England felt the movement of the Renaissance somewhat later than France, and with less instinctive sympathy, but also without such active repugnance as had to be overcome in Germany. A few Englishmen had been pupils of the Italian masters. One of the earliest was William Selling, an Oxonian, who died in 1495. Erasmus, when he came to Oxford in 1498, found there a congenial group of Hellenists, chief among whom were William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. Both had heard Politian at Florence: Linacre had also been a member of Aldo’s Neacademia at Venice. Another Oxonian who did much for the New Learning in England was William Lilly, who had studied Greek in Rhodes, and afterwards at Rome. There were others then at Oxford who had some knowledge of Greek, though the whole number cannot have been large. Few books which could help a beginner with the first rudiments of Greek had as yet found their way to England. An English student desirous of acquiring that language was, as a rule, obliged to go abroad. Erasmus mentions that John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, who began Greek late in life, had been dissuaded by Latimer from attempting it unless he could procure a teacher from Italy. John Colet, a scholar of most active mind and of great industry, lamented in 1516 that he had not been able to learn Greek-a deficiency which he afterwards made strenuous efforts to repair. But the Oxford Hellenists^ though not numerous, represented a new ideal of humane learning, and had a fruitful influence on its progress in England. At Cambridge the study of Greek received its first impulse from the teaching of Erasmus between 1510 and 1513. He began with the rudiments, using first the Erotemata of Chrysoloras, and then the larger manual of Theodoras Gaza. His class was a small one, but included some ardent students, such as his friend Henry Bullock; who, writing to him in 1516, reported that the Greek studies which he had initiated were being vigorously prosecuted. Richard Croke, of King’s College, Cambridge, who took his degree in the year 1509-10, studied Greek at Oxford with William Grocyn; went thence to Paris; and subsequently taught Greek at Cologne, Louvain, Leipzig, and Dresden. Returning to Cambridge in 1518 he began a course of lectures there on the Greek language, though without official sanction. In 1519 he was formally appointed University reader of Greek, and delivered a remarkable inaugural address in praise of Greek studies, which is still extant. His successor in the readership was a man of rare ability, Sir Thomas Smith (1512-77), of Queens’ College, who afterwards rose to eminence in the1 public service. Smith lectured on Greek, with great success, from about 1535 to 1540. In the latter year Henry VIII founded the five Regius Professorships of Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew, and Greek. Smith received the chair of Civil Law; that of Greek was given to his close friend, John Cheke (1514-57), of St John’s College, whose repute already stood very high.
Roger Ascham was Cheke’s contemporary, and a member of the same College. Scarcely two years after Cheke’s appointment, Ascham wrote an interesting letter from Cambridge to a Fellow of St John’s, in which he describes the state of classical studies in the University. Aristotle and Plato, he mentions, are read by the undergraduates; as had, indeed, been the case, at least in his own College, for some five years. “Sophocles and Euripides,” he then says, “are more familiar authors than Plautus was in your time” [i.e. about 1525-35]. “Herodotusi, Thucydides, and Xenophon are more conned and discussed than Livy was then. Demosthenes is as familiar an author as Cicero used to be; and there are more copies of Isocrates in use than there formerly were of Terence. Nor do we disregard the Latin authors, but study with the greatest zeal the choicest writers of the best period. It is Cheke’s labour and example that have lighted up and continue to sustain this learned ardour.” This was written in 1542. It is perhaps the most precise testimony that exists as to the state of Greek studies at any important English seat of learning at any moment in the sixteenth century. Great progress had evidently been made in the preceding ten or twenty years. Sir John Cheke’s services to Greek learning in his day were certainly unequalled in England; but Sir Thomas Smith deserves to be remembered along with him as a man who had also given a new and great impetus to those studies.
Mention is due here to the important part which both these eminent men bore in a controversy which excited and divided the humanists of that age. The teachers from whom the scholars of the Renaissance learned Greek pronounced that language as Greeks do at the present day. In 1528 Erasmus published at Basel his dialogue De recta Latini Graecique sermonis Pronuntiatione. His protest was chiefly directed against the modern Greek “iotacism”; i.e. the pronunciation of several different vowels and diphthongs with the same sound, that of the Italian i. He rightly maintained that the ancients must have given to each of these vowels and diphthongs a distinctive sound; and he urged that it was both irrational and inconvenient not to do so. He also objected to the modern Greek mode of pronouncing certain consonants. His reformed pronunciation came to be known as the “Erasmian”; while that used by modern Greeks was called the “Reuchlinian,” because Reuchlin (whom Melanchthon followed) had upheld it. About 1535, Thomas Smith and John Cheke-then young men of about twenty- examined the question for themselves, and came to the conclusion that Erasmus was right. Thereupon Smith began to use the “Erasmian” pronunciation in his Greek lectures-though cautiously at first; Cheke and others supported him; and the reform was soon generally accepted. But in 1542 Bishop Gardiner, the Chancellor of the University, issued a decree, enjoining a return to the Reuchlinian mode. Ascham has described, not without humour, the discontent which this edict evoked. After Elizabeth’s accession, the “Erasmian” method was restored.
Meanwhile, in the first half of the sixteenth century, a classical training had been introduced into English schools. In developing this type of education Italy had preceded England by about eighty years. Vittorino’s school at Mantua, already described, was the earliest model. Winchester College had been founded when Vittorino was a boy; Eton College arose at a time when his school was in its zenith; but these great English foundations, since so distinguished as seats of classical teaching, came into being long before the humanistic influences of the Renaissance had begun to be felt in England. The oldest English school which has been humanistic from its origin is St Paul’s, founded by Dean Colet, who, in 1512, appointed William Lilly to be the first High Master. Lilly was, as we have seen, among the pioneers of Greek study in England, though he is now best remembered by his Latin Grammar. The statutes of St Paul’s (1518) enjoin that the Master shall be “learned in good and clean Latin, and also in Greek, if such may be gotten.” The proviso implies some scarcity; and in fact it was not, probably, till about 1560 that Greek was thoroughly established among the regular studies of English schools. The statutes of Harrow School (1590) prescribe the teaching of some Greek orators and historians, and of Hesiod’s poems. This seems to be one of the earliest instances in our school-statutes where the directions for Greek teaching are precise, and not merely general. Many large public schools,