Thus driven and thus drawn, Campion left Oxford, on the feast of St. Peter in Chains, August 1, 1569, on the termination of his proctorial office, of which he rendered an account in the usual Latin oration.

CHAPTER II.

IF it had been to any authority that had the right to inquire into his theological opinions, and not to a mere company of London tradesmen, ridiculously erecting themselves into a tribunal of orthodoxy, that Campion excused himself from acknowledging his opinions, on the plea of being "a public person, charged with the education of divers worshipful men's children," it might have been inferred that he strangely inverted the values of his duty as a minister and his duty as a professor. And the inference would not have been far wrong; he was disgusted with himself for having accepted the Anglican diaconate, and wished to forget it, and to live as a simple layman. But in the cause of education and of letters his enthusiasm never for a moment slackened; he strenuously recommended his pupils to complete the whole circle of sciences; "not to deliquesce into sloth, nor to dance away their time, nor to live for rioting and pleasure; but to serve God, to bridle their passions, to give themselves up to virtue and learning, and to reckon this the one great, glorious, and royal road." To one of his scholars, Richard Stanihurst, who two years after his matriculation at Oxford had published a commentary on Porphyry,† he was quite dithyrambic in his congratulations, and in † See Note 2.

* See Note 1.

his

"triumph that their university should possess a youth of Stanihurst's rank, learning, and goodness, capable almost in his teens of competing with able men in maturity." "Proceed," he said, "with the same pains and toil, bury yourself in your books, complete your course, abjure the snares of vice, keep your mind on the stretch, give yourself to your country, strive for the prizes which you deserve." He anticipated a splendid future for such precocious attainments, when they had been matured and completed by methodic study; when "wit had been mellowed with judgment, judgment with wisdom, and wisdom with age." "Only persevere," he said; "do not degenerate from what you are, nor suffer the keen edge of your mind to grow dull and rusty. I speak thus warmly, not because I mistrust you, but because it is my duty to be anxious for the fame of men like you.'

When he finally left Oxford, it was not because he was weary of a university life, but because the opposition to his way of thinking was becoming too strong, and at the same time because he thought he saw an opening for a wider career in Dublin. The new religion was daily gaining ground at the English university, the whole machinery of which was in the hands of men who were both able and desirous to make it the stronghold of the rising Puritanism. But at Dublin, the old university, which had been commenced by Pope John XXI. at the prayer of Alexander Bigmore, the Archbishop, and which, as Campion tells us,† had kept its terms and commencements solemnly, and had been never disfranchised, but only through variety of time discontinued, and now, since the subversion of monasteries, utterly extinct, was to be begun anew: motion was made in the parliamentary session of 1570 to erect it again. The chief mover in this re† See Note 4.

See Note 3.

D

storation was the Recorder of Dublin and Speaker of the House of Commons, James Stanihurst, the father of Campion's pupil, and at that time a zealous Catholic.* Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy, was owned by Father Parsons to be "a very honourable, calm, and civil gentleman, nothing hot in the new religion, but rather a great friend to Catholics;" and Dr. Weston, the Lord Chancellor, was delated to the Privy Council in England by Loftus, the Protestant Archbishop, for his lack of zeal in promoting the Gospel. The career which the constant supervision of the Privy Council, and the puritanical zeal of such men as Horne, Bishop of Winchester, and Tobie Mathew, were fast closing against Campion at Oxford, seemed to him. to be opening with better auspices at Dublin. Thither, therefore, with the approbation of the Earl of Leicester, he betook himself, in company with Richard Stanihurst; and arrived there on St. Bartholomew's day, Aug. 25, 1569, according to Parsons; or rather 1570, for his letter to Richard Stanihurst was written from St. John's College in December, 1569. He was cordially received by his pupil's father, and domiciled in his house, where he is said to have lived a kind of monastic life, and to have exhibited such purity and modesty of demeanour, that the Dublin people called him "the angel." Here he employed himself partly "in exercises of learning with Richard Stanihurst, and in controversies against the heretics of that time," and partly in setting forth his ideal what a university education should be. He wrote a discourse, De Homine Academico, which has not survived in its original form, but in the still more valuable shape of an oration, written when his views had been corrected by his submission to the Church, and pronounced in the presence of Dr. Allen, the founder of our Douai seminary, † See Note 6,

* See Note 5.

and of all the professors and miscellaneous students of that model institution. I shall not scruple to depart a little from the order of time, and to quote this oration in this place, where the subject leads me to speak of Campion's private views on education.

In the first place, then, his ideas on this subject were not changed by his submission to the Church; he imported into her what he had learned outside her, without any material alterations. "I will try," he says, "out of my observations made during many years, in many places, and on many minds,-out of what I have learned in a wide and varied intercourse with men,-to make a kind of pencil sketch of the university man." This sketch was not intended merely for the lay ideal, but for that of the ecclesiastical student, whose education, "up to his twenty-third year, when he begins his theology," is placed before us in a model whose different members are all culled from real examples, and which, though perhaps as a whole unattainable by any individual, is yet the ideal towards which all should strive, according to their various powers. It is to be noticed that there is no thought of two models, one by which some select ecclesiastics should be duly prepared to cope with the great questions of the day, in a manner in which it would be difficult to suppose a seminary capable of instructing them, and another model, which should be that of the seminaries intended to fit the students for work among the poor and illiterate, on the principle that, most men being uneducated, and only the few refined, accomplished, and large-minded, the clergy in general should be trained, not on the model of the few, but so as best to meet the capacities and characteristics of the many; a principle which itself assumes that refine ment unfits for rough work, that boors can best teach

* See Note 7.