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Updated: June 14, 2025
As for Italian journeys of Selling, Grocyn, Latimer, Tunstall, Colet and Lily, of that extraordinary group of scholars who transformed Oxford by the introduction of Greek ideals and gave to it the peculiar distinction which is still shining, I mention them only to suggest that they are the source of the Renaissance respect for a foreign education, and the founders of the fashion which, in its popular spreadings, we will attempt to trace.
But during Henry's reign Colet's figure is almost the only one apart from such representatives of erudition and scholarship as Grocyn and Linacre which stands forth holding out a promise of intellectual and moral progress. In effect there was no literature; in this respect Scotland was in advance of England with the verse of William Dunbar. More's Utopia was still unwritten.
He once said, "Whoever shall live to try it, shall see this child here waiting at table prove a notable and rare man." At the age of about nineteen, Thomas More was sent to Canterbury College, Oxford, by his patron, where he learnt Greek of the first men who brought Greek studies from Italy to England William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre.
Paul's School, now moved to Hammersmith; Linacre or Grocyn, old friends of long ago; and of course Erasmus, if he happened to be in London.
Grocyn, our first Greek Professor, had drawn his learning from that source, and Linacre had sat there in a class with the children of Lorenzo de' Médici. Cardinal Pole and the Ciceronian De Longueil shared as students in those tasks and sports at Padua which were so vividly described by the English churchman in his record of their life-long friendship. Thomas Lilly, the master at St.
"Had I found such a patron in my youth," Erasmus wrote long after, "I too might have been counted among the fortunate ones." It was with Grocyn that Erasmus on a second visit to England rowed up the river to Warham's board at Lambeth, and in spite of an unpromising beginning the acquaintance turned out wonderfully well.
Grocyn and Linacre, as well as Reuchlin, testify to the wise generosity of the great Magnifico, and all three declare that to him, more than to any other man, the Renaissance owed not only its development, but even the character it assumed in Italy in the second last decade of the fifteenth century. The end came when he was literally in his prime.
William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek at Oxford, the former as early as 1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's and the founder of St. Paul's School, and his friend, William Lily, the grammarian, and first master of St.
Paul's, not only worked at Florence but went to perfect his Greek in the Isle of Rhodes. Sir Thomas More was the pupil of Grocyn, whom he seems to have excelled in scholarship. His affection for books is known by his son-in-law's careful biography. An anecdote cited by Dibdin preserves a record of the fate of his library.
It was in Henry's reign that the study of Greek, and with it the new criticism, began to establish itself. Grocyn and Linacre led the way.
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