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John Reuchlin hastened from Germany, William Grocyn from the shades of Oxford, and from the same seat of learning the mighty Thomas Linacre, later to found the Royal College of Physicians. Lorenzo's sons, Piero and Giovanni, were for a time his pupils, but their mother took them away. Poliziano was as vicious as the typical men of his time and the prudent Clarice knew it.
Chief of these were three, whose names you will learn to know well when you come to read more about this time. They were William Grocyn, "the most upright and best of all Britons,"* Thomas Linacre, and John Colet. These men, returning from Italy full of the New Learning, began to teach Greek at Oxford.
Paul's , also studied Greek abroad; Colet in Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More, afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came, in search of the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost scholar of his time.
It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's board. "How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum really was.
"William Selling," says D'Aubigné, "a young English ecclesiastic, afterwards distinguished at Canterbury by his zeal in collecting valuable manuscripts, his fellow-countrymen, Grocyn, Lilly, and Latimer, 'more bashful than a maiden, and, above all, Linacre, whom Erasmus ranked above all the scholars of Italy, used to meet in the delicious villa of the Medici, with Politian, Chalcondyles, and other men of learning; and there, in the calm evenings of summer, under that glorious Tuscan sky, they dreamt romantic visions of the Platonic philosophy.
In his youth Henry VIII. displayed considerable literary talent, posed as a patron of scholars, and smiled benignly on such geniuses as Erasmus, More, Linacre, and Grocyn; but in after years he was more keen to destroy other peoples' libraries than to build up his own.
Grocyn, a fellow of New College, was perhaps the first Englishman who studied under the Greek exile, Chalcondylas; and the Greek lectures which he delivered in Oxford on his return in 1491 mark the opening of a new period in our history.
When I listen to Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself"; and he praises the judgment and learning of those Englishmen, Grocyn and Linacre, who had been taught in Italy. In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten at the root. Theology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it a deadly blight.
But even then, when the enthusiasm and the will were there, such was the dearth of material for learning that, as in the case of Erasmus, the pioneers had practically nothing to work at but the classical texts and a few meagre vocabularies with etymologies of mediæval scholarship. In 1491 Grocyn began to teach Greek at Oxford. In 1499 Erasmus first visited England.
With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the table of Warham.
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