with the fluency of his vows. his love declarations:

You may see it in the levity of

'Wherefore, O lady, break the ice at length;

Make, thou, too, trial of love's fruits and flowers:
When in thine arms thou feelst thy lover's strength,
Thou wilt repent of all these wasted hours:
Husbands, they know not love, its breadth and length,
Seeing their hearts are not on fire like ours:

Things longed for give most pleasure; this I tell thee;
If still thou doubtest let the proof compel thee.'

You may see it, best of all, in his fifteenth century code:

'Honor, pure love, and perfect gentleness,
Weighed in the scales of equity refined,

Are but one thing: beauty is naught or less,

Placed in a dame of proud and scornful mind. . . .

I ask no pardon if I follow Love;

Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof.

Let him rebuke me whose hard heart of stone

Ne'er felt of Love the summer in his vein!

I pray to Love that who hath never known

Love's power may ne'er be blessed with Love's great gain;
But he who serves our lord with might and main

May dwell forever in the fire of Love!'

Three paganisms are thus imported from the South to contribute to the taste of the North,- Greek, Latin and Italian, the last circulating fresh sap through the other two. Between the ancient world and the modern stands the genius of Italy as interpreter. England, when most strenuous in severing her spiritual relations, cultivates most closely her intellectual. The new knowledge came like a fertilizing flood upon the island of the silver sea.' Dean Colet from his Greek studies at Florence returned with the key to unlock the New Testament, and to discover a rational and practical religion in the Gospels themselves. 'I have given up my whole soul to Greek learning,' says the young Erasmus, with chivalrous enthusiasm; 'and as soon as I get any money, I shall buy Greek books, and then I shall buy some clothes.' Formerly Italian scholars had been employed to compose the public orations, but now he could write: 'I have found in Oxford so much polish and learning that now I hardly care about going to Italy at all, save for the sake of having been there. When I listen to my friend Colet, it seems like listening to Plato himself.' Colet, beginning the work of educational reform, established a public school, in which the scholastic logic was displaced, the steady diffusion of the classics enjoined, and

the old methods abolished. The spirit of the founder might be seen in the image of the child Jesus over the gate, with the words graven beneath it, 'Hear ye Him.' 'Lift up your little white hands for me,' he wrote, which prayeth for you to God.' Vain was the cry of alarm. 'No wonder,' wrote More to the dean, 'your school raises a storm, for it is like the wooden horse in which armed Greeks were hidden for the ruin of barbarous Troy.' The example bred a crowd of imitators. More grammar schools were founded in the later years of Henry than in three hundred years before. Higher education passed from death to life. Of Cambridge, Erasmus, invited there as a teacher of Greek, says:

'Scarcely thirty years ago nothing was taught here but the Parva Logicalia of Alexander, antiquated exercises from Aristotle, and the Quæstiones of Scotus. As time went on better studies were added-mathematics, a new, or at any rate a renovated, Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek literature. What has been the result? The university is now so flourishing that it can compete with the best university of the age.'

At Oxford, the fierceness of the opposition evinces the strength of the revival. The contest took the form of hostile division into Greeks and Trojans the former the advocates of the New Learning, the latter its opponents. But even here the battle was soon over. 'The students,' said an eye-witness, 'rush to the Greek letters; they endure watching, fasting, toil, and hunger, in the pursuit of them.' The movement, however, suddenly received a temporary check. The impulse given by the reformers was primarily incidental, for to them the Greek Testament was the armory from which they drew their weapons of defence and of assault; while the immediate effects of the Reformation, both by revolutionizing the ecclesiastical system and by withdrawing academic abilities into the abyss of controversy, were depressing. Latimer calculated that the number of students at the two universities was fewer by ten thousand after the alienation of abbey and church lands had left no mercenary attractions in the sacred offices. Religion lost some of its charms when the golden prospect was gone. About the same time (1550), an observer says curiously:

'Formerly there were in houses belonging to the University of Cambridge, two hundred students of divinity, many very well learned, which be now all clean gone home; and many young toward scholars, and old fatherly doctors, not one of them left. One hundred also, of another sort, that, having rich friends, or being beneficed men, did live of themselves in hotels and inns, be either gone away or else fain to

creep into colleges and put poor men from bare livings. These both be all gone, and a small number of poor, godly, diligent students, now remaining only in colleges, be not able to tarry and continue their studies for lack of exhibition and help.'

Of the poorer and more diligent students he adds the interesting picture:

"There be divers there which rise daily about four or five of the clock in the morning, and from five till six of the clock use common prayer, with an exhortation of God's word in a common chapel; and from six until ten of the clock use ever either private study or common lectures. At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereas they be content with a penny piece of beef among four, having a few pottage made of the broth of the same beef, with salt and oatmeal, and nothing else. After this slender diet, they be either teaching or learning until five of the clock in the evening; whenas they have a supper not much better than their dinner. Immediately after which they go either to reasoning in problems, or to some other study, until it be nine or ten of the clock; and then, being without fires, are fain to walk or run up and down half an hour, to get a heat on their feet when they go to bed.'

In the adverse reign of Mary, Trinity College was endowed, more especially for the cultivation of classical scholarship. Its founder states in a letter:

'My Lord Cardinal's Grace has had the overseeing of my statutes. He much likes well that I have therein ordered the Latin tongue to be read to my scholars. But he advises me to order the Greek to be more taught there than I have provided. This purpose I well like; 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; the study of which is now alate much decayed.'

The languishing culture revived towards the close of Elizabeth's reign, when the 'times' were far more propitious. Insensibly, through the shocks and convulsions of opinion, the influences of the Renaissance had been enriching the soil for the harvest. When the first fanaticisms of misguided zealots had subsided, the interest in letters recovered and spread with unwonted vigor. The tone of the universities wholly changed. Scholars like Hooker could now be found in the ranks of the priesthoodagainst whom it had been a common note in the official visitations, 'He knows a few Latin words, but no sentences.' The Court was distinguished for its elegance. Maids of honor were readers of Plato. The Queen could quote Pindar and Homer in the original, and read every morning a portion of Demosthenes. It was preeminently the age of learned ladies. Says Harrison:

Truly it is a rare thing with us now to hear of a courtier which hath but his own language. And to say how many gentlewomen and ladies there are that, besides sound knowledge of the Greek and Latin tongues, are thereto no less skilful in Spanish, Italian, and French, or in some one of them, it resteth not in me."

The abundance of printers and of printed books is evidence that the world of readers and writers had widened much beyond the

circle of courtiers and of prelates. Yet the light that shone remarkably upon the heights, was by no means generally dispersed. Many of the rank were illiterate, the majority of the middle-class were uneducated, while the lower orders were in comparative darkness. As late as Edward VI there were peers of Parliament unable to read. It is a question whether Shakespeare's father, an alderman of Stratford, could write his name. The educative theory was based upon the principle that varieties of inapplicable knowledge might be good where accessible, but were not essential. Two things were indispensable,― ability to labor and skill in arms. Every boy between seven and seventeen was required to be provided with a long-bow and two arrows; and every Englishman older, to provide himself with a bow and four arrows. It was the spirit of this law which Ascham, the schoolmaster of the period, is enforcing when he says of his own tutor:

"This worshipful man hath ever loved, and used to have many children brought up in learning in his house, amonges whom I myself was one, for whom at term times he would bring down from London both bow and shafts. And when they should play he would go with them himself into the field, see them shoot, and he that shot the fairest should have the best bow and shafts, and he that shot ill-favoredly should be mocked of his fellows till he shot better. Would to God all England had used or would use to lay the foundation of youth after the example of this worshipful man in bringing up children in the Book and the Bow; by which two things the whole commonwealth both in peace and war is chiefly valid and defended withal.'

Latimer, preaching before the king in 1549, draws the portrait of a yeoman:

In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn me any other thing; and so, I think, other men did their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with strength of arms, as other nations do, but with strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength; as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger; for men shall never shoot well except they be brought up in it. It is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and much commended in physic.'

But what is more to our present purpose is, that the true significance of the Renaissance consists, not in any accidental emigration of Greek scholars and importation of ancient manuscripts from Constantinople, nor chiefly in the passion for classical lore, but in that general ferment which produced, on the whole, marked effects upon all classes, in that new life by which every province of human intelligence and action was refreshed. higher development, indeed, than the Greek or Latin mania, sprang from the nearer and more seductive paganism of Italy,

partly through travel, partly through her poetry and romance. A land of tropical gardens and splendid skies, of public pageants and secret tragedies, of brilliant fancies and gorgeous contrasts, she fascinated the Northern imagination with a strange wild glamour. An Italianate Englishman,' ran the Italian proverb, 'is an incarnate devil.' Our ancestral youth who repair to her for polish and inspiration or in quest of fanciful adventure, are warned of her alluring charms:

And being now in Italy, that great limbique of working braines, he must be very circumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a devil, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe, and become a prey to dissolute courses and wantonesse.'

Ascham writes with the alarm and severity of a rigorist:

These bee the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie to marre mens maners in England; much, by example of ill life, but more by preceptes of fonde bookes, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in London.

There bee moe of these ungratious bookes set out in Printe wythin these fewe monethes, than have been sene in England many score yeares before. Than they have in more reverence the triumphes of Petrarche: than the Genesis of Moses: They make more account of Tullies offices, than S. Paules epistles: of a tale in Bocace than a storie of the Bible.'

If the breath of the South was tainted, it was spirit-stirring; and the healthier constitution which inhaled it, purged off much of its mischief, while it assimilated the beneficial. The contemplative vein of the Briton was quickened by the brilliancy of the Italian. That which in the first became a superb corporeality, became in the second a vehement and unconventional spirituality. The debt of English to Italian literature consists,-in material of production - the impulse towards creation- -a keener sense of the tragic-a livelier sense of the beautiful -a more copious diction—and a more finished style.

Language. Of the monstrous anomalies of the current or colloquial speech, the following note from the Duchess of Norfolk to Cromwell is a curious instance:

My ffary gode lord - her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a glasse hoff Setyl set in Sellfer gyld I pra you tak hit (in) wort An hy wer habel het showlde be bater I woll hit war wort a m crone.'

So unsettled was our orthography still, that writers, each in his peculiar mode of spelling, did not write the same words uniformly. Elizabeth, the royal mistress of eight languages, wrote sovereign seven different ways, while the name of Villers, in the