformer himself borne to ignominious execution amid the howls and blasphemies of an infuriated populace.

The expulsion of the Medici from Florence in no way checked the progress of the classical Renaissance, which only attained its full growth in the following generation. To the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent succeeded that of his son Pope Leo X., under whose princely rule Rome drew to herself the literary throngs who had before illuminated the Tuscan court, and rejoiced in the questionable glories of a second Augustan age. But of Rome and her Pontiffs, her garish splendour and her true reform, we shall speak in another chapter. Before doing so we must first look across the Alps, and see what has been going on in the world of letters in the colder climate of the North.

CHAPTER XXI.

DEVENTER, LOUVAIN, AND ALCALA.

A.D. 1360 TO 1517.

It is not to be supposed that the development which had been taken by the universities, and which we have been engaged in tracing in the foregoing chapters, the perils to which their younger members were exposed, and the yet graver results that might be expected to ensue to faith and morals if their influence continued without some salutary check, could fail, even in their own day, of attracting the attention of thoughtful men; and much curious illustration might be drawn from the literature of the fourteenth century, tending to show how questionable a place the great academies of learning at that time held in popular estimation. The most racy legends of mediæval diablerie generally introduce us to some student of Paris or Salamanca, who has made a compact with the enemy of souls; while the graver histories of the saints are crowded with examples of those who fled into the cloister to escape the contagion of the schools.

The danger to which the scholastic convertites seem to have been most sensitively alive was not one, perhaps, which, to modern notions, would seem the most appalling. It was not the licentious manners, nor even precisely the heterodox opinions of the schools, which chiefly terrified them, but the subtle perils of intellectual vanity. It has been before remarked that, among the old monastic scholars, the existence of this danger was hardly recognised. The obligations of their state for the most part protected them from its attacks. “What they learnt without guile they communicated without envy,”[312] and they believed and practically set forth the doctrine which, as one of modern times has beautifully expressed it, acknowledges “humility, the basis of morals, to be also the foundation of reason.” So entirely did the rules of holy living purge the pursuit of science from the leaven of pride, that it is quite common to find ancient writers speaking of learning as though it were almost a virtue. Things had sadly changed in this respect since the close of the tenth century, and the warnings which St. Bernard addressed to the scholars of his day had to be repeated by the ascetics of each successive age with ever-increasing earnestness. He sorrowfully lamented that those who pursued learning were daily more and more losing sight of its right order, its right motive, and its right end. The order of true knowledge, he said, is to set in the first rank the things that concern salvation; its motive should be charity, and its end, neither curiosity nor vain-glory, but our own or our neighbour’s edification. And he failed not to remind the would-be philosophers whom he addressed, and whose chief object seemed to be to make themselves talked about, that the “biting tooth” of the Latin satirist had long before drawn their portraits, and ridiculed those who only care to know in order that somebody else may know that they know.[313] The evils he complained of had certainly not abated with time; nevertheless, the old Christian morality, which was so based on intellectual lowliness as to be hardly capable of realising a fear of the opposite vice until it arose before the eye in all its deformity, was too deeply rooted in Christendom to be eradicated by one or two generations of professors; and its influence may be traced in the horror which good men felt and expressed for what they regarded as a more radical poison than the grosser temptations of an undisciplined life. And we who have witnessed the later issues of that great Revolt of Reason which took its beginnings in the pride of intellect, and which will find its end in the reign of Antichrist, are bound to bear witness that they judged aright, and to applaud a sagacity which originated less perhaps in any very quick-sighted intelligence than in the undulled instincts of the Christian sense.

When, therefore, we represent to ourselves the learned world of the Middle Ages crowding to the universities that were starting up in almost every provincial capital of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we must not forget that a quiet undercurrent was always flowing in an opposite direction, though it had no power to overcome the strong full tide of fashion. Thus, the life of the Blessed Peter Jeremias, of the Order of Preachers, presents us with the picture of the student of Bologna about to read for his doctor’s degree, when, one night as he sits at his books, the window of his room is dashed in, and the voice of one of his fellow-students, recently departed, warns him in terrible accents to renounce those academic honours, in the greedy pursuit of which he had lost his immortal soul. Peter, pierced to the soul by this voice from beyond the grave, abandons his intention of reading for honours, and presents himself the next morning at the gates of the Dominican Convent to implore admission among the friars. And it was to another conversion of this sort, somewhat less pictorial in its colouring, that we owe the foundation of a very remarkable religious institute, too closely associated with the history of education to be left unnoticed here.

Somewhere about the year 1360 there appeared at Paris a young Flemish student named Gerard, a native of the town of Deventer, whose success in every branch of study acquired him no mean fame in academic circles, and inflated him with a corresponding degree of vanity. He took his master’s degree in his eighteenth year, received several rich benefices, began a very pompous and expensive way of life, and at last removed to Cologne, less to study than to display and enjoy himself. There, however, he found his fate awaiting him. It was the precise period when a great spiritual reaction was going on in Rhenish Germany: not twenty years before Cologne had witnessed the conversion of the celebrated John Tauler, whose pride of learning had yielded to the simple word of a nameless unlettered layman, and who spent the rest of his life in preaching those doctrines of self-abnegation on which he built the edifice of the spiritual life. Ruysbroek, the greatest contemplative of his time, was still living in the Green Valley of the forest of Soignies, and training many a fervid soul in the mystic science which aimed at uniting man to God by utterly separating him from creatures. It was probably one of these disciples of Ruysbroek, a religious solitary, whose name, like that of Tauler’s “layman,” has not been preserved, who determined to undertake the conversion of the gay young canon, in whom, despite his vanity and his love of the world, he detected the promise of more excellent things.

The biographer of Gerard has told the story of his conversion briefly enough, and compressed the arguments of the orator into one brief sentence, Quid hic stas, vanis intentus? Alius homo fieri debes. And another man Gerard indeed became. He flung the world behind his back, and entered on a life of penance with no less ardour than that with which he had applied himself awhile before to the business of the schools. For three years he retired among the Carthusians and wholly disappeared from the world; and when he returned there was little of the old Gerard about him. He at once devoted himself to the work of preaching, and generally preached twice a day, his sermons being seldom less than three hours in length. But it was difficult to weary a German congregation of that enthusiastic period, and no complaints appear to have been made of Gerard’s prolixity. During his retirement he had placed himself under the direction of Ruysbroek, and appears to have caught much of his tone and spirit. He had made the Scriptures his only study, and these, expounded with simple eloquence from earnest lips, drew him crowds of hearers, “clergy and laity, men and women, little and great, learned and unlearned, lawyers and magistrates, bond and free, rich and poor, beggars and pilgrims.” He laid the axe to the root of the tree, and like St. John Baptist, called on all men to do worthy works of penance. In short, he gave the age what it wanted, and though he met with many contradictions, he also effected many practical reforms.

Gerard the Great, as he was called, soon reckoned a considerable number of disciples, whom he made it his chief object to ground in the spiritual life; and in spite of his renown as one of the most learned doctors of his time, he thoroughly inculcated the lesson of intellectual humility. Out of the ranks of his followers was gradually formed a sort of fraternity or congregation; and he had conceived the design of founding for their reception certain monasteries under the rule of the Canons Regular, in which purpose he was greatly encouraged by Ruysbroek. Gerard died before he was able to put his plans into execution, but they were carried out by his disciples, and specially by Master Florentius Radewyns, a canon of Utrecht, a former student at the university of Prague. The new religious assumed the title of “Brethren of the Common Life;” their mother-house was at Deventer, they lived like monks, though without at first taking the religious vows, and their employment was the correction and transcription of books, which formed their principal source of revenue. Gerard, in the rule he had drawn up for his own guidance, had prohibited all profane studies. He desired that his children should exclusively addict themselves to the reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, not wasting their time over “such vanities as geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, lyric poetry, and judicial astrology.” In the rigorism of these views we detect the spirit of one who has tasted of a poisoned cup, and knows no other security than a rule of total abstinence. He specially forbids all gainful studies, which obscure and obliquify the human reason, and do not tend to God; and he roundly asserts that very few persons who follow the pursuits of law or medicine are ever found who live a just, honest, and quiet life. No doubt his principles were extreme, and it is some consolation to find that he admitted of certain dispensations. The wiser of the Gentile philosophers, such as Plato and Socrates, might, he admitted, be read with profit. Seneca also was to be tolerated, and with an amiable inconsistency we find him, even in his rule of life, slipping in, half unconsciously, a quotation from Virgil.

All this was exactly what might have been expected from a converted man of the world; but Florentius had gone through a different kind of experience, and one which made his views less austere and exclusive. He had passed the ordeal of a university career unscathed, and his biographer expends an entire chapter in bringing forward proofs why the name he bore was specially appropriate to one whose life from childhood had been so holy and unspotted. Not only was he himself a flower of all perfection, but he was also destined to make the houses he governed flower-beds from which spiritual bees were to suck the honey of wisdom; his brethren were to give out to a naughty world the sweet odour of virtue, according to that of the Spouse in the Canticles, “The flowers have appeared in our land.” Florentius was the model of a good scholar, kind to his equals, respectful to his superiors, a proficient in the liberal arts, but keeping his heart for the Divine law, which he loved and studied far more diligently than he did the book of the Gentiles.

Under his superiority the labours of the brethren were made to embrace a larger sphere of usefulness, and to include the education of youth. The prohibition against profane learning speedily disappeared, and the schools of Deventer attained high celebrity; and there, in 1393, a little scholar, Thomas Hammerlein by name, was admitted under the roof of Florentius, becoming afterwards the biographer of his revered master, and the reputed author of the “Following of Christ.”

Not to enter into the vexed question whether he were indeed the author, or only the transcriber, of that first of uninspired books, it is yet satisfactory to know that the Thomas à Kempis, whom from infancy we have been used to revere, is not reduced by the investigations of ruthless critics to a mere mythical existence. He really lived, wrote, taught, and prayed. In the college of Deventer he studied grammar and plain-chant under Florentius, and tells us how, when present in choir with his schoolfellows, he loved stealthily to watch his master, because of his devout aspect, being cautious, however, that his pious curiosity was not perceived, inasmuch as the good rector could make himself feared as well as loved. He takes us into the school, too, and shows us the master setting copies, and praising the flexible fingers of a little disciple, whom, with the blessing of God, he hopes to form into a good writer. Or we enter the cell of the devout brother, Gerard of Zutphen, whose whole consolation lay in holy books, and who was liable to get so absorbed in the study of them, that a charitable brother had to come and warn him when the bell had rung for dinner. He was the librarian, and had a passing great care for his books; but as for himself and his corporeal wants, if superiors and companions had not seen to them better than he did himself, he would have fared but poorly. He thought so highly of the benefits to be derived from useful reading, that he lent his books to ecclesiastics out of doors, to win them from idle and frivolous amusements. “Books,” he would say, “preach better than we can do.” And therefore he held them in great reverence, read them lovingly, and copied them with the utmost diligence. Nor must we omit to mention the pious cook, John Ketel, the saint of the community, as all, by common consent, seem to have regarded him. Florentius knew his merit, and to increase it never gave him a civil word; but his humility and sweetness were proof against every trial. Or that devout clerk, Arnold Schoonhove, a schoolfellow of Thomas, who never played in the streets with other idle boys, and when he sat in school with them heeded not their childish pranks, but steadily wrote down the master’s words on paper, and got a chosen comrade (who was probably Thomas himself) to read over the lesson to him, or hear him repeat it. “It was God whom he chiefly sought in his studies,” says his friend, “and what he liked best was to get into a quiet corner and pray.” After seven years’ study among the Brethren of Common Life, Thomas took the habit of the Canons Regular in the monastery of St. Agnes, at Zwoll, where he lived till his ninety-second year, engaged in useful labours, transcribing and composing pious books, which earned for him the sobriquet of the Hammer of Hearts. He has left us memorials of his monastery and his college-life, written with a sweet simplicity which reminds us of Bede. Of his own life we know but little, yet that little has a character of its own. His world was his cell; he was never quite happy out of it, and if sometimes induced by his brethren to go abroad and take a little air, he would soon contrive to get away, with the transparent excuse, that “Some one was waiting for him in his chamber.” The others would smile, knowing well Who He was of Whom he spoke, even the Beloved, of Whom it is written that He stands at the door and knocks. In all the books that he transcribed he wrote his favourite motto, “Everywhere I sought for rest, but I found it nowhere save in a little corner, with a little book.” And a certain old and much-defaced picture was long preserved, which represented his effigies surrounded with the legend, which must here be added in its original phraseology:--“In omnibus requiem quæsivi, sed non inveni, nisi in Hoexkins ende Boexkins.”

In process of time the Brethren of Common Life spread over Flanders, France, and Germany, and the schools they founded multiplied and flourished. They were introduced into the University of Paris by John Standonch, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who gave into their direction the College de Montaigu, of which he was the principal, and established them in Cambray, Valenciennes, Mechlin, and Louvain. He drew up statutes for their use, which are supposed by Du Boulay to have furnished St. Ignatius with the first notions of his rule, an idea which receives some corroboration from the fact that the saint studied at the College de Montaigu during his residence at the University of Paris. Standonch himself received the habit of the Poor Clerks, as they were now often called, and had the satisfaction of seeing more than 300 good scholars issue from his schools, many of whom undertook the direction or reform of other academies. In 1430 the Institute numbered forty-five houses, and thirty years later the numbers were increased threefold. The Deventer brethren were far from being mere mystics and transcribers of books. The aim of their foundation was doubtless to supply a system of education which should revive something of the old monastic discipline, but they cultivated all the higher branches of learning, and their schools were among the first of those north of the Alps which introduced the revived study of classical literature. One of their most illustrious scholars was Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor’s cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning. Eugenius IV. appointed him his legate, and Nicholas V. created him Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, in the Tyrol. His personal character won him the veneration of his people, but, according to Tennemann, his love of mathematics led him into many theological extravagances. He was strongly inclined to the views of the Neo-Platonists; he considered, moreover, that all human knowledge was contained in the ideas of numbers, and attempted to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity on mathematical principles. He was undoubtedly a distinguished man of science, and was the first among moderns to revive the Pythagorean hypothesis of the motion of the earth round the sun. Cusanus had studied at most of the great universities, but held none of them in great esteem, for he professed a sovereign contempt for the scholastic philosophy which still held its ground in those academies. At his death he left his wealth to an hospital which he had founded in his native village, and to which he attached a magnificent library. Deventer could boast indeed of being the fruitful mother of great scholars, such as Hegius, Langius, and Dringeberg, all of whom afterwards took part in the restoration of letters. The brethren, moreover, displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their college. And in 1475, when Alexander Hegius became rector of the schools, he made the first bold experiment of printing Greek.

It is not to be supposed that such a revolution as that which was brought about in the world of letters by the new invention could fail of producing events of a mixed character of good and evil. Whatever was fermenting in the minds of the people now found expression through the press, and Hallam notices “the incredible host of popular religious tracts poured forth” before the close of the fifteenth century, most of them of a character hostile to the faith. The first censorship of printed books appears to have been established in 1480, by Berthold, Archbishop of Mentz, who explained his reasons for taking this step in a mandate, wherein he complains of the abuse of the “divine art” of printing, whereby perverse men have turned that to the injury of mankind which was designed for their instruction. Specially he alludes to those unauthorised and faulty translations into the vulgar tongue of the Scriptures, and even the canons of the Church, wherein men of no learning or experience have taken on them to invent new words or use old ones in erroneous senses, in order to express the meaning of the original, “a thing most dangerous in the Sacred Scriptures.” He therefore forbids any such translations to be thenceforward published without being approved by four doctors, under pain of excommunication, desiring that the art which was first of all discovered in his city, “not without divine aid,” should be maintained in all its honour.

This mandate was only directed against the faulty translations of the Holy Scriptures. No opposition was offered to the multiplication of correct versions, both of the Latin Vulgate and its various translations. The Cologne Bible, printed in 1479, had before this appeared, with the formal approbation of the university. The very first book printed by Gutenburg and Fust in 1453, was the Latin Bible, and among the twenty-four books printed in Germany before the year 1470 we find five Latin and two German editions of the Bible. Translations of the Holy Scriptures into various modern tongues were among the very first books issued from the press; as the Bohemian version in 1475, Italian in 1471--which ran through eleven editions before the close of the century, the Dutch in 1477, and the French in the same year. The admirers of Luther have therefore fallen into a strange error, when they represent him as the first to unlock the Scriptures to the people, for twenty-four editions of the German Bible alone had been printed and published before his time.

It was in the year 1476 that a little choir-boy of Utrecht entered the college of Deventer, and gave such signs of genius and industry as to draw from his masters the prediction that he would one day be the light of his age. He was a namesake of the founder, but, after the fashion of the day, adopted a Latin and Greek version of his Flemish name of Gerard, and was to be known to posterity as Desiderius Erasmus. Like Thomas à Kempis, he passed from the schools of Deventer to the cloisters of the Canons Regular, a step which, he assures us, was forced on him by his guardians, and never had his own assent. A happy accident enabled him to visit Rome in the suite of the Bishop of Cambray and once released from the wearisome discipline of convent life, he never returned to it, but spent the rest of his life wandering from one to another of the capitals of France, Italy, and England, teaching for a livelihood, courted by all the literary and religious parties of the day, and satirising them all by turns, indisputably the literary Coryphæus of his age, but penetrated through and through with its scoffing and presumptuous spirit. It was an age fruitful in pedants and humanists, whose destiny it was to help on the revolution in faith by a revolution in letters. Schools and professors multiplied throughout Germany. At the very time when Hegius was teaching the elements of Greek to Erasmus, his old comrades Langius and Dringeberg were presiding over the schools of Munster and Schelstadt. Rodolph Langius exerted himself strenuously in the cause of polite letters, and whilst superintending his classes occupied spare moments in correcting the text of almost every Latin work which at that time issued from the press, and in making deadly war on the scholastic philosophy. His rejection of the old-fashioned school-books and his innovations on time-honoured abuses raised against him the friars of Cologne, and a controversy ensued in which Langius won so much success as enabled him to affix the stigma of barbarism on his opponents. His friend and namesake Rodolph Agricola, who had studied at Ferrara under Theodore of Gaza, and was held by his admirers superior in erudition to Politian himself, at this time presided over the school of Groningen. Besides his skill in the learned tongues he was a poet, a painter, a musician, an orator, and a philosopher. Such a multitude of accomplishments won him an invitation to the court of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, where a certain learned academy had been founded, called the Rhenish Society, for the encouragement of Greek and Hebrew literature, the members of which, says Hallam, “did not scorn to relax their minds with feasting and dancing, not forgetting the ancient German attachment to the flowing cup.” This is a polite way of rendering a very ugly passage, which in the original tells us plainly that the Rhenish academicians were addicted to excessive inebriety and other disgraceful vices. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that Agricola, who died three years after his removal to Heidelberg, received on his death-bed the habit of those very friars whom, during life, he and his friend Langius had done their best to hold up to popular contempt.

About the same time Reuchlin was studying at Paris, where, in 1458, Gregory of Tiferno had been appointed Greek professor. Reuchlin visited Rome, and translated a passage from Thucydides in the presence of Argyrophilus, with such success that the Greek exclaimed, in a transport of delight (and possibly of surprise, at such an achievement on the part of a Northern barbarian), “Our banished Greece has flown beyond the Alps!” Reuchlin was a Hebrew scholar, a circumstance which, in the end, proved his ruin; for, embracing the Cabalistic philosophy, he abandoned classics and good sense in the pursuit of that absurd mysticism. In this strange infatuation he had many companions. Not a few of those who had shown themselves foremost in deriding the scholastic philosophy, ended by substituting in its place either open scepticism or the philosophy of magic. A few years later, the wild theories of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Jerome Cardan, found eager adherents among those who conceived it a proof of good scholarship to despise St. Thomas as a Goth. Reuchlin, whilst pouring forth his bitter satires against the old theologians, was printing his treatise on the Cabala, entitled De Verbo Mirifico, wherein magic is declared to be the perfection of philosophy, which work was formally condemned at Rome. However, all the French savants of the Renaissance were not Cabalists, nor did all, when they introduced the study of Greek, forget that it was the language of the Gospels. The real restoration of Greek studies in France must be ascribed to Budæus, who made up, by the piety and indefatigable studies of his later years, for a youth of wild irregularity. He had studied under Lascaris, and though he had reached a very mature age before he devoted himself to letters, he soon became as familiar with the learned tongues as with his native idiom. His treatise on the Ancient Money first rendered his name famous, and secured him the friendship of Francis I. He profited from the favour shown him by that monarch, to solicit from him the foundation of the Royal College of France, for the cultivation of the three learned tongues, and thus fairly introduced the “Cecropian Muse” into the University of Paris. If we may credit the authority of a grave rector of that university, this momentous change was advantageous, not merely to the minds but also to the morals of her students. St. Jerome, as we know, imposed upon himself the study of Hebrew as an efficacious means of taming the passions; and Rollin affirms that many who, in former years, had been nothing but idle men of pleasure, when once they began to read the Greek authors flung their vices and follies to the winds, and led the simple and austere manner of life that becomes a scholar. He quotes a passage from the manuscript Memoirs of Henry de Mesmes, which gives a pleasant picture of the college life of those days, and may be taken as an example of the sort of labour imposed on a hard-working law student of the sixteenth century:--“My father,” he says, “gave me for a tutor John Maludan of Limoges, a pupil of the learned Durat, who was chosen for the innocence of his life and his suitable age to preside over my early years, till I should be old enough to govern myself. With him and my brother, John James de Mesmes, I was sent to the college of Burgundy, and was put into the third class and I afterwards spent almost a year in the first. My father said he had two motives for thus sending me to the college: the one was the cheerful and innocent conversation of the boys, and the other was the school discipline, by which he trusted that we should be weaned from the over-fondness that had been shown us at home, and purified, as it were, in fresh water. Those eighteen months I passed at college were of great service to me. I learnt to recite, to dispute, and to speak in public; and I became acquainted with several excellent men, many of whom are still living. I learned, moreover, the frugality of the scholar’s life, and how to portion out my day to advantage; so that, by the time I left, I had repeated, in public, abundance of Latin, and two thousand Greek verses, which I had written after the fashion of boys of my age, and I could repeat Homer from one end to the other. I was thus well received by the chief men of my time, to some of whom my tutor introduced me. In 1545, I was sent to Toulouse with my tutor and brother, to study law under an old grey-haired professor, who had travelled half over the world. There we remained for three years, studying severely, and under such strict rules as I fancy few persons nowadays would care to comply with. We rose at four, and, having said our prayers, went to lectures at five, with our great books under our arms, and our inkhorns and candlesticks in our hands. We attended all the lectures until ten o’clock, without intermission; then we went to dinner, after having hastily collated during half an hour what our master had written down. After dinner, by way of diversion, we read Sophocles, or Aristophanes, or Euripides, and sometimes Demosthenes, Tully, Virgil, and Horace. At one we were at our studies again, returning home at five to repeat and turn to the places quoted in our books till past six. Then came supper, after which we read some Greek or Latin author. On feast days we heard mass and vespers, and the rest of the day we were allowed a little music and walking. Sometimes we went to see our friends, who invited us much oftener than we were permitted to go. The rest of the day we spent in reading, and we generally had with us some learned men of that time.”

We have the satisfaction of knowing that the frugal and laborious training of Henry’s early life was the means of forming a manly and Christian character. Nor is the portrait less pleasing which the biographer of Budæus has left us of the domestic life of that great man, who, though he had visited the court of Leo X., in quality of ambassador of France, and was the chief lion of the French world of letters, retained to his dying day those simple tastes and habits, which we are assured resulted from no affectation of laconic manners, but a certain genuine sentiment of humility.[314] His secretary and constant fellow-labourer was his wife, who sat in his study, found out passages in his books of reference, copied his papers, and withal did not forget his domestic comfort. Budæus needed some such good angel by his side, for he belonged to that class of scholars who are more familiar with the Latin As than with the value of louis d’ors. His mind was in his books, and whilst busy with the doings of the Greeks and Romans he could not always call home his absent thoughts. It is to be regretted, that with a character in many respects so amiable, Budæus should have permitted his love of Greek to lead him to take part with the Humanists in the ferocious onslaughts which they directed against the adherents of the mediæval learning. It was surely possible to revive the study of Homer and Cicero with rejecting the philosophy of St. Thomas, nor did there seem any reason why the lovers of polite literature should seek to establish their fame as scholars by savage and unseemly pasquinades on their literary rivals. And here it may be remarked that the title of Humanists, applied to the rising school, was one of their own choosing. By it they intended at one and the same time to indicate themselves as the only cultivators of “humane” letters, and to imply that the professors of the old school were barbarians. They were not content with advocating good Latin, and reviving the study of Greek; no one could join their camp who was not ready to rail at monks and schoolmen as offensive idiots. The former, in the choice vocabulary of Luther, were “locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice,” the latter, in the more polished phraseology of Budæus, “prating sophists,” and “divines of the Sorbonian Lake,” “Monks,” says Erasmus (himself an apostate canon[315]), “are only acceptable to silly women, bigots, and blockheads.” The Dominicans had the audacity to protest against the freedoms he had taken with the Latin Vulgate, and to complain of his version as that of a poet and orator rather than of a divine. “Most men who know anything of the value of a poet,” replies Erasmus, “think you to be swine rather than men, when they hear your stupid raving. Poetry is so little known to you, that you cannot even spell its name;[316] but let me tell you, it would be easier to cut two Thomists out of a log of wood, than one tolerable orator.” No matter what were a man’s talents, or how reasonable were his arguments, the moment he opened his mouth in opposition to these writers, he was placarded as a dunce. Erasmus, in his new Version of the Greek Testament, had given just cause of complaint by his use of a phraseology more elegant than theological. A certain Franciscan friar ventured to object in particular to his rendering of the Magnificat, whereupon Erasmus vented his spleen in a Colloquy, and branded the critic as “a pig and a donkey; more of a donkey than all donkeys put together;” and proceeded to justify his translation by quoting the comedies of Terence. Standish, Bishop of St. Asaph, took exception to another blot in the new version, the substitution, namely, of the word Sermo, for that of Verbum, in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel; and Erasmus and his friends considered that they sufficiently vindicated their good Latin by nicknaming the objector, the Bishop of St. Ass. In the same style of wit, Vincent the Dominican was Bucentum the ox-driver, and the Carmelites were commonly designated the Camelites. “I have hopes of Cochlæus,” writes Luther, speaking of some of his adversaries, “he is only an idiot; as for the other two, they belong to the devil.” This was the ordinary style of the humanist controversialists; their puns and sarcasms being, in most cases, accompanied with a shower of mud.

With these, however, we need not more particularly concern ourselves, but turn our glance on Louvain, where, in the early part of the century, a new university had arisen, under Duke John of Brabant, which received its first diploma from Pope Martin V. in 1425, the theological faculty being erected six years later by Eugenius IV. The latter Pontiff had the satisfaction of receiving the firmest support from the Louvain doctors during the troublous times of the Council of Basle; and during the following century Louvain continued to be not merely the chief seat of learning in Flanders, but one of the soundest nurseries of the faith. She held stoutly to scholasticism, and was distinguished by her resolute opposition to the Lutheran heretics; yet it was in vain that her enemies attempted to charge her with retrogression, for even Erasmus owns in his letters, that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris.

It is not difficult to explain the hostility which the Louvain scholars had to encounter on the part of the partisans of the new learning. Louvain, from the first, consecrated herself to the defence of the scholastic theology. Immediately on the erection of the theological faculty in 1431, the Dominicans arrived at Louvain, and opened a school whence they sent forth fourteen doctors in the space of twenty years. In 1447 they were formally admitted to all the rights of the university, and obtained chairs of theology, and the other privileges formerly granted to them at Paris and Bologna. Their brethren were frequently aggregated to the college of the strict faculty, and one of their order was always a member of the council strictæ facultatis. From this period the studium generale of the order at Louvain ranked as one of the highest character in the order, and the influence of the Dominican doctors made itself powerfully felt throughout the whole university. St. Thomas of Aquin was the doctor, par excellence, of the Louvain schools, and in 1637 was chosen by the faculty of theology their perpetual patron and protector. It is needless to say that this determined Thomism was not more agreeable to the humanists and their partisans than the Scotism of the Paris theologians; and they sought, with very poor success, to squib down the university by representing it as nothing but a nest of friars.

The University of Louvain enjoyed some advantages in which the more ancient academies had been wanting. Not having grown up out of accidental circumstances, like so many of her elder sisters, but having been begun at a time when the principles necessary for governing such institutions had been made manifest by long experience, her founders were careful to provide her, from the first, with a body of statutes sagaciously drawn up, so as to ensure the preservation of regular discipline; and a well-organised collegiate system protected the students from those disorders which had disgraced the beginnings of Paris and Oxford.

In course of time separate schools and colleges were established for the different faculties, one for medicine, eight for arts, and eight for mixed studies. Among the latter was Standonch’s college of poor scholars, and the celebrated Collegium Trilingue founded in 1516 by Jerome Busleiden, the friend of More and Erasmus, for the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The idea of this academy had been suggested to the founder by a visit to Alcala, where Cardinal Ximenes was then completing the establishment of his university. Hallam tells us that its foundation was fiercely opposed by the monks and friars, “those unbeaten enemies of learning,” and it is true that the old professors did at first regard the new institution with some jealousy. They had been used to write and speak mediæval Latin, and grumbled sorely when required to turn Ciceronians. The college happened to be first opened in the fish-market, and hence arose the favourite bon-mot of the Louvain Conservatives, “We do not talk Fish-Market Latin.” In time, however, the fish-market Latin established its supremacy, and Louvain grew proud of her classical professors, such as Louis Vives and Conrad Goclen. The colleges gradually multiplied in number, and even at the present day the city is filled with splendid buildings, all of which owe their existence to the university of which they once formed part.

It was at Louvain that Pope Adrian VI. received his education, and from a poor scholar rose to fill the posts of professor and rector of the university. The son of a boat-builder of Utrecht, he was admitted among a certain number of poor boys whom the university bound itself to educate gratuitously, and endured rather more than his share of the hardships and privations to which scholars of that class are usually exposed. Seldom able to provide himself with the luxury of a lamp or a candle, he was accustomed to prosecute his studies after dark in the porch of some church, where a lamp was then usually suspended, or at the street corner, which supplied him with a feeble light. However, he seems sometimes to have been able to procure himself a better sort of light, for we read that, one cold winter’s night, Margaret, the widow of Duke Charles of Burgundy, then governess of the Netherlands, remarked a tiny ray that issued from one of the college windows at a very late hour, and bidding her chamberlain find out which of the students sat up so late in such intense cold, she was told that it was only “little Florentius” over his books. With a woman’s instinct of compassion, she sent him the next day three hundred florins for the purchase of books and firewood.

When he was afterwards raised to the head of the university, he exhibited the same zeal for the promotion of ecclesiastical discipline which afterwards won him so much unpopularity from his Roman subjects. In spite of their contemptuous strictures on his supposed barbarism, Adrian was revered in Louvain as a generous patron of letters. He erected and endowed one of the most magnificent colleges of which Louvain could boast, and in it was deposited the autograph copy of his works, which is still preserved in the great seminary of Mechlin.

A considerable number of other new universities sprang up in Germany about the beginning of the sixteenth century, all more or less stamped with the literary character of the age. Of these the most famous was Wittemberg, marked out by an evil destiny as the cradle of the Lutheran apostasy. It was founded in 1502 by Frederic, elector of Saxony, who commissioned Staupitz, the provincial of the Augustinians, to seek out men of learning and ability to fill its vacant professorships. Luther was invited hither in 1508 to teach the Aristotelian logic, and, four years later, after his return from Rome, received his doctor’s cap, and took the customary oaths to defend the faith against heresy to the last drop of his blood. In 1516 the professor was to be found waging open war against the philosophy he was engaged to teach, and drawing up ninety-nine theses against the scholastic theology, in which is clearly laid down the fundamental dogma of Lutheranism--the denial of free-will. They were published many years later with a preface by Melancthon, declaring them to contain the veritable sum of the reformed religion, which had thus been reduced to system a year before that quarrel with Tetzel, usually represented as the origin of Luther’s revolt.

Melancthon was given the chair of Greek in 1518, on the recommendation of his master Reuchlin, and was introduced to Wittemberg at the moment when Luther’s quarrel had been taken up by the students and professors. In him Luther gained a disciple whose learning and natural moderation of character were worthy of better things than to become the author of the Confession of Augsburg, and the colleague of Bucer. That horrible apostate, a renegade Dominican, who condescended to every one of the rival schools of heresy, provided only he was suffered to enjoy the license which first tempted him to abjure the faith, filled for twenty years the theological chair at Strasburg. Everywhere the reins of power had fallen into the hands of the pedagogues, and the Lutheran army was to be seen officered by humanists and university professors. The facilities offered by the numerous academies that had sprung up since the beginning of the century encouraged a rage for learning among all classes, and many a poor artisan’s son, like Wolfgang Musculus, or the notorious Henry Bullinger, scraped together a scanty pittance by street singing, which they afterwards spent in procuring the means of study at one or other of the universities. Musculus, indeed, found charitable patrons in the person of some Benedictine monks, who educated him, and gave him the habit; but he soon abandoned the cloister, and after a wild adventurous life, during which we find him working as a mason, and, during the scanty moments he could snatch from his toil, studying the Hebrew grammar, he became “Minister” of Strasburg, and theological professor in the Protestant University of Berne. About the same time the Greek professorship of Calvin’s college at Geneva was filled with another of these strange itinerant scholars, Sebastian Castillon, a native of Dauphiny, who studied the Oriental tongues in the early morning hours, before he went to his day labour in the fields. He afterwards quarrelled with Calvin, who accused him of theft, and went to teach Greek and Hebrew at Basle. Here he produced a Latin and French version of the Scriptures, and endeavoured to render the sacred books into the classical diction of profane authors. We can scarcely form any correct idea of the period of the Reformation without a glimpse at men of this stamp, who then swarmed in every part of Germany; restless, self-sufficient, often more than half self-taught, their minds untrained with the healthy discipline of the schools, disposed to run after every novelty, and to overvalue themselves and their attainments, they inevitably fell into the extravagances to which vanity commonly betrays her victims.

From this class of men the German professorships were chiefly recruited, and little foresight was needed to anticipate the consequences which must ensue when the work of education had passed into such hands. The state of the German universities during the century subsequent to the Lutheran revolution, has been described by the Protestant historian Menzel, from whom Rohrbacher has quoted some remarkable passages. “The colleges where the future ministers of the Lutheran religion spent six or seven years, were the abode of a ferocity and licentiousness from which our moral sensibility shrinks aghast. In the German schools and universities, the elder students obliged new-comers to go about in ragged garments, filled their mouths with ‘soup’ made of mud and broken bits of earthenware, compelled them to clean their boots and shoes, and by way of salary, to imitate the barking of dogs and the mewing of cats, and to lick up the filth from under the table. In vain did the princes endeavour to banish these savage customs; they held their ground in spite of ordinances and edicts.”[317] At the University of Jena, the younger students were robbed of their money, their clothes, and their books by their elder companions, and compelled to discharge the most disgraceful services. Those who had received what was called “absolution,” treated new-comers in the same way; and these outrages were often committed in the streets, and even in the churches during the preaching, when the poor victims were pulled and knocked about, and otherwise maltreated by their persecutors. And that no one might escape, a particular part of the church was devoted to the reception of “freshmen,” who were installed there with these edifying ceremonies. Hence, during the whole time of divine service, one incessant clamour went on, made up of the trampling, the cries, the murmurs, and coarse laughter of the combatants.

If such were the manners of the future pastors, those of their flocks may be imagined. Any one who tried to lead a good life, observes Menzel, was stigmatised as an enthusiast, a Schwenkfeldian, an Anabaptist, and a hypocrite; Luther’s dogma of justification by faith only having brought good works into actual discredit. It was dangerous at that time for a preacher to exhort his people to keep the commandments--as if they were able to do so--it was quite sufficient to render him a suspected person.[318] But we have no heart to dwell on this subject, or to realise the degradation of those old German dioceses and schools, the names of which are so linked in our hearts with the memory of St. Boniface and St. Wilibald, St. Bernward and St. Anscharius. So we will turn our back on Germany and seek on Catholic soil for some more consoling spectacle. We shall hardly find it in France: there, indeed, a revival of letters is going on, under the splendid patronage of Francis I.; and Budæus, the prodigy of his country, as Erasmus called him, is writing his learned treatise on Ancient Money, and persuading the king to found the College Royal. There perhaps the greatest scholar of his time, though known to posterity chiefly by his artistic fame, Leonardo da Vinci, is expiring at Fontainebleau in the arms of the king. But the French Renaissance school is mostly remarkable for its poets, by whom, indeed, the revival of letters was first set on foot. Much edification was not to be anticipated from a movement that reckoned as its originator Villon, whose verses were as infamous as his life, and who found a worthy successor in Clement Marot. The French kings, who by their Pragmatic Sanctions[319] had condemned the Papal provision of benefices as a crying abuse, used their royal patronage of the same as a convenient mode of rewarding Court poets. Thus Octavien de St. Gelais, the translator of Terence, obtained the bishopric of Angoulême from Charles VIII.; and his son, Melin de St. Gelais, surnamed the French Ovid, was rewarded by Francis I. for his “Epigrams” with an abbey. Ronsard, formally proclaimed “the Poet of France, par excellence,” who was born on the same day as the defeat of Pavia--as though (to make use of the king’s words) “Heaven would make up to France, by his birth, for the disgrace sustained by her arms”--who was the literary idol of his time, had statues erected to his honour, and silver images of the goddess Minerva presented to him by learned academies, to whom Elizabeth sent a rich diamond, and Mary Stuart presented a gilded model of Parnassus--the most appropriate present that could be offered to the new Apollo--Ronsard, the vainest of men, as he might well be, for assuredly he was the most flattered, died, literally overwhelmed under the weight of his laurels and his priories. I will not attempt the enumeration of his benefices, and perhaps he would hardly have undertaken the task himself, for the prince of poets enjoyed the revenues of half the royal monasteries of France. It would be unbecoming to notice any writer of less renown, after so very illustrious a personage, and the bare name of Rabelais will probably content most readers. These were the stars of the French Renaissance, well worthy of the monarch who patronised them, and the Court over which he presided. Warton has thought good to praise the enlightened wisdom which induced this prince to purge his Court from the monkish precision of old-fashioned times, and enliven it with a larger admixture of ladies’ society. There was certainly not much to be complained of on the score of precision in the coteries of Fontainebleau; yet it is curious that the fair dames who graced the royal circle were chosen by the grim disciples of Calvin as the likeliest agents for disseminating their views. The ladies of the Court of Francis I. were the first Huguenot apostles, and it was in this school that Anne Boleyn, in her quality of maid of honour to Queen Claude, acquired, together with her inimitable skill in dancing, that “gospel light” which, the poet informs us, first shone on England and her king “from Boleyn’s eyes.”

Let us rather direct our steps across the Pyrenees, and watch the erection of a Catholic university on the orthodox soil of Spain. Up to this time the education which prevailed in the peninsula appears to have been thoroughly of the old school. The Spanish universities had indeed some peculiarities arising from their proximity to the Moorish schools, and appear to have cultivated the geometrical sciences and the Eastern tongues more generally than was elsewhere the practice. But the prevailing tone was scholastic and ecclesiastical. The monasteries still maintained those public schools, which served as feeders to the universities, and in these a discipline was kept up differing very little from that of Fulda and St Gall. At Montserrat, peasants and nobles were received together, and each wore a little black habit, and, in church, a surplice. They sang every day at the Mass, and recited the Office of Our Lady, eating always in the refectory of the brethren, and sleeping in a common dormitory. Every month they went to confession, as well as on all festivals, and their studies were of the monastic stamp, with plenty of Latin and plain chant, and also instrumental music. A number of the bravest Spanish knights had their education in these monastery schools, and one of them, John of Cardonna, who commanded the galleys of Sicily, and relieved Malta when besieged by the Turks, chose as his patroness, in memory of his school days, Our Lady of Montserrat, and bore her banner into battle. He used to call himself Our Lady’s page, and said he valued the privilege of having been brought up in her house more than his rank as admiral.

But these are old-fashioned memories, and must give place to something more in accordance with the requirements of the age. The Renaissance was making its way even into the Spanish schools, and the literary movement had been fortunate enough to find a nursing mother in the person of Isabella the Catholic. German printers and Italian professors were invited into her kingdom, and Spanish students sent to gather up the treasures of learning in foreign academies. Among these was Antonio de Lebrija, whom Hallam calls the restorer of classical literature in Spain. Italian masters directed the education of the royal children, and from them the Princess Catherine, doomed to be the hapless Queen of Henry VIII., received those learned tastes which won the admiration of Erasmus. A Palatine school was attached to the Court, in imitation of that of Charlemagne, and was placed under the direction of Peter Martyr,[320] whose letters are filled with accounts of the noble pupils who thronged his school, won from frivolous pastimes by the charm of letters. In 1488 he appeared at Salamanca to deliver lectures on Juvenal, and writes word that the audience who came to hear him so blocked up the entrance to the hall, that he had to be carried to his place over the heads of the students, “like a victor in the Olympic games.” The rage for learning went on at such a pace that the proudest grandees of Castile thought it not beneath them to ascend the professor’s chair, and even noble ladies delivered lectures on classical learning in the halls of universities.[321] The queen’s noble encouragement of learning had been fostered by her confessor, F. Francis Ximenes; and when, in 1495, the Franciscan friar became Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, one of his first thoughts was the erection of a model university, to which he resolved to devote the immense revenues of his see.

It has been said that seats of learning require the accessories of a fine air, and even the charms of natural scenery; and we might quote one of the most exquisite pieces of word-painting to be found in any language,[322] which is written to show the special gift enjoyed by Athens, rendering her worthy to be the capital of mind. It was the clear elastic air of Attica which communicated something of its own sunniness and elasticity to the intellect of her citizens, just as it imparted a golden colouring even to the marble dug out of that favoured soil. So it had been with Paris, the Athens of the Middle Ages, where students from the foggy shores of Britain conceived themselves endowed with some new faculty when relieved from the oppression of their native atmosphere. And even Louvain, though less favoured than these by nature, had been chosen in preference to other Flemish cities, chiefly on account of her purer air and her pleasant entourage of copses and meadows, with their abundant store of “corn, apples, sheep, oxen, and chirping birds.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Ximenes, when seeking the fittest spot in which to plant his academy, took very gravely into consideration the question of scenery and climate. The clear atmosphere of Alcala, and the tranquil landscapes on the banks of the Henares, so soothing to the meditative eye, had their share in determining him to fix his foundation at the ancient Complutum. In its grammar schools he had made his early studies, and old boyish recollections attached him to the spot, the ancient traditions of which rendered it dear to Christian scholars.[323] There, then, in the year 1500 he laid the foundation of his first college, which he dedicated to his saintly predecessor, St. Ildefonsus. This was intended to be the head college of the university, to which all the others were in a manner to be subordinate. It consisted of thirty-three professors, in honour of the years of our Lord’s earthly life, and twelve priests or chaplains, in honour of the twelve Apostles. These latter had nothing to do with the education of the students, but were to recite the divine office in common, and carry out the rites of the Church with becoming solemnity. The professors, who were all to be theologians, were distinguished by their dress, a long red robe, which, being flung over their left shoulder, hung to the ground in large and graceful folds. The colleges of St. Balbina and St. Catherine were intended for students in philosophy, each containing forty-eight students. There was a small college, dedicated to Our Lady, for poor students in theology and medicine; and a larger one, used for the reception of the sick. The college of SS. Peter and Paul was exclusively for Franciscan scholars, corresponding in character to the monastic colleges or houses of study at Oxford. There were also two classical schools for young students, forty-two of whom received a free education for three years; these were severally dedicated to St. Eugenius and St. Isidore. And lastly, there was the college of St. Jerome for the three languages, in which ten scholars studied Latin, ten Greek, and ten Hebrew; a foundation which, as we have seen, formed the model on which the Collegium Trilingue at Louvain was afterwards established.[324] I will say nothing of the libraries, refectories, and chapels, all of which were finished with great splendour; and the whole city was restored and beautified, so as to make it more worthy of being the site of so magnificent a seat of learning. Other houses of study soon sprang up in connection with the different religious orders, all of which were anxious to secure for their members advantages which were nowhere else to be found in such abundance. For though Ximenes was a mighty builder, and thereby exposed himself to many bad puns from Court wits, who made much of the “edification” he gave when he superintended his workmen rule in hand, he certainly did not neglect the spiritual for the material building. Eight years after he had solemnly laid the foundation stone of his first college, the university was opened, and a brilliant staff of professors--in all forty-two in number--were gathered round the Cardinal primate to receive their respective offices from his hands. The government of the university was vested in the hands of a chancellor, rector, and senate. The system of graduation was copied from that of Paris, except that the theological degrees were given a pre-eminence over the others, and made both more honourable and more difficult to attain. The professorships were distributed as follows:--Six for theology; six for canon law; four for medicine; one, anatomy; one, surgery; nine, philosophy; one, mathematics; four, Greek and Hebrew; four, rhetoric; and six, grammar. There was no chair of civil law, as this faculty was excellently taught at the other Spanish universities, and Ximenes had no liking for it, and did not wish to introduce it at Alcala, probably fearing lest it might prevent that predominance of the theological faculty which he desired should be the characteristic of his university. Provision was made for the support of the aged and infirm professors; and on this point the Cardinal consulted his former colleague in the regency of Castile, Adrian of Utrecht, and established similar regulations to those which existed at Louvain. The system of studies and rule of college discipline were drawn up by himself, the former being in a great degree borrowed from that established at Paris. Frequent disputations and examinations quickened the application of the students, and at these Ximenes loved to preside, and encourage the emulation of his scholars with his presence. In the choice of his professors he considered nothing but the merit of the candidates, and set at nought all the narrowness of mere nationality. Spain was by this time, however, able to furnish humanists and philologists equal to those of Italy or Germany. And most of the first professors were of native birth. Among them was Antonio de Lebrija, and though he afterwards accepted a chair at Salamanca, yet he finally returned to Alcala, and rendered invaluable aid to Ximenes in the philological labours in which he was about to engage, and which shed an additional lustre over the new academy.

Ximenes had always manifested a peculiar predilection for the cultivation of Biblical literature. In his earlier years his love of the Holy Scriptures had induced him to devote himself to the study of Hebrew and Chaldaic, and he had often been heard to say that he would willingly give up all his knowledge of jurisprudence to be able to explain a single verse of the Bible. He considered a thorough revival of biblical studies the surest means of defeating the new heretics, and in the midst of Court engagements and political toils, he at length conceived the plan of his great Polyglot Bible, in which the sacred text was to appear in the four learned languages, after the most correct versions that could be obtained. This great work, which was to serve as the model for all subsequent attempts of a similar kind, was no sooner designed than he set about its execution, and secured the co-operation of a number of skilful scholars, fixing on Alcala as the scene of their labours. Immense sums were expended in obtaining Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaic manuscripts; and in his dedication, Ximenes acknowledges the invaluable assistance which he received from Pope Leo X. The plan was exactly one sure to engage the sympathies of that generous Pontiff, who accordingly placed at his command all the treasures of the Vatican Library. The costly work when complete presented the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek version of the Septuagint, the Latin version of St. Jerome, and the Chaldaic paraphrase of the Pentateuch, together with certain letters, prefaces, and dissertations to assist the study of the Sacred Books. The work was commenced in 1502, and the last volume was published in 1517. The same energy which had succeeded, in the brief space of eight years, in raising a university which received the title of “the eighth wonder of the world,” was able, in fifteen years, to bring to a happy conclusion a literary undertaking which might well have occupied thrice that space of time. Ximenes, who felt his end approaching, desired to leave all his great works complete, and urged on his scholars with frequent admonitions on the shortness of human life. If they lost him as their patron, or if he were to lose their labours, the whole design might fall to the ground. On the 10th of July 1517 the last sheet of the great Complutensian Polyglot was printed, and the young son of the printer, Bocario, putting on his holiday garments, ran at once to present it to the Cardinal. Ximenes received it with a solemn emotion of gratitude and joy. “I thank Thee, O Lord Christ,” he said, “that Thou hast brought this work to a desired end.” It was as though he had been permitted this as his last earthly consolation, for four months later he closed his great and useful career, being in the eighty-second year of his age.

Louvain and Alcala, the two great Catholic creations of the age of the Renaissance, both fell under the hammer of Revolution. The memory of Ximenes has not prevailed to preserve his university from destruction at the hands of the Spanish Progressistas, and we can but hope that its restoration may be reserved for another generation. That of Louvain has been witnessed even in our own time. Swept away in 1797 by the decree of the French Republic, which at the same time suppressed all the great ecclesiastical seminaries, it was not restored by the Nassau sovereigns who, in 1814, became masters of the Catholic Netherlands. William of Holland, so far from showing his Catholic subjects any larger degree of favour than they had enjoyed under French rule, did his best to render their position worse than it had been under the Revolution. He put down all the little seminaries, and proposed to supply the place of the ancient university of Louvain by a grand royal philosophical college, through which all ecclesiastical students were to be compelled to pass before being received into the great seminaries. This was in the June of 1825; in the January of 1830 the determined resistance of the Belgian Catholics obliged him to suppress his college, which had proved a total failure. The August following witnessed the expulsion of his dynasty and the establishment of Belgian independence; events which were followed in 1834 by the erection at Louvain of a new university, in virtue of an Apostolic brief of Pope Gregory XVI.

Planted on the Belgian soil, which has so long and so successfully resisted the inroads of heresy, and which appears destined in our own day to become the battle-ground of a yet deadlier struggle with open unbelief, the Catholic university of Louvain has already merited to be declared by illustrious lips “the glory of Belgium and of the Church.” She has been presented by the Sovereign Pontiff to the Catholics of these islands, as the model on which our own academic restorations may fitly be formed; and at this very moment her example is understood to have encouraged the prelates of Germany to attempt a similar foundation in that land. May their generous efforts be crowned with ample success, and may such institutions, wherein Faith and Science will never be divorced, multiply in the Church, supported by the prayers and good wishes of every Catholic heart.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME.

A.D. 1513 TO 1528.

On the morning of the 11th of April 1513 the streets of Rome were thronged with a joyous and expectant crowd, assembled to witness the public procession of the newly-elected Pontiff, Leo X., on occasion of his taking possession of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. Many circumstances combined to render the accession of Leo welcome to his new subjects: they had already felt the charm of his courteous manners, springing partly from careful culture, and partly from an innate kindness of heart; and whilst the Roman citizens, who were heartily tired of the wars and war-taxes of Julius II., rejoiced at the prospect of peace and plenty, the artists and professors, who made up a population by themselves, regarded the election of a Medici as a sufficient guarantee for the protection of their personal interests. The son of Lorenzo, and the pupil of Politian, of Chalcondylus, and of Bernard Dovizi, he had imbibed a love of art and poetry in the gardens of Florence and the villas of Fiesole. Created a Cardinal at the age of fourteen, he was but thirty-seven at the period of his election to the Papal chair, and during his residence at Rome under the two preceding Pontificates had acquired a character which his friends condensed into a motto, and exhibited in golden letters on the canopy under which he was enthroned, Litteratorum præsidium ac bonitatis fautor. If an ancient statue had been disinterred in the baths of Titus, the Cardinal de’ Medici had been the first to celebrate the auspicious event in graceful iambics improvised to the music of his lyre; his house had been the rendezvous of artists, poets, and, above all, of musicians; and whilst men of this stamp loudly proclaimed the taste and munificence of the new Pontiff, the unblemished name which he had preserved in the midst of a society the corruptions of which were matter of public notoriety, put to silence the busy tongue of scandal.

It was truly, therefore, a festa-day which his subjects were now celebrating; and as he rode on his white charger through the brilliant streets, men contrasted his mild and débonnaire countenance, his gay smile, and affable address; with the imperious bearing of his predecessor, the warlike Julius; and the contrast was all to his advantage. What a scene it was through which he was now passing! Rome had been all but rebuilt under the four last Pontiffs, and from the Vatican to the Coliseum the way was marked with monuments of their munificence and of the genius of their artists. Domes, amphitheatres, arcades, and fountains had risen during the last seventy years with magnificent profusion; the old Basilica of the Apostles had disappeared, and was in process of being replaced by a pile worthy of the vast conceptions of its founders and its architects. And now the splendid city had decked herself in gala costume, and amid velvet tapestries and flowery wreaths, triumphal arches, and private houses, with their facades improvised into heathen temples, appeared a strange medley of saints and mythological characters, in which the statues of Mars, Apollo, Minerva, and Venus, were exhibited in close proximity to those of SS. Peter and Paul. On the whole, however, the classic element predominated, and the characters chosen at each resting-place to harangue the new Pontiff were the Muses, the Seasons, and their attendant nymphs.

The hopes and expectations of the Roman populace on that day were abundantly fulfilled. Leo did his best to restore peace to Italy, and raised Rome to the dignity of a great capital. Few princes have ever been more richly endowed than he with the qualities which make princedom popular; a liberality which bordered on profuseness, a generous readiness to reward merit, and a charming urbanity of manners, which made every one who approached his person believe himself the object of the Pope’s particular regard. Erasmus felt the magical influence of his presence, and wrote to his friends, saying, that Leo was as far superior to the rest of men, as men are superior, to beasts. “He has the genius and the virtues of all the Leos who have preceded him, and to perfect goodness of heart,” he continues, “he unites an incredible strength of soul.” In the church all beholders admired the majesty with which he officiated at the sacred ceremonies; and his temperate habits in private have been praised by all his biographers. He was not only a passionate lover of literature and science, but was firmly persuaded that the cultivation of letters, rightly regarded, is ever friendly to the faith. “I have always loved learned men and good letters,” he wrote to Henry VIII. “This attraction was born with me, and it has only increased with years; for I always see that those who cultivate literature are most firmly attached to the dogmas of the faith, and form the glory of the Christian Church.” His patronage of arts and letters, therefore, was hearty and munificent enough to satisfy even the requirements of the learned world around him. He restored the Roman University, and appointed a brilliant staff of professors, men not only of the first ability, but of exemplary life. In his Bull addressed to the students, he failed not to warn them against substituting Plato and the poets for more serious studies, and reminded the preceptors that they were called on to defend the faith as well as to teach good letters. His own tastes, however, had the character which might have been anticipated from his education: they inclined almost exclusively to the belles-lettres. In many cases the classic acquirements of those who were now promoted to canonries and Cardinals’ hats were more regarded than their personal merits. Bernard Dovizi, who, as tutor to the young Medici, had studiously and successfully laboured to confer on his manners that exquisite polish which was his greatest charm, was now raised to the purple, and, as Cardinal Bibiena, endeavoured to surround the Pontifical palace with every attraction of a secular Court. The literary public of those days was not easily scandalised, but it was at least taken by surprise by the first production which came from the new Cardinal’s pen, his comedy of “Calandra,” written as a carnival piece for the amusement of a noble lady, and acted in the private apartments of the Vatican.[325] Ariosto was also welcomed at Court, and even the infamous Aretino received marks of favour, whilst Bembo and Sadolet, the two first Latinists of their day, were appointed the Pope’s secretaries.

The patronage of Leo was not limited to any one kind of literary excellence. He was as ready to reward a scientific treatise as an imitation of Horace, and whilst encouraging the study of the Eastern tongues, and publishing at his own expense a magnificent edition of Tacitus from the unique manuscript obtained from the abbey of Old Corby, he was accepting the dedication of Italian tragedies and causing the “Rosamunda” of Ruccellai to be acted in his presence. Almost his first act after his accession to the Papal dignity was to summon Lascaris to Rome, and establish him in a palace on the Esquiline, where, in concert with Musurus, he superintended a Greek academy and printing press. Zenobius Acciajoli, the most learned Orientalist of his day, who had shone among the stars of Lorenzo’s Court, and had afterwards assumed the Dominican habit and dedicated his genius to sacred studies, now became Prefect of the Vatican Library; whilst another Oriental scholar of the same order, the celebrated Sanctes Pagninus, found generous encouragement to undertake his Latin translation of the Scriptures from the original tongues.

But whilst extending his splendid patronage to every department of literature, the personal predilections of Leo were undoubtedly for poetry and the arts. Like a true Medici he loved the sunny side of life, and delighted in surrounding himself with poets, wits, and musicians, he himself being the gayest wit and best musician of the party. The Court was crowded with professional improvisatori who enlivened the suppers at the Vatican with their jests and pastimes. In the mornings there were literary assemblies in which the great men of the day recited their poems or epigrams, or more learned works. Now it was Vida, whom Leo had engaged to undertake the composition of his “Christiad,” and who beguiled his lighter hours by setting forth the mysteries of the game of chess in Latin hexameters; or Paulus Jovius,[326] the Italian Livy, who came to read a chapter of his history; or “the divine Accolti,” as he was called, who recited his poems surrounded by a guard of honour, and who in return for his lyric productions was raised to the dukedom of Nepi and a bishopric.

Under such a régime the arts flourished, and men of letters were promoted to wealth and dignities; Rome grew daily more luxurious and more splendid, but, alas! it must be said, her moral atmosphere was a pestilence. The historian Mariana declares that at the opening of the sixteenth century greater disorders existed there than were to be witnessed in any other European capital. Even Bembo, whose own life at this time was a disgrace to the ecclesiastical habit, admits the charge, and owns that he who desired to lead a holy life would do well to fly from Rome.[327] What else could be anticipated of a society made up of artists and professors, paganised to the very core in its literature, its language, and its every maxim? And when we say paganised, let it not be supposed that the simple restoration of classical studies is here intended, or that the abuses complained of consisted only of the extravagances of a few learned pedants. In Italian literary circles, if we may credit historians of the time, the Christian ideas were slowly becoming obliterated. It had grown fashionable in certain coteries to scoff at all the Christian dogmas as obsolete and barbarous; and Antonio Bandino complains that you were no longer regarded as a man of education unless you could jest at the Scriptures and indulge in some witty piece of scepticism. Many of the Italian schools were deeply infected with infidelity, particularly the University of Padua, which for more than a century had been notorious as the focus of atheism. Pomponatus,[328] one of the Paduan professors, published a treatise on the immortality of the soul, during the reign of Leo X., in which he endeavoured to show that the doctrine was not held by Aristotle, that it rested only on the authority of Scripture and the Church, and was plainly opposed to reason. A great number of professors taught similar errors, and pretended that though contrary to revelation they might yet be taught as philosophically true. These were condemned in 1513 by the Fifth Council of Lateran, which formally declared that “truth could not contradict truth;” and to counteract the dangerous spirit prevalent in the universities it was at the same time decreed that students aspiring to sacred orders should not follow the course of philosophy and poetry for more than five years, unless at the same time they studied theology and canon law.[329] But little or no fruit was produced by this decree, and as we shall see, at a somewhat later period the “great and pernicious abuses” which were admitted as loudly demanding reform, were formally declared by a commission of Cardinals to have arisen mainly from the impious teaching tolerated in the public schools.

In fact, Italy was at this time professor-ridden. Of all odious dogmatisms surely that of pedagogues is the most intolerable form of social tyranny, and under this the Transalpine world was then groaning. Armed with their pens and their tinsel eloquence the men of letters wrote down and talked down all opposition, and made so much noise in the world that they seemed for a time to occupy a much larger and more influential position than was really the case. They dictated their laws to the literary world, and every one who would not be pasquinaded as a barbarian was content to follow the fashion. So in the pulpit preachers called on their audience to contemplate the examples of Epaminondas or Socrates; parallels were drawn between the sacred events of the Passion, and the self-devotion of a Curtius or a Decius: our Divine Lord was commonly spoken of as a hero who had deserved well of his country, and not unfrequently allusions would be introduced to the thunders of Jupiter and the stories of heathen mythology.

The grand object of Italian scholars at this time was to attain a pure Ciceronian style, and in this none were more successful than the two papal secretaries, Sadolet and Bembo. The pains taken by the latter on his compositions at least deserved success. He is said to have kept forty portfolios, into each of which his sheets were successively entered, and only passed on to the one next in order after undergoing careful revision. The rejection of every phrase not absolutely Ciceronian led to very strange affectation when speaking of events of ordinary life, as well as to the more offensive fault of adopting heathen phraseology on matters relating to the Christian faith. Thus the accession of Leo was announced to foreign Courts as having taken place “through the favour of the Immortal Gods;” Divine grace was the magnificentia divinitatis; Our Lady was the Dea Lauretana, or the Alma Parens; and the Christian mysteries were described in terms taken from the sacrificial terminology of the Greeks. Erasmus had good sense enough to despise these extravagances, and he did his utmost to render them ridiculous.[330] He describes the Ciceronian spending a whole winter’s night on the composition of a single sentence, compiling lexicons of Ciceronian words, tropes, locutions, and pleasantries, more bulky than the great orator’s entire works, and struggling with the insuperable difficulties of rendering the wants and habits of a modern age into the colloquial phraseology of the ancients.

The poets and artists followed the example set them by the professors. They still occasionally condescended to choose Christian subjects, but in most cases it was to debase them by a pagan method of treatment. When Sannazar thought fit to employ his muse on so old-fashioned a theme as the birth of Our Lord, he converted it into a pagan fable, placed the prophecies of the Sibyls in the hands of the Blessed Virgin, and the words of Isaias in the mouth of Proteus, omitted the name of Jesus Christ throughout his entire poem, and surrounded the holy crib with nymphs, satyrs, and hamadryads. The very liturgy of the Church had a narrow escape of undergoing a classical reform, and a new Hymnarium appeared, drawn up by Zachario Ferreri, “according to the true rules of Latinity and metre,” in which, says Dom Guéranger, “occur every image and allusion to pagan belief and customs which are to be met with in Horace.” This work was undertaken by command of Leo X., but its use, though permitted by Clement VII., was happily never enjoined on the clergy.

Hand in hand with the paganism of literature advanced the paganism of morals. We are not here engaged in studying the history of the Church, and may therefore be spared the pain of contemplating her scandals--those scandals the existence of which, far from weakening our faith, may rather confirm it, when we remember that they were distinctly prophesied by her Divine Head as evils which “must needs be” accomplished. Our business is with schools and scholars, and, sooth to say, after wandering amid the dim religious light of the mediæval cloisters, the blaze of the Roman literary circles, after first dazzling our eyes, reveals such bewildering spectacles, that we look about for some retreat into which the Christian scholar may creep and hide himself.

Such, perhaps, was the feeling of many a student who, coming fresh from the schools of Louvain, or the cloisters of Winchester or Oxford, found himself suddenly dropped down upon a world which seemed to have broken loose from all time-honoured traditions of scholastic life. Perhaps he had been used to set before him the musty maxim of Philip the Almoner,[331] that “that is no true science which is not the companion of justice;” or he had learned from Hugh of St. Victor to regard humility as the foundation of wisdom; or he was familiar with the saying of the Angel of the schools, that the best way to make progress in philosophy was to keep the commandments of God. But if he had the gift of prudence, he would think twice before citing such authorities in the polite circles of the Roman literati. He would have been hooted at as a barbarian. The monks and schoolmen were never spoken of by the professors of the new learning save in terms of execration and contempt. They were, to use the language of Erasmus, wretched creatures, whose language was as uncouth as their apprehension was dull. In those days there was no greater reproach than to call a man a Scotist--it meant precisely a dunce[332]--and those who held communion with the Muses and the Graces would have judged it an affront to be required to treat with respect the memory of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. And truly their venerable names, and the maxims they had laid down for the guidance of Christian scholars, would have been sadly out of place in the sumptuous orgies of the Chigi palace, or those luxurious soirées where prelates, ambassadors, and men of letters did not refuse to appear as the guests of the most questionable characters. The Roman academy which had been suppressed by Paul II., and had revived under Julius II., was now at the height of its renown. Its members generally met in some delicious suburban garden, and there, under the shade of the thick foliage, in an atmosphere heavy with the perfume of the orange-flower, they recited poems, proposed philosophic questions, and whiled away with song and merriment long hours of the day and night. Amid scenes of such Epicurean enjoyment the stranger might have been forgiven had he imagined himself taking part in the revelries of pagan rather than of Christian Rome. On the walls of the luxurious banqueting-rooms, in which he assisted at those suppers of world-wide celebrity, he might see representations from the comedies of Plautus, reminding him how close a parallel was to be drawn between the manners described by the Latin poet and those of the sixteenth century. From the elegant revellers around him he might hear the authority of Pliny quoted to prove that the human soul differed in nothing from that of beasts; or, exchanging the philosophic for a lighter mood, he might perhaps be called on to assist at some macaronic exhibition, such as the crowning of Querno, the drunken buffoon, arch-poet of Rome; or be required to listen to the facetious improvisation of Folengo or Mariano Fetti,--the former a monk, the latter a friar,--both of whom had quitted their cloisters to ply the trade of professional jesters. Thankful enough he would be to escape from these polished circles and return to his own barbarous land and the society of those rude English, who, as Politian contemptuously remarked, “knew nothing of letters, and busied themselves with their sheep,” and who perhaps might, in their turn, have thought with the Psalmist, that it was well with those who knew no literature, and were only mindful of justice.[333]

We are not left merely to conjecture the abuses which throve in such a soil. We have the grave avowal of the commission of Cardinals already referred to, that “in no city was there to be witnessed such corruption of manners as in this city, which should be an example to all.” Vice, in fact, had ceased to wear a veil; it stalked abroad under the noonday sun, and too often found illustrious support. Yet, strange to say, the existing abuses, monstrous as they were, were more superficial than they seemed. The evil scum that rises to the surface of society must not always be taken as a test of what lies beneath; the gaudy charlock may toss its wanton head and blazon itself to the eye, but the good seed is quietly germinating below, and in the day of harvest its sheaves will not be wanting. The Church is happily not governed by professors and scholastics, and at the very time when the literary world of Rome was exhibiting the spectacles described above, the Fifth Council of Lateran was holding its sessions in that very city, and promulgating its decrees for the reform of the Universities, the College of Cardinals, and the Roman Court.[334] The Church, by the mouth of her episcopate, was solemnly exposing and condemning those very evils which thoughtless observers were perhaps laying to her charge. In the decree of the Council on the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts, the Fathers, after setting forth the vital importance of the education of youth, go on to declare that schoolmasters and professors are bound not merely to teach their scholars grammar and rhetoric, but yet more to instruct them in their religion, and to make them study sacred hymns and psalms, and the lives of the saints; and forbid anything to be taught on Sundays and festival days save what refers in some way to religion or holy living. Decrees of this sort, if they plainly indicate the deplorable practical paganism which at that time prevailed in most public academies, show us also that the rulers of the Church were sensible of the evil, and earnestly desirous to apply a suitable remedy. And, as we shall see hereafter, this very city of Rome that seemed so corrupt, cherished in her bosom a principle of life and power, which eventually cast out the infection which had hung over her so long, and so accomplished her own purification. Long before Luther had uttered the word “Reform,” it had rung through the halls of the Lateran. The Fathers of the Council spared nothing and dissimulated nothing; and at the opening of the ninth session, a remarkable oration was delivered by Antonio Pucci, clerk to the Apostolic Chamber, in which he called on the Pope to set about the work in earnest. “Holy Father!” he exclaimed, “you desire to restore peace to Christendom, and you do well in so desiring. But see first that you extinguish the intestine wars of our vices, and exterior peace will soon reappear. Behold the world! Behold the cloister! Behold the sanctuary! Everywhere there are abuses to reform, and it is with the house of God that we must begin.”

Yet it can be no great matter of surprise that passing strangers did not always penetrate the distinction between the Church and the City of Rome, and that the undeniable corruption of the Roman literary circles brought ecclesiastical rulers into disrepute, and sapped in many minds the sentiment of loyalty to the Apostolic See. That both Erasmus and Luther carried with them from Rome fatal impressions, which, each in his own way, turned to the detriment of religion, is not to be doubted. Erasmus, indeed, had no cause to be scandalised by a state of society which was exactly to his taste. He was fêted and flattered by prelates and philosophers, and in his letters from Rome he wants words to express his raptures at those delicious hours which he spent among libraries and academies, in the reunions at the palace of the divine Cardinal San Giorgio, or the yet more charming assemblies in the Pope’s private chambers. Yet, while enjoying the cup of pleasure to the full, his keen sarcastic eye was taking the measure of all he saw, and it was on his journey back to the north, that he beguiled his travelling fatigues with composing his “Praise of Folly,” in which Cardinals, Popes, and Prelates are made the subject of his most caustic gibes and pleasantries. And this, after all, is the way of the world; it is a lynx-eyed critic, and has ever a rigorous standard for those who ought to be saints, and a ready condemnation for those who fall short of it. Erasmus, who was himself worldly to the heart’s core, had yet sense enough to feel that worldliness, however delightful, was out of place on the threshold of the apostles, and he made other men feel it too, with all that biting irony of which he was the master.

Luther, a man of different mould, visited Rome in a widely different spirit. He was in the first fervour of what he considered his religious conversion, when in 1510 he came thither full of enthusiasm, and fell on his knees as he entered the city, to kiss the soil watered by the blood of martyrs; though he afterwards mocked at his own devotion and at the simplicity with which he ran about from church to church prepared to believe and venerate everything that he saw. He too carried away impressions that were never effaced. His coarse, strong Saxon nature had little taste for the arts and the belles-lettres, and was only repelled by the magnificence around him. The Olympic deities that met his eye at every street corner, the heathenish adornments of the very churches, where pictures and images of Christian mysteries were presented in the garb of paganism, and the yet worse heathenism which met his ears from the elegant literary crowds among whom he passed in his coarse friar’s frock, all this sank into his soul to be reproduced on the day when he launched his imprecations against the seven-hilled city, and held her up to the scorn of his countrymen, as “the dwelling-place of dragons, the nest of bats and vultures, the resort of hobgoblins, weasels, gnomes, and demons.”[335] Nor did it matter anything to his audience that the enormities he exposed were far surpassed by those which he committed, and that the apostle of reform had himself let loose on the world the reign of frenzied license; the scandals he propagated did the work which he intended, and indelibly fixed in the Saxon mind the tradition which identified Rome with Babylon.

We need not here concern ourselves with the history of that great revolution which history miscalls the Reformation. Before the death of Leo X., that which had been deemed in its beginning to be but “a squabble of friars,” was ending in the apostasy of nations. The Roman academicians, however, were less moved at the tidings which reached them in 1520, that the Pope’s Bull, the Decretals, and the Summa of St. Thomas, had all been burnt together by Luther in the public square of Wittemberg, and that the Pope himself had been declared by the same authority to be Antichrist, than at another piece of intelligence, which was communicated to them on February 9, 1522, and which startled them like a clap of thunder. Leo was dead, and the choice of the Cardinals had fallen on the Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. The burning of St. Thomas in person would have been a light matter to them, in comparison with the election to the Papal dignity of a plain austere Louvain professor; already known to fame as the advocate of ecclesiastical discipline, the friend and colleague of Ximenes, and it was more than whispered, the supporter of scholasticism. He was a Fleming, a “Scotist,” a Goth, and the enemy of letters. He had come into the city without pomp of any kind, and had ordered one of the half-finished triumphal arches, that was to have cost a thousand ducats, to be destroyed. He had discharged ninety out of the one hundred equerries kept by his predecessor. He had brought his old Louvain housekeeper with him to the Vatican, and was dismissing the improvisatori and whole troops of other Court idlers. They had taken him over the Museum attached to his palace, and he had been heard to mutter the words Idola antiquorum, when standing before the group of the Laocoon. Some of Sadolet’s most elegant Latin epistles had been placed in his hands, and he had briefly commented on them as “the letters of a poet.” “I verily believe,” writes Jerome Negri, in terrible alarm, “that he will do as Pope Gregory did before him, make a clean sweep of our libraries, and perhaps grind up our statues to furnish mortar for building St. Peter’s.” The artists cried out that now they should all be starved; the professors bewailed the certain return of Gothic barbarism: Bembo set out at once for Venice, and Sadolet retired to his bishopric of Carpentras, where he displayed those noble qualities which had as yet found no room to expand in the artificial atmosphere of the Court.

Never was there a more undeserved reproach than that which stigmatised Pope Adrian as the enemy of learning. Erasmus, who had been defended by him from the attacks of some over-zealous scholastics, judged far otherwise, but the Romans could not forgive his indifference to ancient art, and his condemnation of those paganising scholars, whom he termed “Terentians.” Still less could they forgive his plain speaking on the subject of reform. “Many abominations,” he said, “have existed near this Holy Chair, abuses in spiritual matters, and evil everywhere. We pledge ourselves, on our part, to use our utmost endeavour to reform that Court which has, perhaps, been the source of the evils we deplore.”

In his brief pontificate of twenty-two months he was unable to accomplish the work which lay so close to his heart. His death was regarded by the Roman literati as a kind of providence, a special grace from heaven which had averted the return of mediæval barbarism; and some of them went so far as to adorn with garlands the house of his physician, to whose want of skill the fatal termination of Adrian’s illness was ascribed, hanging over his door the inscription--“To the Saviour of his country.”

Yet those two-and-twenty months, which seemed so fruitless, witnessed the turning of the tide. The election of another Medici as successor to Adrian was the signal for extraordinary rejoicings, and for the return to Rome of many who had abandoned it after the accession of Adrian. Clement VII. had all the personal grace and refined intellect of his family; he had less taste for pleasure, and more aptitude for business than Leo, and was a true lover of learned men. He induced Sadolet to resume his functions as secretary, and did his best to engage Erasmus to devote his genius to the earnest defence of the Church.

The spirits of the Romans revived when they witnessed the splendid patronage of letters exercised by the new Pope and his kinsman, Cardinal Hyppolitus de’ Medici, who entertained in his household no fewer than three hundred learned men. The artists and academicians confidently reckoned on a return of their golden age; and yet all were more or less conscious of a certain indefinable change which had stolen over the public mind, betokening that a reaction was setting in, and that a new era was at hand. The German revolt from the Church had by this time assumed proportions which it was impossible to ignore. The question of the English divorce was causing grave inquietudes, and whilst the shadow of new and unprecedented calamities hung heavy over the world, even the most indifferent minds felt perhaps that something more earnest was called for at that moment than the cultivation of the Muses. It cannot, indeed, be said that the tide of social corruption was checked; yet another and a better element was silently at work; and, hidden in the glittering crowd,

Some few there were who with pure hearts aspired To lay their just hands on the golden key That opes the palace of eternity.

Clement had summoned to his Court several illustrious ecclesiastics who, whilst inferior to none of their contemporaries in literary merit, were desirous above all things to provide a remedy for those grave domestic abuses which, they rightly felt, afflicted the Church more heavily than any attacks from her exterior foes. Among these were the Venetian, Gaspar Contarini, a profound scholar, and a man of fervent piety; Sadolet, who, now greatly weaned from the pursuits which had formerly absorbed him, desired to devote his remaining years to his pastoral duties; Matthew Ghiberti, the worthiest prelate of his time, whom Clement had admitted to his closest confidence, and raised to the dignity of Chancellor and the see of Verona; the Prothonotary, Cajetan of Thienna, and the Cardinal Caraffa, Archbishop of Theate, who afterwards became Pope under the title of Paul IV. The jubilee year 1525 also brought to Rome a number of devout and earnest pilgrims, among whom was our own great countryman Reginald Pole, then a student at Padua, whom Bembo called the most virtuous young man in Italy, and whose happiness it was to enter on his list of friends the name of almost every one of his contemporaries most illustrious for scholarship or piety. Men of this stamp felt the need, in the midst of that luxurious and enervating atmosphere, of some tie of Christian fellowship which might support and invigorate their spiritual life; and the result was the formation of a humble confraternity which met in the church of SS. Silvestro and Dorotea, and took the name of “the Oratory of Divine Love.”

Similar associations were springing up in other cities of Italy, but that at Rome is remarkable as being the germ whence afterwards developed the order of the Theatines. A plan was concerted among the members of the confraternity for instituting an order of regular clerks, in which the ancient canonical mode of life should be revived; this being suggested as offering the surest means for effecting that reformation of manners among the clergy which all good men so earnestly desired to forward. This design was carried out with the approbation of the Pope; Caraffa and St. Cajetan being chosen the two first superiors. Of the latter it was commonly said that he desired to reform the world without letting the world know he was in it, and in the northern cities of Italy, where he had hitherto chiefly resided, he had the character of uniting in one person the seraphic gifts of a contemplative to the heroic virtues of an apostle. The rule adopted by the regular clerks was nearly the same as that of the ancient Canons Regular. It appears certain that their original design included the formation of ecclesiastical seminaries, and in all essential particulars the new foundation bore a striking resemblance to that set on foot in the eighth century, with a very similar purpose, by St. Chrodegang of Metz. And thus we see how saintly men, when they took in hand the work of ecclesiastical reform, found no better means for carrying out their views, than turning back into the old paths, and following the traditions bequeathed them by a golden antiquity.

The order of Theatines, however, whilst yet in its infancy, was threatened with extinction when that terrible calamity fell upon Rome, to describe which one needs to use the language of the inspired writers, when they detail the woes that were to chastise the guilty city, which was yet the chosen city of God. The political combinations which had closely allied the Roman Pontiff with the Court of France, exposed him to the hostility of the Emperor Charles V., whose armies entered Italy in the early part of the year 1527, and threatened to lay siege to Rome. On the 5th of May, the city was stormed by the ferocious bands of the Constable de Bourbon, consisting chiefly of German Lutherans, animated to frenzy by the thirst for plunder and a wild religious fanaticism. The Pope took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and from thence had the anguish of witnessing his capital given up to scenes of sacrilege and violence which find no equal in history. The sack of Rome by the barbarian Goths lasted but six days, but the Germans held possession of their prey for nine months, every hour of which witnessed some fresh abomination. The citizens were subjected to horrible tortures, to compel them to give up their hidden treasures; the churches were desecrated, and sacred relics tossed about the streets; troop-horses were stabled in the Pontifical chapel, and littered with Bulls and decretals; mock celebrations of holy rites were performed by drunken troopers, who, decked out with cardinals’ dresses, pretended to hold a conclave, and proclaimed the election of Luther as Pope. Out of a population of 85,000, 50,000 citizens are calculated to have perished by torture and the sword, and the excesses of the soldiers at last brought a pestilence in their train, which all but annihilated, the conquerors themselves; so that the city, awhile before so brilliant and luxurious, became little better than a desolate and fetid tomb.

Amid the nameless horrors of that time it is needless to say that neither piety nor learning procured any mercy for their owners. St. Cajetan was scourged and tortured, and then compelled with his brethren to abandon the Roman territory and take refuge in Venice; where their modest house a few years later afforded hospitality to St. Ignatius and his first companions. As to the academicians, we are assured by Jerome Negri that the very few who escaped from the sword were dispersed into foreign lands, and that all subsequent efforts to restore their Society on its former footing proved an utter failure. In fact, when the city was at last delivered from the apostate hordes that possessed her, it was only to be exposed to the new scourges of famine, pestilence, and inundation, and during these calamities there reappeared in her streets, not the gay bands of artists and literati, but reformed Camaldolese and Capuchin friars, whose existence in the city, says one writer, was first made known to the Romans during the plague of 1528. Rome, indeed, recovered from her overwhelming disasters with astonishing rapidity, and it was not long before the Court of Clement VII. reassumed much of the brilliant character which it had borne under Leo X. But Roman society no longer groaned under the dictatorship of professors. The grave troubles of the Church drew to her capital men of earnest and exalted piety, who responded to the cry that came from every Catholic land for a General Council that should not only vindicate the doctrine of the Church against heretical innovators, but courageously enter on the reform of practical abuses. Delivered by her terrible chastisement from the meretricious splendour of a false prosperity, Rome prepared to put on her beautiful garments as of old, and to purify herself from the contagion which worldly men had brought into the very presence of the sanctuary. Even whilst her enemies were counting her among the dead, and rejoicing over her humiliation, she arose to a more beautiful and vigorous life than ever, so that many of those whose hearts had become estranged turned to her once more, and beholding her invested with the majesty of ancient discipline, recognised the seven-hilled city to be indeed “the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the sanctified mountain.”[336]

CHAPTER XXIII.

ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE.

A.D. 1473 TO 1550.

The revival of polite letters in this country may be considered as dating from the foundation of Magdalen College, in 1473. Not only was it the most perfectly constituted college in the realm, but its great founder had amply provided for the cultivation of humane literature; and at the period of his death, Grocyn, the future restorer of Greek studies at Oxford, was Divinity Professor, and Wolsey and Colet were among his pupils. Oxford at this time presented a spectacle which seems to have struck the imagination of all her foreign visitors. Three hundred halls and grammar-schools, besides her noble colleges and religious houses, furnished means of education to a far larger number of students than resort thither at the present time. The English universities, though admitting the new learning, still adhered to the scholastic philosophy--a fact which formed the groundwork of those charges brought against them by some of their contemporaries, and re-echoed by Wood, of being behind their time. It is not very easy to determine what was the precise state of the English schools at the opening of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, it is clear that the revival of classical literature found plenty of enthusiastic supporters among English scholars; and, if we are to draw any conclusions as to the nature of English education of this time from Sir John Elyot’s treatise of “The Governor,” we should be disposed to think that children of the upper classes were then expected to begin their classical studies while still in their cradles. A nobleman’s son, he says, should have none about him, not even his nurses, who cannot speak pure and eloquent Latin. At the very least, their English should be clean, polite, perfect, and articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or syllable. At seven, a boy is to begin his Greek and Latin grammars together; and at twelve he is supposed to have so completely made the Latin tongue his own that he need no more apply himself to its study, but confine his labours to Greek. The whole treatise, which is in many respects valuable and interesting, proves that the writer had imbibed that tiresome form of classical enthusiasm which wears you out with its illustrations from the ancients. Even the necessity of religion is supported by an appeal to the examples of Romulus and Numa Pompilius, though, accidentally, we are allowed to peep into the old Catholic nursery, and see the children “knelyng in thir games before ymages, and holdyng up thir litel white handes, movyng thir mouths as if they were praieing, or going and singyng, as it were in procession.” This treatise, published in 1531, plainly infers that at that time a noble youth was expected to begin his studies very early, and to aim at something more than the name of a scholar. On the other hand, there was a certain prejudice in favour of foreign academies, which induced those who in all ages make it their business to follow the fashion, to undervalue Eton and Oxford, and to consider you a Goth or a rustic if you had not graduated in some Italian university. The mediæval spirit which still hung about the cloisters of Oxford was quite out of harmony with the prevailing tastes; and undoubtedly those same cloisters sheltered many worthy Conservatives of the old school who clung to Aristotle and Oxford Latin, and thought very little of the new-fangled Platonists.

Hence, those who desired to imbue themselves with classic literature generally found their way to Italy, and the rage for a foreign education had become so excessive that Barclay introduces an allusion to it in his “Ship of Fooles:”--

One runneth to Almayne, another to France, To Paris, Padwy, Lombardy, or Spayne, Another to Bonony, Rome, or Orleans; To Caen, Toulouse, Athens or Colayne; And at the last returneth home agayne More ignorant.

The reproach conveyed in the last line was probably deserved by some whose foreign scholarship was only sought for fashion’s sake; but it does not certainly apply to the knot of illustrious Englishmen whom we find studying in the Italian schools at the close of the fifteenth century. Among them was Richard Pace, who had been brought up in the household of Langton, Bishop of Winchester, and had been sent by his patron to study at Padua, where he had Latymer and Cuthbert Tonstall for his tutors; William Linacre, who had repaired to Florence and been received into the family of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, charmed with his modesty and talents, chose him for the companion of his son’s studies: and the amiable and simple-hearted William Lily, whose Greek learning had been acquired at Rhodes, and who was then perfecting himself in Latin literature in the schools of Rome and Florence. Colet also made the tour of Italy, after taking his degree at Magdalen, and on coming back to England, he returned a second time to Oxford, where in 1497 he found Grocyn and Linacre delivering public lectures on Greek. Their audience was at first a small one, for the new learning was regarded with no little jealousy and suspicion in many quarters, and parties ran high between the Greeks and the Trojans, as the adherents of the opposite factions were commonly called. The Greeks expended their wit on the dulness of their adversaries, whom they represented as “sleepy, surly fellows, who talked bad Latin, and never said a smart or clever thing;” whilst the Trojans denounced their brilliant rivals as dangerous innovators. The truth lay pretty evenly between the two parties. The Oxford studies were possibly in some respects behind the time, and not merely profane, but sacred learning also appears, from Wood’s account, to have been at a low ebb; and for this, as has been elsewhere shown, the lawyers and the logicians, the Lollards and the Anti-Roman party, must share the blame among them. Still, when we remember the enthusiasm with which men like More and Erasmus regarded the English universities, it is difficult to believe that sound and solid learning can have been entirely wanting at Oxford,[337] and considering what sort of clouds hung on the horizon, the “Scotists,” perhaps, did not show themselves such dull fellows after all, when they warned their disciples to keep clear of foreign fashions, and set afloat the well-known proverb, “Let the Greeks beware of heresy.”

Colet did not hesitate to join the party of the Greeks, and to this he was moved not merely by a love of polite literature, but by the contempt and aversion which he had conceived for the scholastic philosophy. At Florence he had not only attended the Greek lectures of Politian and Demetrius Chalycondylus, but he had listened to the preaching of Savonarola, from whom he had caught an enthusiasm for Scriptural studies, and a burning zeal for the reform of abuses. So soon, therefore, as he had been ordained deacon he flung aside the Master of the Sentences, and began to read public lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, though with characteristic temper he had disdained to receive any degrees in Divinity, accounting the studies which he should have had to engage in for that purpose as wholly empty and unprofitable. His earnest eloquence and original mode of treatment drew him more hearers than the classic erudition of Grocyn had been able to command, and there was not a doctor of law or divinity in the whole university, but gladly came to hear the young preacher, bringing their books with them.

It was at this moment that Erasmus paid his first visit to England, having been invited over by Lord Mountjoy, his former pupil at Paris. Erasmus at this time supported himself partly by his tutorships, and partly by the pensions which he received from the sovereigns who sought to attach him to their Courts, and from the learned friends whose pecuniary assistance he availed himself of with considerable freedom. At Oxford he was received into St. Mary’s Priory by the kind-hearted Prior Charnock, and in his letters expresses the singular delight which he felt at all he heard and all he saw. He soon made acquaintance with Colet, and was by him introduced to More, then studying at Magdalen, and to Wolsey, bursar of the same college; and in company with these new friends (he wrote to Mountjoy) he would be content to live all his days in the farthest extremity of Scythia. In short, he drew so brilliant a picture of the pleasant hours they spent in one another’s company, that Mountjoy, who was but just married, could not resist the temptation of running down to Oxford, and beginning a fresh course of study under his old master.

The friendship that sprang up from that time between Erasmus and Colet was strong and enduring. Yet no two men could be more unlike in their real character, however much their literary tastes may have coincided. Colet was heart and soul in earnest, and herein lay the strength and nobleness of a disposition which, as his friend owns, had in it many a dash of human infirmity. “When he speaks,” writes Erasmus, “you would think he was more than man: it is not with voice alone, but with eyes, and countenance, and with his whole demeanour.” He was of a hot and haughty spirit, and impatient of the least affront, qualities which imparted a certain harshness and vehemence to all his words and actions. Yet he had (and who has not?) his softer side, and the stern and fiery orator, as rigid and severe to himself as he was to others, was a lover of children, and delighted to make himself little with little ones, whom he compared to the angels, though, as we shall presently see, his love even of them was somewhat lacking in tenderness. Erasmus himself was not likely to be led into the excesses to which a nature like Colet’s easily betrays itself. There was no real earnestness about him. Had he not left his Epistles behind him, we might be amazed that one so deficient in every sterling quality of soul could have found a way to the hearts of all with whom he associated. But his letters explain the mystery. There was no resisting the charm of his wit, and his extraordinary gift of treating every subject on which he touched in the way that was most agreeable. After the lapse of three hundred years, the reader, who possesses nothing but the dead written letter of that graceful eloquence, feels its indescribable magic, the “certain Erasmianism,” as Colet calls it, and is carried away against his will by the bewitching pleasantry of a writer whose whole life he knows to have been contemptible. There was, moreover, one most attractive quality which he shared with More: nothing was able to ruffle his temper; and he had the happiest ways of restraining the sallies of his more fiery companions, and preventing their table talk after dinner from ever ending in a quarrel. Thus, on one occasion, when a disputation had arisen upon the sin of Cain, Erasmus, who judged by Colet’s sparkling eyes that the conversation had lasted long enough, and wished to end it, invented on the spot a story from some pretended ancient author, by which ingenious fraud the argument was broken off, and the company parted in the best of humours. He was moreover an advocate for moderation in all things, even in hostility to the scholastics, and once took up the defence of St. Thomas against the attacks of Colet, and represented that the Angelic doctor really did seem to have studied the Scriptures. But this time Colet bore him down, and could not contain his impatience at hearing a word said in favour of one whose dogmatic definitions of theology he hesitated not to accuse of arrogance. More held an equal place in the affections of both his friends; he had all the wit of Erasmus without his flippancy, and all the earnestness of Colet without his asperity of temper. He chose the latter as his director, and learnt from him a singular love for the inspired writings, and many precious secrets of self-mastery and mortification; but he had some spiritual instincts to which Colet was an utter stranger; and while the one was venting his annoyance at what he deemed the childish superstitions of the Canterbury pilgrims, as he watched them crowding to kiss the relics of St. Thomas à Becket, the other, with truer humility, thought it not beneath the character of a man of letters to feed his faith at the homely springs of popular devotion, and visited many an old English shrine on foot--a rare thing in those days, when even the common people went on horse-back.

We will pass over a few years, which brought their usual changes to the Oxford friends in all save the mutual regard which they bore for one another. The princely boy to whom Erasmus had first been introduced in his schoolroom, and who had won his heart by challenging him to reply to a Latin epistle, was now on the throne, “tall in body, and mighty in will,” says Stow, “and so prosperous in his kingdom, that it was called ‘The Golden Realm.’” Wolsey, whom we left a Demy of Magdalen, was now Cardinal, and had just succeeded Warham as chancellor, having the learned Richard Pace for his secretary. The European politics which he sought to guide had not made him neglect the cause of letters:--

“Witness for him Those twins of learning which he raised in you, Ipswich and Oxford!”

Good Bishop Fisher was hard at work introducing Greek studies at Cambridge, where Croke was delivering lectures, and where the new learning was better received than it had been at Oxford. The noble Countess of Richmond[338] had founded her two Cambridge colleges, her grammar-school at Wimbourne, and her “Lady Margaret” professorships; Fox, now Bishop of Winchester, was drawing up the statutes of Corpus Christi, that classical beehive, as he was pleased to term it, in which he provided for the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, under the professors or “herbalists,” who were for ever to drive all barbarism out of the bee-garden, and provide that the best classical authors should be read by his students. Linacre was now the royal physician and a man of importance; he had translated Galen, founded two lectureships at Oxford, and the College of Physicians, but at this moment he was contemplating whether it might not be well to give up professional fame and Court favour, in order to die a priest; and this design he afterwards executed. Grocyn, too, had ably maintained his scholar’s reputation, and was universally respected as long as he lived, says Erasmus, for his chaste and holy life. In the judgment of that critic, however, his firm adherence to Catholic dogma was somewhat excessive, and bordered on superstition, and he considers it necessary to apologise for this weakness on the part of his friend, who, he says, had from childhood been trained in the scholastic theology, and was exceedingly learned in questions of ecclesiastical discipline. More, whose early inclination for the cloister had yielded to the persuasions of his director Colet, had married and embraced a professional career; he had written his Utopia, and was struggling hard to preserve his independence, and keep out of the royal service, into which others so eagerly sought admittance. He desired nothing better than to be suffered to enjoy in freedom his happy Chelsea home, where it was his delight to direct the education of his children, to gather around him his learned friends, and relieve the intervals of business with polite and Christian studies. In that family circle Erasmus always found a place during his visits to England, and it is to him that we owe the charming portraiture of a household, the venerable memory of which has sunk into the English heart and become almost the typical example of an English home. As to Erasmus himself, his course during the same period is easily told: he had published his Greek Testament and his learned editions of the Fathers, and had thereby earned a European reputation; he had flitted about from England to Paris, from Paris to Germany, from Germany back again to England, and thence to Rome. Courted, flattered, and admired by all, he was the great bel-esprit of the day, and the lighter productions of his pen were telling upon public opinion, much perhaps in the same sort of way that clever journalism affects it in our own day. He was directing his keen powers of ridicule against some real abuses, but at the same time his mocking wit was recklessly striking at sacred things and bringing them into popular contempt. In his “Praise of Folly,” and his “Adages,” he had hit hard at popes, cardinals, pilgrimages, devotions to the saints, and indulgences, but above all at monks and friars, whom he invariably holds up to execration, as something too pitiably vile and puerile to be endured by men of sense. In short, to use the oft-quoted saying, he had laid the egg which Luther was to hatch, and though he afterwards resented this charge, and was wont to say that he had laid a hen’s egg, and Luther had hatched it a crow’s, yet, as Hallam has shrewdly remarked, whatever were the bird, it pecked hard against the Church and her religious orders. His mode of warfare was to paint every one who opened his lips in defence of the old order of things as a half-witted ignoramus, and to bespatter his adversaries with epithets and witticisms, in an easy flowing style which everybody read and everybody laughed at; and when the laugh was once raised the victory was more than half won.

It remains to speak of Colet, now Dean of St. Paul’s, who had steadily followed out the purpose to which he had devoted himself at Oxford, had given himself up heart and soul to the task of reviving the study of Scriptural Divinity, and was opposing himself like a rock to every form of practical corruption. At this distance of time it is not easy for us to satisfy ourselves as to the real character of one who has left nothing but his fame behind him, and whose views and teaching are to be gathered, not from his own writings but from the epistolary correspondence of Erasmus, whose narrative is naturally coloured by the bias of his own mind.[339] In those days of Court sycophancy, we cannot but admire the courageous independence of such a man, and the single-hearted fervour with which he set himself to reform his chapter, to expound the gospel to the people, and to urge upon his fellow clergy a strict observance of the canons. In his sermon preached before Convocation, in 1511, he chose for his text the words of St. Paul: “Be ye not conformed to this world;” and thundered out in plain, strong, and noble words his denunciation of those abuses which he called the “matter of the Church’s reformation;” such as “the worldly lives of the prelates,” “their hunting and hawking,” and “their covetousness after high promotions.” The reformation he said must begin with my “reverend Fathers the Lord Bishops,” whom he prayed to excuse his boldness, for he spoke out of very zeal for Holy Church. In this famous sermon there is doubtless something too much of asperity, yet it does not seem to have been taken amiss. The single-hearted honesty of the speaker was understood and appreciated by his hearers; and it must be added that his own example added force to his words. Colet was a man of pure and blameless life, simple and austere in manners, and ready to spend himself for what he deemed the cause of Christ. His exhortations had extraordinary success; other ecclesiastics were animated to greater zeal in the discharge of their pastoral duties, and began to preach to their people on sermons and festival days. Divinity lectures, too, were delivered in the church of St. Paul, both by the Dean, and certain learned men whom he invited to assist him, and these lectures were no longer permitted to take the form of dry disputations, but were chiefly commentaries on the Scriptures, particularly on the Epistles of St. Paul, with which Colet was so enamoured, says Erasmus, that he seemed to be wholly wrapped up in them. With all his classical tastes he thought less of manner than of matter, in his public orations. Scriptural simplicity was what he aimed at; he wanted, to use his own rather uncourteous phrase, to “clear away the cobwebs of the schoolmen from the plain text of the Bible.” He did not altogether neglect the study of style, and sometimes condescended to read Chaucer and other English poets for the purpose of improving his diction. But in general his thoughts came out too hot and molten for him to deliberate much in what words to utter them, and the careful polish which Erasmus bestowed on his writings was viewed by him as more worthy of a pedagogue than of a preacher, who has his heart full of big thoughts and is in haste to utter them.

How little there was of a courtier about him may be gathered from the sermon which he preached before the king at the time when he was preparing for his French war, in which, instead of offering that monarch the welcome incense of flattery, he very plainly expounded to his hearers the sin which Christian princes committed by wars of ambition, in which they fought, not under the banner of Christ, but under that of the devil.[340] Much of this was surely excellent; and had this been all, we should be ready to yield our hearty sympathy to Colet in spite of those “specks of human infirmity” which his best friends saw and regretted. A reformer has rough work to do, and in doing it has need of a certain fund of audacity which easily overpasses the just bounds of discretion, and can scarcely avoid wounding the susceptibilities of those whom he undertakes to amend. Yet such things are easily pardoned in them whom we know to be only “zealous for the Lord of Hosts,” and who cannot “restrain their lips” when they declare His justice in the midst of the people. But there were other elements in the character of Colet from which we instinctively shrink, for the simple reason that they betray a mind out of harmony with the teachings of faith. We have already seen him bringing the charge of arrogance--himself surely with greater arrogance--against the Angelic doctor, unable to repress his intolerance of what he deemed his too strict definitions of doctrine; and betraying an angry contempt for the popular devotions sanctioned by the Church, but which he impeached of superstition. That practical abuses may easily have crept into many of these devotions is what no Catholic will think himself called on to deny, and that where they existed they deserved to be exposed and denounced is equally obvious; yet when we find that the only fact alluded to by Colet’s biographer as having stirred the wrath of the reformer was the eagerness displayed by the Canterbury pilgrims to kiss the shoe of St. Thomas, preserved there as a relic, we are disposed to think that it was not merely these supposed abuses, but the devotions themselves which he regarded with dislike. And this judgment is confirmed when we find him betraying a similar want of sympathy with the spirit and practice of the Church in cases where there could be no question of superstition. He set very little store by the practice of daily hearing or saying Mass: he considered the recitation of the Divine Office in private by priests to be both a burdensome and a superfluous duty, and seems to have been, to say the least, indifferent to the value of prayer for the dead. All this we learn from the correspondence of Erasmus, who further informs us that there were a vast number of opinions received in the schools from which Colet strongly dissented, and that he not only read the works of heretical writers without scruple, but was accustomed to say that he often learned more out of them than he did from orthodox writers, who were content to be always running over a beaten track.[341] It can therefore be no great matter of surprise that Colet, before long, became involved in trouble. While some men regarded him as little short of a saint, others, alarmed at his bold views and the uncompromising language in which he expressed them, looked on him as an incipient heretic, and as such denounced him to his bishop. Articles were drawn up against him and laid before the Primate, but Warham dismissed the case as frivolous, and Colet was never afterwards interfered with on account of his liberty of speech.[342]

Erasmus, and after him Fox, tells us that the three articles of accusation referred to his manner of treating the worship of images, his preaching against the worldly lives of the clergy, and his complaints of those who read their sermons in a cold and formal manner; vague charges, which would be very justly designated as “frivolous.” Tyndale, however, in his usual burlesque style, declares in his “Reply to More,” that “the bishop would have made Colet a heretic for translating the Pater Noster into English,” and this random shot has been gravely taken up and handed on from one author to another as a sober bit of history. “He even gave the people parts of the Bible in English,” says a Scotch reviewer, “such as the Lord’s Prayer!” Whilst Knight seriously assures his readers that not only were the English Scriptures at this time utterly unknown, but that “there was scarce so much as a Latin Testament in any cathedral church in England.”

Colet’s friendship with More and Erasmus meanwhile remained unbroken, and in the intervals of graver duties the three friends were wont to meet at the house of Dame Christian Colet, the Dean’s mother, in the (then) pleasant country suburb of Stepney, of which parish Colet was vicar. Erasmus has sketched the good old lady in her 90th year, with her countenance “still so fair and cheerful, you would think she had never shed a tear;” and Colet lets us know the pleasure which she found in receiving her son’s guests, and in their agreeable and witty conversation. Stepney, with its green lanes, fresh country air, and rural population, would often picture itself to the eye of More when he grew weary of his life in town; and in his early married days, when his narrow means obliged him to content himself with a house in Bucklersbury, the hardworked lawyer was glad enough, like other cockneys, to run down to Stepney on Saturday afternoons, and refresh himself with the merry talk of his friends, as they sauntered in the trimly-kept gardens and admired the noble strawberries brought over from Holland, or the damask roses lately introduced into England by Linacre.

Not unfrequently the party included some of the learned foreigners who just then crowded the Tudor Court, such as Andreas Ammonius,[343] the king’s Latin secretary, whom Erasmus praises as being “so noble and generous, so free from envy, and so full of great endowments,” or their old Oxford crony, John Sixtine, a Frisian by birth, but now naturalised in England, and esteemed by all good scholars for his versatile genius. It seems strange to us in these days to associate the names of foreign canonists and divines with our country parish churches, of which, however, they not unfrequently enjoyed the revenues. Hidden in a sequestered valley of Devonshire, surrounded by woods that are dear to village children for the sweet-scented violets that grow there in such wild profusion, shut in by hills which they will not easily forget who have seen their sloping fields all bright with golden sheaves, made brighter with the intense sunshine that seems borrowed from a southern sky; the tourist may perhaps have stumbled on the little church of St. Blaze of Haccombe, with its quaint encaustic tiles and cross-legged effigies of the crusading lords of Haccombe, all as perfect as in the days of John Sixtine, the friend of More and Erasmus, who was arch-priest of the college formerly attached to this church by Sir Stephen de Haccombe, to the end that perpetual prayer might be made there for the souls of his ancestors. Dr. Sixtine had other more splendid and lucrative benefices, but the beauty of that little rural valley seems to have clung to his heart, and among the various bequests which he names in his will, appears the sum of fifteen pounds in honour of God and St. Blaze, towards the reparation of the church of Haccombe. Let the good deed be noted here, as well as the kind and homely feeling which induced him to direct that twenty pounds should be distributed among his parishioners at Eglescliffe, “to buy them instruments necessary for their country labours.”

Both these distinguished men were frequent visitors to Stepney, and in the pleasant conferences which Colet held with the familiar coterie, one project of his must often have furnished them with a topic of conversation: it was his wish to found a school. Schools, indeed, there already were in rich abundance; during the last thirty years a very harvest of them had been springing up all over England, but none yet founded were quite to Colet’s mind. He desired to see an academy in which there should be laid a solid foundation of learning, both sacred and profane. Classical, or what he termed “clene Latin,” the fashionable study of Greek, and Scriptural divinity, would never, he argued, establish themselves in the universities until they were first taught in preparatory schools; and he pleased himself with the thought of attaching such a grammar-school to his own church of St Paul’s, and bestowing his wealth and his study in bringing it to perfection. He hoped to raise a generation of scholars who should be trained to understand the true sense and spirit of the classical authors, so as to read, write, and speak the learned tongues with ease and elegance; and who, at the same time, should have gone through a careful course of religious instruction; a large-hearted design, which met the warm approval of his literary friends, and of none more than of Erasmus.

The school was accordingly commenced in 1509, at the east end of St. Paul’s churchyard. The front next the church was finished in the year following, and bore this inscription:--Schola catechizationis puerorum in Christi Opt. Max. fide et bonis literis, Anno Christi, MDX. The endowments provided for the free education of one hundred and fifty-three scholars,[344] and for the maintenance of a master, usher, and chaplain. The school, when complete, was divided into four parts. First the porch, where those whom Colet called his catechumens were instructed in religion, no one being admitted who could not at least say the catechism and know how to read and write. Then came a room for the lower class taught by the usher, and a third for the higher class taught by the master. The captain of each form had a little desk to mark his pre-eminence, and the apartments were only divided by curtains. Lastly, there was a small chapel opening into the schoolroom, where Mass was said daily. The children, however, were not intended to hear Mass daily, for, according to Colet’s views, this would have been a waste of time. Unlike Bede and Alfred, he was ignorant of what has been called the grand secret of education, “the way how to lose time wisely.” Week-day Masses were in his eyes simple superfluities, and he judged the moments so consumed much better spent in study. In accordance with this principle, he himself only said Mass on Sundays and festivals, and argued that he spent the time thus saved more profitably in arranging the matter for his sermons! His scholars, indeed, had their Mass said for them every morning in the chapel; but the statutes enjoined that when the Sacring bell was heard, they should only prostrate until after the Elevation, and then rise and go on with their studies. What a revelation of character appears in traits like these, and how wide a distance separates such a tone of spirituality from that of the monastic scholars! How little of the spirit of faith was likely to be imbibed during this daily lesson of irreverence, and what could have been the theory which this much-vaunted director possessed of the spiritual life, when he practically taught his pupils by word and example to value work above prayer, and to save time for study by cutting short their Mass! Yet Colet designed this as a Catechetical school, and intended it to be a nursery of Christian piety. The image of the child Jesus stood on the master’s seat in the attitude of teaching, with the apposite inscription, “Hear ye Him.” The children were instructed to regard Him as the Master of the school, and as they went and came, to bow to His image and salute Him with a brief hymn. Thrice a day, moreover, they were to prostrate, and recite appointed prayers; in short, there were not wanting provisions of a religious character, only much of the true spirit of Catholic devotion had been pared away.

The statutes regarding recreation were drawn up with Puritanic rigorism. Old traditions on this head met with small indulgence at the hands of the reforming founder, and hardening his heart to all the infirmities of the schoolboy nature, he strictly forbade Shrovetide cock-fighting and the disputations of St. Bartholomew’s day, which he denounced as “idle babbling.” The abolition of cock-fighting was beyond all praise, but I grieve to add that there were absolutely no play days. Nay, so rigid was this rule, that the master was to forfeit forty shillings every time he broke it, unless at the request of an archbishop, bishop, or king. But, strange to say, there was a special provision for the due celebration of Childermas day, when they were all to repair to St. Paul’s church, hear the child-bishop’s sermon, assist at the High Mass, and offer his lordship a penny. The studies were to consist of good Greek and Latin authors, especially Christian ones, “for my intent is,” writes the founder, “by this scole specially to increase the knowledge and worshipping of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, and good Christian life and manners in the children.” But whilst giving this preference to Christian over Pagan authors he requires “the verrye Romayne eloquence” to be taught, and warming at the bare notion of Scholastic barbarism ever invading his seminary, “will utterly have banished and excluded all such abusion as the later blind world hath brought in, which is rather to be called bloterature than literature.”

Colet had no difficulty in finding a master fully qualified to undertake the direction of this academy. William Lily, the god-son and pupil of Grocyn, and the fellow-student of More, the very ideal of a humble, devout, and unworldly scholar, who had never yet thought of making his learning a way to fortune, but was still plodding on as a poor London pedagogue, was at once promoted to the mastership of St. Paul’s, with John Rightwyse for his usher. The next step was to draw up a little book for the use of his scholars containing the rudiments of grammar, and an abridgment of Christian doctrine; and this little book, commonly called Paul’s Accidence, was dedicated by Colet to Lily. Herein we find the creed in Latin and English, the seven sacraments, brief explanations of the love of God, and our duty to ourselves and our neighbours, including precepts for the observance of appointed fasts and holy days, and some rules of holy living, with a beautiful Latin prayer to “the Child Jesus, Master of this school,” and two others for daily use, one for parents, and another for the virtue of docility.

In his preface to his “Rudiments,” Colet apologises for writing on a subject whereon so many had written before him, but explains his purpose to have been the putting things in a clear order for the use of young wits, out of compassion to the tenderness and small capacity of little minds. “I pray God,” he continues, “that all may be to His honour and the erudition of children. Wherefore I pray you all, lytel babes, learn gladly this lytel treatise, and commende it dyligently unto your memorye, trusting that ye shall proceed and growe to perfyte literature, and come to be grete clerkes. And lyfte up your lytel whyte hands for me also, which prayeth for you to God.”

Wolsey reprinted this little manual for the use of his Ipswich scholars, recommending it to the masters in an epistle from his own pen. In 1513 the indefatigable founder resolved on providing his boys with something more complete. Grammars, indeed, there were in plenty; there was the old Donatus, and the more modern “Lac puerorum” of good Master Holte,[345] and a host of others whose quaint names and flimsy contents have been whimsically criticised by Erasmus. But they did not satisfy the requirements of Colet, and he accordingly composed his treatise on the Eight Parts of Speech, which, with some alterations and considerable additions, forms the syntax of the grammar which afterwards bore the name of Lily’s grammar. After Lily had revised and corrected the manuscript, Colet put it into the hands of Erasmus, who made so many alterations, that neither of them could in justice call the work his own, and in 1515 it was published, with an epistle from Erasmus. After its publication Lily drew up the rules, known as the Propria quæ maribus, and As in præsenti, his usher Rightwyse adding some finishing touches. About the same time Linacre was engaged on a somewhat similar work, but his “Compendium of Grammar,” originally drawn up for the use of the Princess Mary, was judged by Colet rather too abstruse for the comprehension of beginners, and he did not, therefore, admit it into his school. This seems to have been resented by the sensitive grammarian, and Erasmus had to interpose to restore a good understanding between him and the dean.

Lily proved an excellent master, and among his first pupils were the famous antiquary Leland and Thomas Lupset, son to Colet’s amanuensis, who was afterwards admitted to close intimacy by More and Reginald Pole. One fault, however, appeared in the management of the school, too common at that time, namely, the excessive severity of the discipline. This is perhaps to be charged partly to the account of Colet, whose views were as austere in what regarded the education of children, as they were in the direction of souls; and partly to the influence of Rightwyse, who was a scholar of Eton, and brought with him thence maxims of school government, which were exceedingly harsh, not to say cruel. In fact, since education had passed from the hands of the monastics into those of professional pedagogues, the paternal spirit which formerly presided over the Catholic schoolroom had been gradually fading away. It seemed agreed by all that the Greek grammar, and the “verrye Romayne eloquence,” could not be attained without an unsparing use of the rod; for we find the same complaint of cruelty made of the French professors of the time. In England this unmerciful system kept its ground throughout the whole of the Tudor period, and we find Sir John Elyot advising his “governor” to provoke a child to study with a pleasant face, and deprecating “cruel and yrous masters, by whom the wits of children be dulled, whereof we need no better witness than daily experience.” The Eton fashion was to flog a boy directly he appeared in the school, as a sort of entrance fee, of which old Tusser dolefully complains;[346] and something of this sort of discipline existed at St. Paul’s, and was supported by the approval of Colet.

To the credit of Erasmus, it must be said that he strongly condemned such severity; he knew from his own experience that brutal tutors ruin many a hopeful lad, and advocated the milder system of teaching, which he himself followed with so much success. He was wont to quote the example of Spensippus, who would have pictures of joy and gladness to be set round his school: and in his tract on education, quotes with pleasure the story of an English gentleman, who seeing that his little son was very fond of archery, bought him a bow and arrows, and painted them with the letters of the Greek alphabet. The capitals were marked on the butt, and whenever the child had hit a letter and could tell the name of it, he was rewarded with a cherry.

This was not at all in Colet’s way, and Erasmus tells a frightful story of the cruelty which he himself witnessed--practised under his direction. “I once knew a certain theologian,” he says, “who must needs have masters who were zealous floggers. He esteemed this an excellent means for subduing all asperity of character, and mastering the wantonness of youth. Never did he sit down to a repast with his disciples, but at the end of the meal some one or other of them was brought out to be flogged; and his cruelty was sometimes exercised on the innocent, merely to accustom them to stripes. I was once standing by when he thus called out from dinner a boy of, I should think, ten years old, who had recently come to the school from his mother. He began by saying that his mother was a most pious woman, and had specially recommended the boy to his care, and then that he might have an opportunity of flogging him, he charged him with I know not what atrocity, and made a sign to the prefect of the school to give him a flogging. The latter at once knocked the boy down, and beat him as if he had committed a sacrilege. The doctor called out several times, ‘Enough, enough,’ but the savage went on with his barbarity, till the boy almost swooned. Then turning to us, the doctor quietly observed that he had not merited any punishment, but that it was done to humble his spirit. Who would treat his bondslave in such a way? nay, I may say, who would thus treat his ass?”[347] Though Colet is not named in this passage, yet he is generally believed to have been the “theologian” in question, the prefect of discipline being no other than his usher, Rightwyse.

We gather from Colet’s letters to his friend, that on one point of opinion they greatly differed, namely, in the view they took of religious life. Erasmus, when he speaks of monks, forgets his usual politeness, and descends to a style of which Luther might have been proud. They are designated as “foul and noxious insects, which it is a sort of pollution to touch; creatures so detested and so detestable, that it is regarded as an ill omen to meet one in the street; dolts and idiots, who think it a mark of consummate piety not to be able to read; wretched beings, who are distinguished by a certain obstinate malignity of disposition, and who think that they are charming the ears of the saints when, with asinine voices, they bray out their psalms in choir.” One is ashamed to transcribe such language, and to remember that the greatest scholar of his time considered it to be wit.

But Colet was of another mind. He condemned the relaxed life led in many religious houses; but there was a theory of monasticism which he loved and admired. It was hardly the Catholic theory of religious life, for Colet’s dream seems to have been to have found some retreat where he could have spent the close of life with a few chosen friends of kindred tastes, living and conversing with them after the manner of the ancient philosophers. He even set on foot inquiries, to discover if any house suitable for his purpose existed in Italy or Germany; but finding none to his mind, he built himself a residence adjoining the Carthusian monastery at Shene, whither he often retired, and purposed withdrawing there altogether, and giving up all his public engagements that he might prepare in quiet for his end. In his last letter to Erasmus, we see that his old interests were fast losing their hold upon him as he felt the sands of life running out. His friend had sent him some of Reuchlin’s Cabalistic works. “O Erasmus,” he replies, “of books and knowledge there is no end. There is no better thing in this world than a holy life, and no other way to attain it than by the earnest love and imitation of Jesus. Wherefore, leaving all wandering paths, this, to the best of my ability, is what I long for.” He made all his last dispositions, therefore, bestowing extraordinary care in drawing up his will, in which there occurs no word suggestive of suffrages for his soul; a fact which shows, that if he did not condemn the practice of praying for the dead, he at any rate attached no value to it. Death overtook him sooner than he anticipated, and in the year 1519 he expired at his favourite retreat, almost at the moment when Luther was making his mock submission to the Sovereign Pontiff.

What shall we say of the character of this celebrated man? a strong and earnest one it was, no doubt; one that loved justice and hated iniquity, and had a zeal for the interests of God. Erasmus somewhere speaks of his “passionate admiration for the wonderful majesty of Christ.” Nor in judging him must we forget that he lived in an age when worldliness had infected the high places in the Church; and that, if his denunciation of abuses was often arrogant, there were plenty of abuses to denounce. Yet granting all this, our readers will long ago have agreed on their verdict. From such a type of Catholicism, they will say, in which we see piety without unction, austerity without sweetness, and an absence--if not of faith--at least of all its tenderest instincts; from such a form of godliness, over which the coming spectre of Lutheranism had already projected somewhat of its baneful shadow, may the schools and scholars of England be long preserved! Such characters, if we cannot impeach them of formal heresy, yet indicate a woful wane of faith, and fully explain the significance of those rules[348] left by St. Ignatius to his disciples, wherein he taught them how to conform their sentiments to the sentiments of the Catholic Church. He was not content with bidding them hold fast to her creeds, but would have them esteem and speak highly of all her minor practices of devotion. For these, in the judgment of one of the most sagacious among the saints, are the pulses by which we count the heart-beatings of the true believer; and in Colet these were silent. Though he died a Catholic, therefore, Protestants unanimously claim him as one of their precursors; and his panegyric, from which we gather all that is known of his life, was drawn up by Erasmus for the edification of his Lutheran friend, the notorious Dr. Jonas Jodocus.

The mention of Shene may fitly introduce a younger and more illustrious scholar, who had received his early education in that monastery, and who, at the time of Colet’s death, was studying at Oxford, and was received as a frequent and welcome visitor in the family circle of Sir Thomas More. Reginald Pole was then a youth of nineteen, exhibiting both the comely dignity of his Plantagenet blood, and a promise of intellectual excellence that was not belied by his after career. From Shene he had passed on to Oxford, and at Corpus Christi College, under the tuition of Linacre and Latymer, had thrown himself heart and soul into classical studies. Though he afterwards in great part laid them aside, in order more exclusively to devote himself to sacred letters, yet he always retained the style of a polished Latinist, as all his writings testify. Young as he was, he had secured the friendship of More, and was often admitted into the family circle and the happy schoolroom of Chelsea. In a letter to his daughter Margaret, More speaks of the admiration he had expressed on reading one of his Latin epistles, and calls him “not so noble by birth as he is by learning and virtue;” while Pole, on his side, was wont in after years to boast of the friendship of More and Fisher as something he valued more highly than the familiarity of all the princes of Christendom.

The society at this time gathered round the English Court was extraordinarily brilliant. Besides a throng of native scholars, it included several illustrious foreigners, such as Ludovicus Vives, the Spanish Quinctilian, as he was called, who condescended to direct the education of the Princess Mary. Three queens graced the royal circle, one of them the consort of Henry, and the other two his widowed sisters of France and Scotland. The poets and pageant-makers of the time racked their fancies to find new ways of introducing the Tudor roses white and red and the rich pomegranates of Arragon (the devices of the royal dames), and to make the most of a Court illuminated by three crowned beauties. Erasmus is never weary of praising the king, the queen, the cardinal, and the bishops; they are all patrons of letters, the Court is the seat of the Muses, and might vie with Athens in the days of Pericles. The queen is as virtuous as she is learned; she daily reads the English Scriptures, spends six hours at her prayers and kneels all the time without a cushion. The king is a scholar and a musician; he is devout, moreover, writes very elaborate Masses in eight parts, and has gone on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham, walking barefoot from the town of Barsham; and Erasmus has gone there too, and has hung up a copy of verses as his offering at her altar. How artistically he paints the broad green way across the fields by which the pilgrims approach, and the little chapel built within the splendid church, in imitation of the Holy House of Loretto, wherein there is no light save from the tapers that burn with so delicious an odour, and the walls of which are blazing with gold and jewels!

Or we are introduced to the “solemn Christmas” kept by the Court at Richmond or Greenwich, with “revels, disguisings, and banquets royal, all with great nobleness;” and we observe how the quaint mummings which found favour at the beginning of the reign are gradually giving place to “masks, after the manner of Italy, a thing not seen before in England, with which some were content, but which others that knew the fashion of it,”[349] appear to have disapproved. Such scenes were well calculated to dazzle and fascinate a young courtier; but Pole was proof against them; he showed no hurry either to plunge into the amusements of his age, or to enter on the brilliant political career which fortune seemed to open before him, and had hardly appeared at Court before he solicited from the king a fresh leave of absence.

The six years he had spent at Oxford did not by any means satisfy his ardour for study, and, with the consent of the king, who had charged himself with the education of his young kinsman, he proceeded to Padua, which Erasmus styled the Athens of Europe, and where students from all countries were eager to resort. Here “the nobleman of England,” as he was called by the Italians, soon won golden opinions--from some, for his singular modesty and virtue, from others, for the graceful acquirements that so well became his royal birth; and here he first became introduced to Bembo and Sadolet, with the latter of whom his acquaintance ripened into friendship. After the fashion of the times, he received a certain number of humbler scholars into his household, and among these were Longolius, who records his dislike for frivolous conversation, and Lupset, afterwards Greek Professor at Oxford. Erasmus, too, was often a welcome guest when the wanderings of that restless scholar led him to Padua, and his voluminous correspondence includes many letters to Pole, who, though totally opposed to his views on religious matters, was yet unable, like the rest of the world, to shut him out of his affections.

Meanwhile the breach between the reformers and the Church had terribly widened, and open war was being waged between the two parties. Henry VIII. had written his “Defence of the Seven Sacraments,” and Luther had published his “Reply;” the scurrility of which had called both More and Fisher into the field as controversialists. But Erasmus still kept silence. He was on excellent terms with Luther and Melanchthon, the worthy Dr. Jonas, and the other Coryphæi of the Reform. He corresponded with them all, and did them every service in his power at the head of those German Humanists whose literary labours were directed against the old-fashioned theologians, while their political intrigues aimed at winning over the young emperor to their side, or at least at procuring his neutrality. It is true he regretted that Luther should openly have broken from the Church, and the excesses of the heretics offered fair mark for his satire; nevertheless with most of their views of reform he heartily sympathised. On the other hand, as he was not ashamed of avowing, he had no intention of dying a martyr for his principles, neither did he at all contemplate offending the Catholic sovereigns by whom he was petted and pensioned. He counted on his own address for enabling him to steer a middle course, to save both his head and his Court remittances, and earn a good name for moderation. But on this fair horizon clouds were now about to rise. He received an official hint from Cuthbert Tonstall that King Henry was surprised and offended at his silence, and that rumours were even afloat that he had assisted Luther in the composition of his “Reply.” In vain did Erasmus protest his innocence; only one course would satisfy the king. Let him write against Luther, if he wished his sincerity to be believed; the whole Catholic world expected it of him, and was scandalised at his delay. But if this did not suit him, he could not be surprised if his pension from the Court of England were withdrawn. Thus sorely pressed, Erasmus prepared to obey. But meanwhile, a whisper of what was going on had reached Luther’s ears, and he wrote at once, advising his quondam ally to be wise and preserve silence. Luther, at least, had the merit of being a plain speaker; “If you take up the cudgels against me,” he says, “you will be beset on both sides, and must infallibly be worsted. Everybody knows that what you style moderation, is really duplicity. All I ask is, that you will stand quietly by and see the play, and not take part in it, and then I will leave you alone; but if not, you know very well what you have to expect.” This letter by some means became public, and Erasmus felt that his last chance was gone. If now he held his tongue, he should be accused of collusion; so, in pure desperation, he plunged into the combat, and wrote his treatise on Free Will, copies of which he was careful to send to all the crowned heads of Europe. Wonderful credit he took to himself for this achievement, declaring that he had exposed himself to be stoned to death by the heretics, but that he gloried in suffering for so good a cause. At the same time his letters to Melanchthon are couched in the most pitiful and apologetic strain. He could not help himself; he was a lost man if he had held his peace; the figuli Romanenses had made the Catholic sovereigns believe he was a Lutheran; he would have been ruined if he had refused to write. To Vives he was more explicit. “I have written a treatise on Free Will,” he says, “but to confess the truth I lost my own. There my heart dictated one thing, and my pen wrote another.”[350] However, whether his attack were sham or earnest mattered little to Luther; it was a declaration of war, and as such he treated it, replying to it with his usual promptitude, and with more than his usual grossness. The other leaders of the Reform likewise gave tongue on the occasion, and denounced the unwilling controversialist as a Balaam who had been hired to curse Israel. Poor Erasmus had reaped the just reward of his shuffling policy, and felt himself in a sad quandary. He knew not whether to advance or retreat, and either way he had to wade through the mire. He pours out his vexation in a letter to Pole; in which, however, he is careful to keep up the tone of a sufferer for the faith. “Luther has written a huge volume against me,” he says, “in a style one would not use in addressing the Turk; and so, from the partisan of peace and quiet which I would fain remain, I am forced to turn gladiator, and, what is worse, to fight with wild beasts in the arena.”

On his return to England, Pole found a sad and ominous cloud hanging over the Court which he had left so prosperous and splendid. The question of the divorce had already been mooted, and the bad success of the negotiations with Rome had brought about the fall of Wolsey. Henry was anxious to secure the support of Pole, whose influence at Rome he foresaw would one day be powerful, and employed his new favourite, Cromwell, to sound and tempt him. That worthy minister commenced operations by putting a copy of Machiavel’s works into the hands of Reginald, who returned it to him with disgust, and contrived to get leave to retire to Shene, where he took up his residence in Colet’s old house. Here he remained for two years, carefully abstaining from taking any part in public affairs, and at the end of that time asked and obtained leave to proceed for another term of study to the University of Paris. He was not long suffered to remain there in peace. The notable scheme of consulting the European universities and divines, which had been originally proposed by Wolsey, was warmly taken up by his successors, and royal agents were now busy in every foreign country, seeking, by bribes and cajolery, to obtain opinions favourable to the king’s divorce. To the credit of the English universities it must be said they opposed a stubborn resistance, and the affirmative declaration sent to the king never received the votes of the majority.[351] But foreign academies were found more pliant; it is true the charge for a professor’s conscience was somewhat exorbitant, but still they had their price, and did not refuse to be bargained for. In Germany, indeed, Luther’s influence was powerful enough to prevent his old adversary from receiving any assistance, but greater success was met with in France and Italy, and a commission was now sent to Pole, requiring him to gather up the suffrages of the Paris professors. He contrived to evade the odious office thus wilily thrust upon him, and was sickened to the heart by observing the eagerness with which the Humanists came forward in this disgraceful business. No one was a more active agent than Croke, the Greek orator, who wrote complacently to the king, detailing the success which attended his “honourable presents” to the Italian professors. Richard Pace, too, the successor of Colet, and the holder of several diplomatic offices, writes to say he has found a man ready to put the case either for or against the divorce, according to his Majesty’s pleasure, so as all the divines of England shall not be able to reply. The facile casuist here alluded to was no other than Wakefield, the Hebrew professor at Oxford; and, in short, turn where we will, we find the pedagogues busily engaged in doing very dirty work at high wages.

Pole was next recalled to England to be tempted with caresses. The Archbishopric of York, it was hinted, was at his command, if he were willing to bend to the king’s wishes. His own family were employed to move his determination, and at last, beset on all sides, he wavered, and consented to see the king. Henry received him graciously in the gallery at Whitehall; but when he tried to speak, conscience gained the day, and, with a faltering voice, instead of protesting his readiness to serve his Grace in his “secret matter,” he plainly declared his conviction that the proposed divorce was utterly unlawful. Though Henry cut him short with a volley of reproaches, he treated him with more magnanimity than might have been expected. He did not order him to the Tower, and silenced the officious courtiers who expressed their disgust at Reginald’s ingratitude, by the unexpected declaration that he loved him in spite of his obstinacy.[352] His pension was not withdrawn, and he was suffered once more to retire abroad; and in 1531 Pole withdrew to Italy, never again to set foot on the English shores till he landed there a Papal legate, to reconcile his country, for too brief a space, to the communion of the Catholic Church.

It is unnecessary to pursue the events of the great tragedy, save in so far as they affected the career of Pole. In his retreat at Padua, his heart was torn by the news of each successive step by which the infatuated king was plunging his country into schism; the rupture with Rome, the repudiation of Catherine, the marriage with Anne, and the formal establishment of the royal supremacy. The English Lords and Commons submitted to all this with wonderful docility, but to Henry’s vexation he found that his proceedings were daily losing him the countenance of friends abroad. The Emperor of course, was his sworn enemy; Francis I. had refused to listen to the explanations of his ambassadors; Cochlæus, and other grave writers, had drawn the pen against him; and even Calvin made game of his new-fangled supremacy, and ridiculed the man who had delivered his country from the primacy of Peter to saddle it with the primacy of Henry. Erasmus, too, had withdrawn from a country where it was no longer safe for a man to have an opinion. He was just then directing his irony against the Protestants, who had disgusted him with their grossness, and whom he pronounces a sad set of hypocrites. “People talk of Lutheranism as a tragic business, but for my part I think it is a regular comedy, and, like other comedies, the piece always ends with a marriage.” Elsewhere he says, “We have been stunned long enough with the cry of Gospel, Gospel, Gospel. What we want is Gospel manners. These Evangelicals love money and pleasure, and despise everything else.” Henry’s Acts of Parliament, too, seasoned as they were with axe and fagot, did not suit his notions of moderation; and, besides, just then Pope Paul III. was making him tempting offers, so that Erasmus was not at all disposed to take up the gauntlet on behalf of a prince, against whose conduct all the respectable part of Europe was protesting. Henry had, therefore, no one to look to out of his own kingdom save the small German princes and Protestant divines; and it was a sore humiliation to sue for support to the religionists whom it was his boast to have defeated in controversy. In this extremity, his thoughts turned to Pole, who owed him everything, and who, he could not believe, would ever openly take part against him. Cuthbert Tonstall, Reginald’s dearest friend, had swallowed the new oath, and accepted the bishopric of Durham; why should Reginald’s conscience be more tender? A messenger was, therefore, posted to Padua, with letters to Pole inviting him to accept the king’s offers of favour, and write in defence of those royal claims which had been accepted as law by the English Parliament and Hierarchy.[353] Pole saw that the time was come to take his part openly and decidedly. He sat down and counted the cost, and then he took pen in hand and wrote, not an apology for the supremacy, but his celebrated treatise De Unitate Ecclesiastica in which he sums up all the acts by which England has been severed from Catholic communion, fearlessly condemns the sacrileges of the king, and calls on him to enter on the path of penance. Whilst thus engaged, terrible tidings reached him: the axe had fallen at last, and More and Fisher were numbered with the martyrs; and, with the tears blotting his paper, he gave vent to his sorrow in that magnificent apostrophe to the memory of his friends, which he introduces in his Third Book. The treatise was finished in four months, and despatched to England by a faithful messenger, who was charged to deliver it into the king’s own hands; and then, fully aware of the consequences of his determination, Reginald set out for Rome, whither he had been invited by Paul III. almost immediately on his accession. His friends entreated him not openly to break with the king by accepting any preferment from the Pope. The two Houses of Parliament even sent him a common letter to the same effect; but before it reached him, Pole was at Rome, and had received from the new Pontiff the dignity of Cardinal.

Two months later he found himself charged with a dangerous and difficult mission. The fate of Anne Boleyn had, it was hoped, removed from the king his worst councillor, and the insurrection of the northern counties of England bore witness that the people themselves were still true to the faith. Hopes were, therefore, entertained that negotiations for a reconciliation might now be opened, and Pole was accordingly appointed legate north of the Alps, with instructions to proceed to Flanders, to bring about a peace between France and the Empire, to announce the Pope’s resolve to call a General Council, and to seize any occasion that might present itself for confirming the English Catholics in their faith, and negotiating with the king’s government. The legation, however, was an utter failure. Henry had proclaimed the Cardinal a traitor, and set a price on his head; he had offered to buy him of the Emperor in exchange for a force of four thousand men; he had so managed matters that the legate was warned to leave France as quickly as possible, and refused admission into the imperial territory; the English agents were everywhere busy endeavouring to procure either his open seizure or his secret assassination; and in the midst of these multiplied perils Pole had no support save his own great heart and dauntless courage. His chaplains and followers were perplexed and terrified. A legate in those days travelled in state, with his cross borne openly at the head of his train; but the attendant, whose duty it was to carry the cross, turned faint-hearted, and suggested the prudence of concealing these marks of dignity in a hostile country. The last of the Plantagenets, however, was not the man to quail in the presence of danger; he calmly took the cross from the hands of the bearer, and fixing its point firmly in his own stirrup, rode along, thinking perhaps of St. Thomas, and certainly as ready as he to face the assassins, and shed his life-blood in the cause of the Church.

A second legation in 1538 proved equally fruitless, and its only result was the slaughter of every one of Pole’s family on whom Henry could lay his hands. The Cardinal meanwhile was recalled to Rome, and appointed to the government of Viterbo, where he heard, in 1541, of the murder of his aged mother, and gave thanks that she, too, had been deemed worthy to suffer for the faith. His political engagements had not weaned him from the love of letters, and, amid his many trials, he found his chief solace, after his exercises of piety, in the company of his learned friends. Pole entertained very strong views as to the necessity of restoring a more Christian system of studies, and laboured hard to bring those around him to the same mind. Sadolet had just published his “Treatise on Education,” and Pole addressed him a letter which Erasmus calls worthy of Cicero, touchingly remonstrating with him for not giving a more prominent place to Christian theology. Sadolet defends himself by saying that theology is a part of philosophy, and the perfection of it; but Pole was not satisfied. It might do well enough, he says, if your pupil lived in the time of Plato or Aristotle, but a Christian scholar requires something more than philosophy. Their difference of opinion, however, was expressed on both sides with equal courtesy and moderation, and the correspondence between them offers a pleasing contrast to those acrimonious disputes, in which the scholars of the last generation had so frequently disgraced themselves.

This was not the only occasion when Pole exerted himself to give a more decidedly Christian direction to his friend’s studies. Sadolet had two works on hand; one a treatise in praise of philosophy, the other a Commentary on St. Paul. He was doubting which to finish first, and Bembo of course advised the preference to be given to philosophy. Pole was as great a lover of classical antiquity as either of them, but at that grievous juncture, when a swarm of heretics were in the field, it seemed to him a kind of infidelity for the children of the Church to waste their time and genius on elegant trifling. His arguments decided Sadolet in favour of St. Paul, and he afterwards received his friend’s hearty thanks for having thus determined his choice. “There were not wanting plenty,” writes Sadolet, “who were ready to give me very different advice, but you counselled me to embrace studies, the emoluments of which extend to the other life, and your words have decided me henceforth to devote myself to sacred literature.”

There was, however, nothing of the narrowness of a zealot in Pole’s character; he and Contarini were advocates for a mild policy even with heretics; and his gentle persuasion had a happy success in recalling many who had been seduced by the new opinions, among others, the Latin poet Mark Anthony Flaminius. This celebrated man had been one of his early friends, but had suffered himself to be won over by the specious arguments of Valdes. Pole invited him to Viterbo, and, by dint of patience and kindness, restored him to a better mind, and it was in his house that he afterwards expired, as Beccadelli expresses it, “like a good Christian.”[354] In the same spirit he received into his family Lazarus Bonamico, professor of humanity at Padua, saying that he was worth something better than the occupation of explaining Virgil, and that the study of theology which he wished him to embrace, required the whole man. He assisted Bembo also in his last moments, and his house was the refuge of all those English Catholics, who, like himself, preferred exile to apostasy.

Among these, one is glad to reckon George, the son of our old friend William Lily, whom he took under his protection, and who, alter writing some learned works, and contributing to the history of Paulus Jovius, returned with Pole to England in Queen Mary’s days, and died a prebendary of Canterbury. And so we will leave our great countryman for a time doing the work of an apostle among the scholars of his day, to find him again at the head of that momentous council, which owed to his influence not a few of its most important measures of reform. Before following him there, we have to take our farewell of the English schools, whose destinies from this time form a page in the history of sacrilege. The first royal visitation of the universities, held in virtue of King Henry’s newly-claimed supremacy, took place in 1535, when the further study of scholastic philosophy and canon law were prohibited. For a brief space the attempt was made to fill up the hiatus with an extra quantity of Greek and profane studies, and then it was that Sir John Cheke achieved that celebrity at Cambridge which Milton has commemorated in a sonnet. All the Humanists indeed were not men of equally solid learning, for Saunders tells us the universities were filled with a multitude of young orators and poets, who, after celebrating the mock obsequies of Scotus and St. Thomas, tried, by means of unbecoming comedies, songs, and verses, to decoy the unwary into the errors of the sects, and immorality of life. On the whole, the attempt was a failure; English scholars were nor yet sufficiently familiarised with the new learning to give it a very warm reception, and the exotic Greek studies, like plants that had been overforced, soon drooped and perished.[355] Canon law and theology, and, above all, the despised scholastic logic, were precisely the studies in which Catholic Oxford had most excelled; and their abolition was tantamount to the formal closing of her schools. And during the reign of Edward VI. the divinity school was actually closed, and in spite of every effort on the part of the Humanists, the decay became so universal that all the other schools, except two, were shut up, or let out to laundresses and glovers. “There, where Minerva formerly sat as regent,” says Wood, “was nothing during all the reign of King Edward but wretched solitariness; nothing but a dead silence prevailed.” The dissolution of the monasteries, moreover, had ruined upwards of a hundred flourishing academies, which served as feeders to the universities, the place of which was very imperfectly filled by King Edward’s grammar-schools. Thus, a large proportion of those who had formerly followed the pursuit of learning, now betook themselves to mechanical trades, and the schools literally died out for want of scholars. In 1550 we find Roger Ascham, a strenuous adherent of the new worship, lamenting over the decay of the old grammar-schools, and predicting in consequence the speedy extinction of the universities: whilst Latimer about the same time is found declaring that there were at least ten thousand fewer students in the kingdom than might have been found twenty years previously.

The ruin of learning at the universities was completed by the bigotry of those foreign Protestant divines, who, in King Edward’s time, were brought over from Germany and Switzerland to fill up the professorships which no English scholar could be found to accept under the new ecclesiastical régime. Among these the celebrated Peter Vermigli, better known by the name of Peter Martyr, was indeed a good scholar, but the greater number of his colleagues were not only without learning, but, following in the footsteps of Luther, they proclaimed war against it as “a human thing.” They voted the academical degrees “Antichristian,” and showed their horror of all the vain things fondly invented by Popery, not only by the breaking of images, but by the burning of libraries. Duke Humphrey’s precious collection of classical authors was condemned to the flames; the exquisite illuminations of his costly volumes possibly suggesting the notion that they must be of the nature of Roman service books. When Sir Thomas Bodley took up his residence at Oxford, towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, he informs us that he found the libraries “in every part wasted and ruined,” and it is well known that the splendid foundation which we owe to his munificence, was but a collection of such poor fragments as had accidentally escaped destruction.

Of the material sacrileges committed by King Edward’s visitors it is unnecessary here to speak, and without necessity one would not willingly enter on the sorrowful tale. The shell of the universities was left, to be gradually informed with a new spirit, a new learning, a new life; which, as years rolled on, became no longer new, and so gradually grew to be regarded by Englishmen as venerable. Oxford, with her thousand Catholic memories, became in process of time the stronghold of Anglican Church Toryism; a pigmy destiny, indeed, for her who had been founded by the hands of saints, yet one with which, on the whole, she has showed herself amply satisfied. The Royal Supremacy, which had first cut down her fair proportions, clung to her like the poisoned garment of Nessus, but though it sometimes galled her, she made the most (as was fitting) of her solitary dogma, and, in a memorable moment of her history, proclaimed fidelity to it in its extremest form to be “the badge of the Church of England.”

Here, then, we will bid farewell to Oxford; to those venerable walls round which there still hang shadows of the past, out of which alas! too many build up an unsubstantial cloudland, with the gorgeous beauty of which they rest content. The Catholic, while he feels the power which even such phantoms of the old faith exercise over the heart, knows well enough that he does but gaze on

The loveliness of death That parts not quite with parting breath.

He reads her ancient motto, and can but pray that a beam of the True Light may one day again illuminate her, and that she, over whose beautiful places the fire has passed, may once more sing, according to the days of her youth, “Dominus Illuminatio mea.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.

When the conclave of October 13, 1534, announced the election of Cardinal Alexander Farnese as successor to Clement VII., few men probably anticipated what would be the character of the new pontificate. The antecedents of Paul III. appeared to link him with what may be called the Conservative party of the day. He had been a pupil of Pomponius Lætus, had been raised to the purple by Alexander VI., had grown up in the luxurious atmosphere of Leo’s Court, and in his early youth, before he embraced the ecclesiastical state, had not escaped the worldly infection which clung to the literary circles among which he mixed. Men of letters indeed might naturally look for encouragement from the friend of Sadolet, the correspondent of Erasmus, and the elegant commentator on Cicero, but few expected to find in him the uncompromising champion of ecclesiastical reform. Yet such he soon proved himself. One fault alone was charged to his administration, the promotion of relatives whose subsequent misconduct brought scandal on the Church, and anguish to his own heart. But in other respects his favour was bestowed on precisely those who were best qualified to forward the interests of religion. He filled the sacred college with men worthy of the purple; Pole, Fisher, Caraffa, Contarini, Sadolet, Aleander, and Cortese, were all cardinals of his nomination. In his love of art and poetry he was hardly inferior to Leo X., but the thoughts that occupied his soul as Supreme Head of the Church had a higher and nobler aim than even the encouragement of letters. To restore peace between France and the Empire, to keep back the onward progress of the Turks, and to call a General Council for the purpose of healing the wounds of the Church, these were the objects he set before him as the work of his pontificate, and he never rested till he had accomplished them. Until Charles and Francis had laid down their arms, however, the Council so loudly demanded by men of all opinions was a simple impossibility, and ten weary years had to pass before these Christian princes could be brought to terms. If for a moment they suspended hostilities, it was only to renew them with greater animosity than before, and to give the French king an opportunity of covering himself with infamy by calling to his help the Turkish hordes, and inviting them to overrun Italy. Whilst Europe was involved in these broils, it was plain there could be no Council; but at least there could be the initiatives of reform, and in 1537 Paul III. proved his earnest desire to begin the work by naming a Commission of cardinals and other ecclesiastics, whom he charged with the delicate task of drawing up a statement of those abuses which, in their judgment, most loudly called for redress.

This Commission was composed of nine men, whose names were equally illustrious for integrity and learning. They were the cardinals Contarini, Caraffa, Sadolet, and Pole, together with five other prelates afterwards raised to the same dignity; namely, Fregoso, Archbishop of Salerno; Aleander, Archbishop of Brindisi; Ghiberti, Bishop of Verona; Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins; and Father Thomas Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace.

Some of these have already been spoken of. Contarini and Aleander had distinguished themselves by their missions in Germany and their fruitless efforts to conciliate and win back the misguided Lutherans. Ghiberti had been associated with Pole in his legations, and was bound to him by close ties of friendship. He was regarded by St. Charles Borromeo as the ideal of a Christian bishop, and his portrait always hung in the saint’s chamber, to urge him, as he said, to imitate his pastoral career. He was also profoundly learned, and had set up a printing-press in his episcopal palace, whence issued forth magnificent editions of the Greek Fathers. Cortese, a Benedictine abbot, had revived the fame of the old monastery of Lerins, and restored regular observance in a great number of other houses of his order. Tiraboschi calls him one of the most elegant writers of his age, and says that his theological works are free from the least tincture of scholastic barbarism. Frederic Fregoso was a Hebrew scholar, and Aleander a learned Orientalist. Not one, in short, of all the nine could be taunted as a disciple of the retrograde school, and all had in one way or other taken part in the revival of polite letters.

Out of the twenty-seven heads to which they reduced their statement of existing abuses, one only concerns our present subject. The whole report was indeed of great importance, and furnished the basis on which were framed many of the decrees of discipline subsequently promulgated by the Fathers of Trent. But it is the sixteenth article alone which touches on the subject of university education, which we will here reproduce as containing both a brief summary and a sufficient justification of much that has been put forward in the foregoing pages. After noticing the reforms urgently called for in the collation to ecclesiastical benefices, the Congregation of prelates proceed as follows:--

“It is a great and pernicious abuse that in the public schools, especially of Italy, many philosophers teach impiety. Even in the churches most impious disputations are held, and if some are of a pious nature, yet in them sacred things are treated before the people in a most irreverent manner. We think, therefore, that it should be pointed out to the bishops, in those places where public schools exist, that they admonish those who deliver lectures not to teach impiety to the young, but to manifest to them the weakness of natural reason in questions appertaining to God, to the recent origin or eternity of the world, and the like, and that they rather lead them to piety. Also, that they permit not public disputations to be held on questions of this nature, nor even on theological subjects, which certainly in this way lose much in vulgar esteem; but let disputations be held in private on these matters, and let the public disputations be on other questions of physics. And the same thing ought to be enjoined on all other bishops, specially of great cities where disputations of this sort are wont to be held. And the same care should be employed about the printing of books, and all princes should be written to, warning them not to allow books of all sorts to be printed everywhere in their dominions. And the care of the matter should be committed to the ordinaries. And whereas it is now customary to read to boys in the schools the ‘Colloquies’ of Erasmus,[356] in which there are many things which instil impiety into inexperienced minds, the reading of this book, and of others of a similar character, ought to be prohibited.”[357]

This certainly is a most remarkable document. It proceeded not from a body of “Scotists” and “barbarians,” but from elegant Humanists, all of them university scholars, whilst some, like Aleander, had themselves occupied Professors’ chairs. It will be observed that the evils which they point out in the existing system of education, and which they indicate as lying at the root of so many prevailing corruptions, are precisely those the growth of which we have been watching from the time when the universities replaced the episcopal and monastic schools. The whole weakness of the Professorial system is here laid bare; its incitements to vanity, its tendency to substitute novelties that tickle the ears of a mixed audience for the teaching of solid truth; the system which had Berengarius and Abelard for its fittest representatives; which had already produced a goodly crop of heretics and false teachers, and which, while it extinguished the old ecclesiastical seminaries, supplied in place of them, nothing better for the training of the Christian priesthood, than universities which, in Italy, at least, had grown to be little else than academies of heathen philosophy. Such a grave and deliberate declaration, and from such authority, requires no commentary; it was a candid avowal from the choicest intellects of Christendom, that three centuries before, a false step had been taken; and a plain and solemn warning that if the evil results of that step were now to be remedied, it could only be by returning to the ancient paths.

It was precisely at this time that St. Ignatius and his companions first appeared in Rome, and submitted to the Holy See the plan for the foundation of their society. The education of youth[358] is set forth in the Formula of Approval granted by Paul III. in 1540 as the first duty embraced by the new Institute, and it is to be observed that the two patrons who most powerfully interested themselves in obtaining this approval were both of them members of the above-named commission, namely, Cardinal Gaspar Contarini, and the Dominican, Father Thomas Badia. Although the new religious were not at once able to begin the establishment of colleges, yet the plan of those afterwards founded was gradually ripening in the sagacious mind of St. Ignatius, who looked to these institutions as calculated to oppose the surest bulwarks against the progress of heresy. The first regular college of the Society was that established at Gandia in 1546, through the zeal of St. Francis Borgia, third General of the Society; and the regulations by which it was governed, and which were embodied in the constitutions, were extended to all the Jesuit colleges afterwards founded. The studies were to include theology, both positive and scholastic, as well as grammar, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. The course of philosophy was to last three years, that of theology four; and the Professors of Philosophy were enjoined to treat their subject in such a way as to dispose the mind for the study of theology, instead of setting up faith and reason in opposition to one another. The theology of St. Thomas, and the philosophy of Aristotle, were to be followed, except on those points where the teaching of the latter was opposed to the Catholic faith. Those points of metaphysics which involved questions depending for their demonstration on revealed truth, such as free-will, or the origin of evil, were not to be treated in the course of philosophy, but to be reserved for that of theology. No classical authors, whether Greek or Latin, wherein was to be found anything contrary to good morals, were to be read in the classes until first corrected, and the students were subjected to rules of discipline which aimed at forming in them habits of solid piety. It is clear that colleges thus constituted were exactly fitted to carry out those reforms which Pole and his colleagues had suggested as being so urgently called for, and that the system of education thus proposed effectually excluded the “impious philosophy” which had been nurtured in the academies of Italy.

Meanwhile the political horizon was gradually growing clearer, and on the 13th of December 1545, the first session of the long-expected Council was opened by the three legates nominated by the Pope. They were the Cardinals del Monte, Cervini, and Pole. The two first successively filled the chair of St. Peter after Paul III., under the titles of Julius III. and Marcellus II. Pole held his office only until the October of the following year, when the state of his health obliged him to retire from the legation. He nevertheless continued to be employed in affairs connected with the Council, and assisted in drawing up the Bull of Reform published by Julius III. in 1550. The exhortation addressed to the Fathers of the Council at the opening of the second session was composed by him, and the doctrinal decree on Justification, which defined the faith of the Church on the point most warmly controverted by the Lutherans, is believed to have been first sketched out by his pen,[359] and was certainly submitted by his colleagues to his approval in its complete shape before publication, he being then detained by sickness at Padua. In 1554 the accession of Queen Mary recalled him to England, where, for the four remaining years of his life, he was engaged in reconstructing the shattered constitution of the English Church, and was, of course, unable to take any active part in the affairs of the Council. But some of his Synodal Acts anticipated in so remarkable a manner the Tridentine decrees of discipline that they have been even supposed to have furnished the model on which the decrees were drawn up. At any rate, they evince how thoroughly Pole was himself imbued with the views and principles which guided the Fathers of the Council, and bear too closely on our subject to be omitted here.

The first act of his primacy, after the formal reconciliation of the nation to the Holy See, was to summon a Provincial Synod, which met in Henry VII.’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, and continued to sit from the November of 1554 to the same month in the ensuing year. After regulations passed for the remedy of sundry abuses, such as pluralities and non-residence, and others which aimed at providing for the instruction of the people, by means of preaching, we come to the important decrees on the subject of Church seminaries. A return was made to the ancient ecclesiastical system, and the cathedral schools were put on a footing which should enable them to train the future clergy of the diocese. Every cathedral was to maintain, in its own school, a certain number of boys, in proportion to its revenues. Those only were to be chosen in whom there seemed to be tokens of a vocation to the priesthood; they were to be received about the age of eleven or twelve, rather from the ranks of the poor than the rich, and were required before admission to know at least how to read and write. All were to wear the tonsure and the ecclesiastical habit, to live in common, and to assist daily at the public office in the cathedral. They were gradually to be admitted to Holy Orders, at proper intervals. The school was to be placed under the superintendence of the Dean and Chapter. Other students might be admitted, who were required to follow the rules of the seminary in all things. Moreover, all the schools and schoolmasters of the diocese were placed under the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, and the books used in these schools were first to be approved by him.[360] The acts of this synod were sent to Rome, and formally approved by Pope Paul IV., and there is little doubt that they must have been in the hands of many of the prelates who assisted at the later sessions of the Council of Trent.

The next task which presented itself was the restoration of the universities, which, as we have seen, had sunk during the reign of Edward VI., into a state of utter decay. Here the Cardinal’s efforts were nobly seconded by Queen Mary, who re-endowed the Colleges with such portions of their revenues as had been seized by the Crown, and at her own charges commenced the rebuilding of the schools. To restore the ancient theological studies, and place the universities on their former footing, Nicholas Ormanetti, formerly Vicar-General to the good prelate Matthew Ghiberti, and now first Datary to the English Legation, was appointed visitor. The heretical professors were replaced with learned Catholics, both native and foreign, and among the latter number were the two Spanish Dominicans, Peter Soto and Bartholomew Carranza, both of whom had been present as theologians at some of the sittings of the Council of Trent. By their influence the scholastic theology was restored at Oxford--a circumstance which occasioned the charge of obscurantism to be very unsuitably brought against the Catholic professors, by those who had been engaged before them in crying down humane learning and burning Duke Humphrey’s library. Pole certainly was not one to neglect the cultivation of humane literature, but the restoration of the Divinity schools of Oxford was just then of more urgent necessity than anything else, and we could not have blamed the Catholic prelates if, in their solicitude on this point, they had even allowed the polite letters to remain for a time uncared for. They did, however, the very reverse of this, and put such renewed life into the English schools as inspired Sir Thomas Pope with courage to propose a new Oxford foundation, for the express purpose of promoting classical studies. The statutes of Trinity College, Oxford, were submitted to the approval of Pole, who pleaded strongly for more Greek. Sir Thomas Pope is represented by some to have resisted this, but his own letters explain the true state of the case. “I like the purpose well,” he says, “but I fear the times will not bear it now. I remember when I was a young scholar at Eton the Greek tongue was growing apace, but the study of it of late is much decayed.” That is to say, that the real “obscurantism” had been occasioned, not by the Spanish Dominicans, but by the Genevese Reformers, who left it to Pole and his colleagues to undo their mischievous work. In consequence of the Cardinal’s representations, a Greek lecturer was appointed at Trinity, and the buildings of old Durham College were given up to the new foundation, the present library being the very same originally built to receive the books deposited there by Richard of Bury.

The death of the queen in 1558, followed sixteen hours later by that of the Cardinal Primate, put an end to the work of restoration, and the curtain dropped heavily over the hopes of the English Catholics. And in what way, it may be asked, did the triumph of Protestantism affect the schools? “Duns, and his rabble of barbarous questionists” (to use the language of Ascham) were, of course, put to the rout; but what was substituted in their place during the golden reign of Queen Elizabeth? Five years after her accession, we learn from Wood, that there were only three divines in Oxford judged capable of preaching the university sermon. The established clergy were recruited from an illiterate class, who preached on Sundays, and worked at their trades on week days, some of them being hardly able to sign their names. Four years later, when Archbishop Parker founded three scholarships in Cambridge, for the best and ablest scholars to be elected from the chief schools of Kent and Norfolk, it was found prudent to require no higher attainments from the candidates than a knowledge of grammar, “and, if it may be, that they should be able to make a verse.” And three years later again, we find Horne, bishop of Winchester, requiring his minor canons every week to get by heart a chapter of St. Paul’s Epistles in Latin, which task they had to repeat aloud at the public episcopal visitation. The universities revived in some degree towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign, and yet more under the early Stuart princes, though it is remarkable how large a number of the best English scholars of this period, such as Campion and Crashaw, embraced the Catholic faith. But the free intercommunion with the mind of Europe, which had been the great intellectual advantage of these institutions in Catholic times, was now at an end. Whatever scholarship they fostered was henceforth stamped with a certain character of narrow nationality; their very Latinity became Anglicised in its pronunciation, and thus the Latin language ceased to be to English scholars what it was, and still is, to those of Catholic academies--a medium of intercourse between educated men. Among those Englishmen who have distinguished themselves in the ranks of science and literature since the Reformation, a very large proportion have not been university scholars, and our two philosophers of greatest note, Bacon and Locke, so far from acknowledging any obligations to their university training, avowedly despised, and set themselves to make others despise, the academic system of education.

It remains for us to speak of the decrees affecting the question of ecclesiastical education passed in the later sessions of the Council of Trent. The wars and political intrigues of that troublous time caused so many interruptions in the sittings of the Council that they were not finally closed until eighteen years from the date of their first opening.

Few, comparatively, of those who had taken part in the first sessions, assisted at the three last held in the year 1563, under the presidency of five cardinal legates.[361] Of the three who had presided at the opening of the Council, two had been successively raised to the Chair of St. Peter, and all had passed to a better life. Not one survived of those nine Cardinals who had sat in Paul III.’s Congregation of Reform. But the new generation which had arisen in their place were animated with the same spirit, or, if there were any difference to be noticed, it lay, perhaps, in the fact, that the deliberations of those eighteen years had supplied them with fuller light, and deepened their desire for the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. The very troubles of the times had co-operated in the development of a strong Christian reaction against the Paganism of the last half century; and many prelates had not waited for the close of the Council before instituting a vigorous reform of abuses in their own dioceses. Thus the church of Verona under Matthew Ghiberti had become a model of discipline, and in Portugal the celebrated Bartholomew of the Martyrs, Archbishop of Braga, had set the example of exact observance of the canons, in the government of his large diocese. Among the other means he had adopted for the reform of his clergy, was the establishment of a sort of seminary in his own palace, which he endowed out of his episcopal revenues, appointing as scholasticus a religious of his order. The archbishop sat in the later sessions of the Council, and took a very prominent part in its deliberations. Again, the establishment of the Jesuit colleges, specially the German college in Rome, and the extraordinary success which had attended the labours of the Blessed Peter Canisius, in restoring Catholicism in Germany, had poured a flood of light on the whole subject of educational reform. Canisius assisted at the sittings of the Council in 1547 and again in 1562, and even when absent his opinion was continually consulted by Cardinal Hosius and the other legates. Reform was now not a theory, but a fact. In Aichstadt, the old diocese of St. Wilibald, where heresy and irreligion, had, as it seemed, firmly established themselves, the university was purged of the evil leaven, and the faith had revived in all its fervour. In Vienna, in spite of the protection of the Government, religion had so rapidly declined under the infection of the Lutheran doctrines, that for twenty years not a single candidate for holy orders had presented himself. Parishes were left without pastors, the sacraments were neglected, and through timidity and human respect the Catholic clergy opposed but a faint resistance to the encroachments of the heretics. But under the direction of Canisius the university was restored, a college was founded for the education of youth, and public catechisms were instituted, which effected a change little short of miraculous, and the same scenes were to be witnessed in the other cities of Germany.

The Fathers, therefore, who assembled at the twenty-seventh session of the Council of Trent had facts as well as principles before them, indicating a sound system of ecclesiastical education as the measure best calculated to remedy the evils which afflicted the Church. In earlier sessions the old canons had been confirmed requiring cathedrals to maintain a theologian and grammar-master for the instruction of the younger clergy, but this law fell very far short of what was needed, and its frequent renewal by former Councils does not appear to have been attended with much result. What the Church had possessed in former ages, and what she now desired to restore, were not mere theological classes, but rather nurseries, in which her clergy could be trained in ecclesiastical discipline as well as supplied with the learning proper to their state. Such seminaries had existed before the rise of the universities; they were now to reappear, and it was with unanimous consent, accompanied with an emotion of grateful joy not easy to express, that the Fathers passed that decree which has been called the practical résumé of the whole Council. It forms the eighteenth chapter of the twenty-seventh session, and its provisions are briefly as follows:--

Every cathedral or metropolitan church is bound, according to its means, to maintain a certain number of youths belonging to the city or diocese in some suitable college, who shall then be trained for the ecclesiastical state. They are to be at least twelve years old, and chosen from those who give hopes of their being eventually fit for the priesthood. The Holy Council desires that a “preference be given to the children of poor parents,” though the rich are not to be excluded. The college, which is to be “a perpetual seminary for the service of God,” is entirely under the direction of the bishop, who is to be assisted by two canons chosen by himself. The students, on their entrance, are to wear the tonsure and ecclesiastical habit; to learn grammar, church music, the ecclesiastical computation, and the other liberal arts; but they are specially to apply themselves to the study of the Scriptures, and all that appertains to the right administration of the Sacraments. The bishop, or the visitors whom he appoints, are to watch over the maintenance of good discipline among them, and to take all proper means for the encouragement of piety and virtue. The seminary is to be maintained by a tax on all the benefices in the diocese. If in any province the dioceses are too poor each to maintain its own seminary, the Provincial synod may establish one attached to the metropolitan church for the general use of all churches of the diocese; or, again, if a diocese be very large and populous, the bishop may, if necessary, establish in it more than one seminary. It belongs to the bishop to appoint or remove the scholasticus, and no person is to be appointed who is not a doctor or licentiate in theology or canon law. The bishop also has the right of prescribing what studies are to be pursued by the seminarists, according as he may think proper.[362]

So universal was the satisfaction caused by this decree, that many prelates hesitated not to declare, that if no other good were to result from the labours of the Council, this alone would compensate to them for all their fatigues and sacrifices. They regarded such a reform as was here provided, as the only efficacious means of restoring ecclesiastical discipline, well knowing that in every state and government, as are the heads, so are the members, and that the character of a people depends on that of their teachers.[363]

It will be observed that in this famous decree there is no allusion to the universities as in any way regarded as nurseries of the clergy. Canons for their reform were passed in the twenty-fifth session,[364] but not a word was said connecting them in any way with the proposed seminaries. It is not even recommended that seminaries should be established in the vicinity of universities where these already existed, though at that time universities were far more numerous than now, every province almost possessing one in its territory; but it is distinctly laid down, that they are to form a part of the cathedral establishment, and, where it can conveniently be done, that they be erected in the cathedral city of the diocese. The radical idea of the seminary is that of its being the bishop’s school,[365] formed under his eye, and subject to his control--an idea which is manifestly totally inconsistent with the plan of a university. So strictly is this the case, that where colleges have since been founded (as at Rome) for ecclesiastical students of different nations, which of course could not be placed under the jurisdiction of their own bishops, these colleges are rarely given the name of seminaries, the nature of such institutions, properly so-called, requiring them to be subject to the canonical authority of their own Ordinary. Universities were not abolished or condemned, or even discountenanced, by the Fathers of Trent: they were reformed, indeed, and laws were passed requiring all masters and doctors to engage by oath, at the beginning of each year, to explain the Catholic faith according to the canons of the Council, and obliging visitors to institute the necessary corrections of discipline. But universities, when doing their own proper work, continued to receive the same encouragement as before; and even in our own time, we have witnessed new ones established, at the express recommendation of the Sovereign Pontiff, to the end that the Catholic youth of Belgium and Ireland might enjoy the same advantages for following a course of liberal studies as were at the command of the uncatholic world around them.[366] But other schools than those of the world were to be provided for those who were to minister divine things, that they might be “wholly in them, and that their profiting might be manifest to all.”[367] Them the world was not to touch; the smell of the fire was not to pass on them; from childhood they were to be taken out of it, and fashioned after another model, signed and set apart as “holy to the Lord.” Their consecration was not to be the change of a moment, but the formation of a life; and for ever they were to be preserved from what even the heathen poet bewailed as “the intolerable calamity of yielding to what is base,” and to enjoy that which he declares should be the object of all men’s prayers,--to dwell in those sacred temples where “nature and the law of the place should both conspire to present us in innocence to the Deity.”[368]

Besides the important decrees already referred to, the reform of education was encouraged by other provisions of the Council of Trent, in which we recognise the same solicitude for restoring the Christian spirit, and abolishing the corrupt Paganism which had crept into its place. The Tridentine Fathers had something to say on the matter of art. The object of pictures and images, is, they remind us, to instruct the people, and recall to them the mysteries of the Faith; therefore everything profane and indecorous is to be avoided in the House of God, and the beauty that is represented must be that alone which savours of holiness. Nor was it to be supposed that they could be silent on the subject of that ecclesiastical chant, which from the very infancy of the Christian schools had taken its place by the side of grammar. The Gregorian chant had by this time all but disappeared in the greater number of churches, and had been replaced by orchestral music of the most profane and unsuitable description. Against this abuse, which had been growing for upwards of two centuries, Popes and Councils had uniformly protested, but with little fruit. The Fathers of Trent seriously contemplated prohibiting the use of instrumental music altogether, but at the earnest representations of the Emperor Ferdinand, they contented themselves with prescribing the abuses introduced by the musical professors,[369] and making the study of the plain-song of the Church one of the indispensable studies of the new seminaries. They number among the duties of those promoted to cathedral canonries that they should “reverently, distinctly, and devoutly praise the name of God in hymns and canticles in the choir appointed for psalmody;” and require the Provincial synods to regulate the proper way of singing and chanting the divine office. And the various Provincial councils and synods held to promulgate the Tridentine decrees, failed not to enforce the same salutary provisions, as that of Toledo, in 1566, which forbade those noisy exhibitions wherein the sense of the words is buried under the confusion of voices.[370]

The projected reforms had been very warmly urged on the Fathers by St. Charles Borromeo in his letters from Rome. The friend of Pole and of St Ignatius, he had watched with lively interest the success of the German college, and in his twenty-third year had already put his hand to the work of educational reform, by giving up the Borromeo palace at Pavia, for the purpose of a college which he founded out of his own revenues. When in the July of 1563, therefore, letters from Trent arrived in Rome notifying to the Holy Father the decree which had been passed, and soliciting his confirmation of the same, St. Charles earnestly supported the petition of the Legates, and had the happiness of conveying to them the warm approval of his Holiness, and his promise that the confirmation should be published with the least possible delay, and that he himself would be the first to carry it into execution. Accordingly, on the 18th of August following he convoked the Cardinals to deliberate with them on the subject. The foundation of seminaries in all the dioceses of the Roman State was at once determined on; 6000 scudi were assigned for the purpose by the Pope, and a Commission of Cardinals, of whom St. Charles was one, was appointed to carry the resolution into effect.

Thanks to the exertions of St. Charles, the solemn confirmation of the Canons of Trent was not long delayed. In a consistory held on the 30th of December, Pius IV, addressed a moving discourse to the assembled Cardinals, including several who had recently returned from the Council, in which, while declaring his firm resolve to enforce every one of the reforms which had been therein recommended, he took special notice of the decree on seminaries, which he praised as having been suggested by the “special inspiration of God,”[371] declaring again that he desired to be the first who should put his hand to so blessed a work. The confirmation of the Tridentine Canons followed on the 26th of January 1564, and on the 15th of April the same year, in a consistory which met in the Hall of Constantine, plans were proposed for the foundation of the Roman Seminary, the care of which was committed to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus.

Nor was it at Rome alone that the decree of the Council was thus eagerly and promptly carried out. The first act of Bartholomew of the Martyrs, on returning to his diocese, was to institute measures for the establishment of a seminary, in precise conformity to the prescribed canons. He accordingly summoned his chapter and laid before them the urgency of the business; giving them a noble example by his own munificent contribution to the necessary expenses. As it was an undertaking involving a question of finances, there were not wanting those who murmured at the idea of a compulsory taxation, but the prudence and moderation of the archbishop prevailed over every difficulty, and at the end of six months he had the satisfaction of seeing accommodation provided for sixty students, and of opening the first seminary founded in Portugal. This appears to have been in the year 1565. In the same year Daniel, the worthy successor of St. Boniface in the See of Mentz, commenced the foundation of the first episcopal seminary of Germany, which he appropriately dedicated to our great English apostle, and placed under the direction of the Jesuits. The Provincial Councils, held at Salzburg and Toledo in 1569, decreed the establishment of provincial seminaries, and, not to multiply examples, we have but to turn to the correspondence of St. Pius V. to see how rapidly this great work was taken up throughout every part of Christendom, and how energetically it was encouraged by the Sovereign Pontiff himself.

One Saint, however, and one diocese, stands out pre-eminent in the history of Church seminaries. St. Charles Borromeo had protected the design in its infancy, and he lived to give the Church a perfect model of its practical realisation. Appointed to the archbishopric of Milan when only in his twenty-second year, St. Charles found it impossible for several years to obtain leave from Pope Pius IV. to withdraw from Rome and devote himself to his pastoral cares. Nevertheless, he never ceased to occupy himself with plans for its benefit, and sought the counsel of every one whom he deemed best able to instruct him in the duties of government. One of the friends whose advice he most highly esteemed was Bartholomew of the Martyrs; another was one whose name, if less famous than that of the great Archbishop of Braga, has a peculiar interest to the English reader--it was the good priest, Nicholas Ormanetti. This saintly ecclesiastic had acted as Vicar-General to Matthew Ghiberti, and assisted in the reforms which that zealous prelate had instituted in his diocese. He had afterwards been appointed first Datary under Cardinal Pole to the English Legation, and as we have seen, had been named by him visitor of the English universities. He continued to act as confidential adviser to our last Archbishop of Canterbury up to the time of his death, when he left England and attended several sessions of the Council of Trent.[372] After this he retired to a humble country parish in the diocese of Verona, where he busied himself with his parochial duties as quietly and happily as if he had never exercised a more weighty charge. From this obscurity he was drawn by St. Charles, who conjured Navagerio, now Bishop of Verona, to send Ormanetti to him at Rome, that he might enjoy the benefit of his counsels. He received the humble Curé with extraordinary respect, and for weeks, to the amazement of the Roman courtiers, he was closeted day after day with a man whom nobody knew, and nobody thought worth knowing, and whose exterior was altogether poor and unpretending. In these long conferences every point of pastoral discipline was gravely and deliberately discussed, and the whole plan of the future government of Milan moulded, as it were, into shape. St. Charles listened eagerly to the account which Ormanetti gave of the views and methods of government which had been adopted by the two men whose example and maxims he most venerated, Ghiberti and Reginald Pole. They consulted together on the fittest method of executing the Tridentine decrees, and specially on the formation of seminaries, and the holding of diocesan synods. And these measures being thus concerted, Ormanetti was despatched to Milan to discharge the office of Vicar-General until St. Charles should himself be able to assume the government of his diocese. Poor Ormanetti, however, found his new dignity beset with thorns, and the contradictions he had to endure from the clergy who would not endure the name of reform, moved St. Charles to make such renewed entreaties that he might repair himself to his diocese, that he at last obtained from the Pope the desired permission, and set out for Milan in 1565, where he almost immediately held his first Provincial Synod. He commenced the visitation of his diocese in the following year, and in spite of the overwhelming labour which was thus imposed on him, found time to begin a series of educational establishments such as never before, we may confidently affirm, owed their existence to any single founder. “Reform education,” said the sagacious Leibnitz, “and you will have reformed the world.” And it was on this principle that St. Charles applied himself to the task of reforming, not the world indeed, but a vast province, in which doctrine and discipline had alike fallen into decay. To begin with his foundations for seculars, which were very numerous, the Borromeo College, dedicated to St. Justina, of which mention has been already made, had been planned by him while a student at Pavia, where his own observation of the disorders prevalent there moved him to make larger provision for the protection of his fellow-students. In 1572 he founded at Milan the College of St. Fidelis, in which Humane Literature and all the higher branches of study were taught, and which was more particularly intended for the benefit of poor scholars. A second college was in the following year attached to the church of St. John the Evangelist, for the education of noble youths. It was under the care of the Oblates of St. Ambrose, and was commonly known as the College of Nobles. St. Charles himself drew up the rules both for the masters and scholars. He marked the time to be assigned to prayer, reading, and study, and established such a discipline as was calculated to form a character of solid piety in the most influential classes of the laity. Next to virtue and learning he desired to see his noble scholars trained in habits of Christian courtesy, and was accustomed to insist much on the importance of good manners. He often visited the school in person, examined the boys at their tasks, and addressed them some brief religious instructions. Every year, at the close of the studies, he attended their public literary exercises, and distributed prizes with his own hand; and so solicitous was he to perfect this establishment, that he engaged Cardinal Sylvius Antonianus, his former secretary and a man of rare learning, to write a work on the education of the higher classes, for the guidance of those who taught in his College of Nobles. Besides these colleges, he founded others at Arona, Lucerne, and Fribourg, as well as the admirable Swiss college established at Milan, for the education of young Swiss ecclesiastics, which became afterwards the great means of upholding religion in the Catholic cantons.

For the clergy of his own province he founded no fewer than six seminaries--three in his cathedral city, and three in other parts of the diocese. It must be remembered that the giant evil with which St. Charles had to struggle was a slothful and corrupt clergy: the salt had lost its savour, and had to be salted anew. The whole face of the diocese had to be changed; and such a change demanded a body of skilful workmen. To create these was his first care, and with the sagacity of a mind illuminated with something higher than mere human prudence, he perceived at once that an undertaking so vast as the creation of a new body of clergy, and the reform of the old one, could only be grasped by division. He had to classify his work in order to master it, and in this lay the secret of his success.

His first and principal seminary was attached to his cathedral church, and was intended to receive 150 of the most promising candidates for the ecclesiastical state. In this greater seminary dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the students went through a regular course of philosophy, theology, and canon law.[373] But the second seminary, called the Canonica, which was intended for youths of less ability, who from their good dispositions, nevertheless promised to make useful parish priests, nothing more was required than a course of instruction on moral theology, Scripture, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and the rubrics and ceremonies of the Church. A third seminary in the city was set apart to receive such priests as, either from ignorance or negligence, were found unfit to discharge their sacred duties, and were placed here for a time to renew their ecclesiastical spirit, and acquire the learning necessary for their state. These city seminaries received altogether about 300 students--a number quite inadequate to supply the wants of the diocese. Three others were, therefore, added in the different deaneries, and these were intended as nurseries to those at Milan. In them were received youths of all ages and ranks of society, principally those of the poorer classes, who, when properly prepared, were passed on into the higher schools, all being dependent on the great seminary of St. John the Baptist as their head.

At first the archbishop supported these establishments at his private charge, but he was at length obliged to have recourse to the plan of taxation laid down by the Council of Trent, though this was only continued until a permanent endowment had been secured. The rules for their government he drew up himself, placing the care of their temporal affairs in the hands of four of his clergy, chosen by himself.

Every student on entering was required to make a spiritual retreat under the director of the seminary, and a general retreat was made yearly by all before the opening of the classes. The great object aimed at in every regulation was to train the subjects in the spiritual life, and to supply them with both the learning and the habits proper to their state. The care and personal supervision which the archbishop bestowed on his seminarists, whom he used to call “the restorers of his diocese,” were rather such as might have been expected from a father than a superior, and one whose time was never at his own command. There were few days that he did not visit the seminary, which occupied one side of his cathedral quadrangle; it was his wish to receive all new-comers in person, that he might examine their vocation himself; and when once he had seen and conversed with them, each one had a peculiar place in his memory, and became a separate object of his paternal care. Twice a year he made a visitation of his seminaries, and held an examination of all the classes. On such occasions he determined those who were to be promoted to higher classes, and when the course of study was finished, assigned them offices and benefices, according to the ability of each. These visitations lasted a fortnight, besides other shorter ones which he made in the course of the year. One result of the extreme solicitude he bestowed on the spiritual training of his disciples was not altogether such as he had anticipated: so many of his priests evinced an inclination to embrace the religious life, that he had to solicit from Pope Clement XIII. that some means might be adopted for keeping them for the service of the diocese;[374] for every religious order and every bishop were eager to obtain subjects who had been educated in a seminary of St. Charles. On the other hand, detractors were not wanting who busied themselves in representing these colleges as prisons, in which the unhappy students were worn to death by prayers, watchings, and austerities, by which means they succeeded in frightening away some who were about to enter. But the seminarists had but to show themselves in the streets of Milan to dispel these malicious rumours; their countenances and their whole deportment being marked with a certain character of peace and joy, that was recognised as the effect of that holy discipline under which the whole interior and exterior man was being formed anew.

St. Charles had now provided for the education of his clergy and seculars of the upper ranks, but he did not stop there; he had thought also for the children of the poor; and his plans on this point were formed when he was still at the Court of Rome, presiding over the brilliant academy of learned men which he had formed in the palace of the Pope, and taking part in the erudite conference of the Noctes Vaticanæ. Among the instructions which he gave to his Vicar-General, Ormanetti, the establishment of poor schools for teaching the Christian doctrine held a prominent place, and in his first Provincial Synod he made a special decree obliging his curates to assemble the children of each parish for catechism on Sundays and other festivals. By his exhortations he moved a greater number of pious persons, of both sexes, to interest themselves in the good work, so that at the appointed hour the churches of Milan were crowded with catechists and their classes, and it was the good archbishop’s recreation, to go from one church to another, encouraging teachers and learners with his presence and his gracious words. Before he died there was not a parish in his diocese, however remote, which had not its school; and whereas before his time it was common enough to meet with persons of advanced age who scarcely knew the Our Father and the Hail Mary correctly, it was now as common to find children of ten or twelve perfectly instructed in their religion. The schools of the diocese were at last entirely placed under the care of the Oblates of St. Ambrose, that congregation which had been created by St. Charles, and which he employed as a kind of spiritual militia for carrying out all his charitable designs. The discipline established in the poor schools of Milan by their means was the admiration of every stranger, and the extent of their labours may be estimated from the fact, that at the death of the archbishop there existed in his diocese seven hundred and forty poor schools, two hundred and seventy-three superintending officers, and seventeen hundred and twenty-six others acting under their orders, having under their care no fewer than 40,098 scholars.

* * * * *

Here, then, we may fitly close our studies of the Christian schools. We have watched them in their infancy springing up under the shadow of the cloister, and having traced them through their varied fortunes of good and ill, we leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of Catholic Christendom were passing into the hands of a great religious order, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of Christian education. Did we need a token that the reforms of the sixteenth century were truly the work of God, we should find it in that deadly hostility which the enemies of religion, and the rulers of the world, have never ceased to exhibit against the seminaries of the Church and the colleges of her religious orders. And this, not in Protestant countries alone, but under nominally Catholic Governments, where heretical impieties have been excluded, only, as it would seem, that there might be set up the odious idol of the State.

For two centuries at least, education has been the battle-ground of the Church, and the battle is not yet fought out and finished. In France, in Belgium, in Germany, and in Switzerland, infidelity has triumphed exactly in proportion as it has succeeded in substituting an Anti-Christian State system of education for the system of the Church, and has never done its work more surely than when its agents have been philosophic universities, and ministers of public instruction.

For us in England, who, by a strange anomaly enjoy a freedom denied to many a Catholic land, and who are called on in one way or other to take part in the reconstruction of so many of our shattered institutions, the educational annals of the past have imperative claims on our attention. It is not for a writer to point the moral of his own tale; we can but hope, therefore, that our story, however rambling and diffuse, may yet have been told with sufficient clearness for our readers to draw that moral for themselves, and to resolve that, in so far as they may be called on to lend their aid in the great work of education, they will take no lower models for their guidance than those that have been bequeathed them by the saints.

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