education calculated to evoke it. In spite of the fact that the Gouvernour was so largely drawn from Plutarch, Plato and Aristotle, it has an English quality and vitality of its own, gained from the personal experience, and indeed springing from the personality, of its worthy author.

This practical and personal English element is less noticeable in the works of Roger Ascham, (1515-1568), a professional scholar, equipped with an ample store of Greek and Latin learning. His was largely an academic career passed as a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and crowned by the attainment of the Public Oratorship of the University. But he hankered for the light of courts and their emoluments; and became to his delight, and moderate profit, the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth. He has left famous descriptions of her early studies and proficiency,11 and has also told of that ill fated paragon of young womanhood, Lady Jane Grey, whom he found "in her chamber, reading Phaedo Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale of Boccace."12 He was afterwards given the post of secretary to Edward VI, and discharged the duties of a like office under Mary and the young queen Elizabeth. A man of anti-papal convictions and occasional bold expression, he could also realize the golden quality of silence.

Ascham was a diligent man with a retentive memory, and an excellent letter writer in both Latin and English. He associated with the scholarly and the great, and besides his interesting correspondence, and his enthusiastic, but pedantic, Toxophilus, on archery, he wrote his Scholemaster, toward the end of his life, and dedicated it to Elizabeth as he had dedicated the Toxophilus to her father. It betrays the thoroughly English satisfaction of its author at the privilege of associating with those of better birth than himself. It was specially purposed for the private bringing up of youth in Jentlemen and noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such as had

11 E.g. in Ep. XCIX, (Giles' ed., 1550).

12 Scholemaster, Bk. I, cf. Ep. CXIV, in Giles' edition.

forgot the Latin tonge, and would, by themselves, without a Scholemaster, in short tyme, and with small paines, recover a sufficient habilitie, to understand, speake and write Latin." Just how the book would assist forgetful maturity to recover its youthful Latinity may not be clear. Yet it has an abundance of Latin and Greek quotations, with some seasonable advice on the education of children and a considerable amount of formal pedantic definitions. It is not so strongly and personally put together as Elyot's Gouvernour.

These earlier examples of study and scholarship in England are suggestive of several points. First, that the progress of English scholarship in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came through the studies of Englishmen upon the continent, or through the coming of learned foreigners to England. Secondly, profane studies with Englishmen might quickly turn to serve the ends of a rational Christian piety, and proceed hand in hand with study of the Sacred Text and the Church Fathers, as was indeed the case with Erasmus, who after all was England's chief enlightener. Thirdly, through the sixteenth century, Englishmen will contribute little to pure scholarship, profane or sacred; but in secular life and church reform will make practical English application of their studies. Fourthly, when, as in the case of the Scotchman George Buchanan, 13 these islanders confine

13 George Buchanan, 1506-1582, was Scotland's chief humanist, nor did any contemporary Englishman equal him in reputation. The ties were close between Scotland and France, and at the age of fourteen Buchanan was sent to study in Paris. He spent the better part of twelve years studying and teaching at that University. After a brief visit to Scotland, he next is found spending three years at Bordeaux and five in Portugal, where he suffered at the hands of the Inquisition. But he had gained fame from his metrical Latin version of the Psalms, which rendered them with pseudo-classic taste and feeling. This complete humanist returned to stay in Scotland at the age of fifty-five. He became a sort of court poet to the Queen of Scots, and although a follower of the Reform, preserved her favor. Upon Darnley's murder and Mary's marriage with Bothwell, and subsequent flight to England, Buchanan turned against her in his Detectio. He was afterwards tutor to the young King James, and wrote a Latin history of Scotland. His repute was great while he lived and for another century. But when one thinks of his metrical rendering of the Psalms and his great poem "De Sphaera," which was also written in classic metre and consecrated to a presentation of a rapidly exploding theory of the universe, one is impressed with the futility of his accomplishment.

themselves to pure scholarship, and the production of polite pseudo-classic literature, the result is empty. For their energy passed out from scholarship into politics, church reform, voyages of discovery and the creation of an English literature which was not classical. English scholarship had also its ups and downs. The suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII cut off a considerable supply of funds used in the support of scholars at the Universities. Because of this and the distraction and confusion of ecclesiastical changes, the cult of letters was unfavorably affected by the English Reformation during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary.14 In Elizabeth's reign, especially the latter half, the genius of the time passed beyond the cult of classic letters, however much it had directly or indirectly drawn from them.

14

14 Ascham's letters-e.g. Ep. LXXIX (Giles' Ed.) of 1547 speak of the decline of learning at Cambridge. See more at large Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, II, I, Chapter XXXI, and II, II, Chapter XXIV.

CHAPTER XIX

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: WYCLIF

HISTORICAL events are not always to be accepted under the tags which have been attached to them, nor for what their movers assumed or supposed them to be. The socalled English Reformation was not predominantly a religious movement having to do with the saving of souls and their lot in the world to come. Its chief dramatic incidents sprang from the political constitution of England. In its entire course it was a catholic expression of the taste and temper and the formative genius of the English people. It cannot be treated by itself, separate from the consideration of all the rest that made England. For it was a part and parcel of the whole, and scarcely more other-worldly than the rest.

The Lutheran revolution was German, and the French Reform was French. But, among other obvious traits, one vital circumstance distinguishes them essentially from the English Reformation. The inspiration of the German Reformation, the explosion which it was, flared from the personality of perhaps the greatest of Germans, Martin Luther. The French Reform finds its form and culmination, its intensive actualization, in the work and genius of Calvin. In either case Luther or Calvin centres the human interest of the modern student upon himself. But the course of the English Reformation, unless at the very beginning in Wyclif, offers no man whose personal genius dominates and impels the story. It is a social, political, and if one will, religious, movement among a people; moulded by the political and social conditions of the country, and dominated by no single personality, except when temporarily driven by the passions and policy of Henry VIII. It has very little that is intellectually original; it borrows ideas from abroad, from any quarter.

Its makers, the English people, were neither blessed nor burdened with abstract conceptions. In the end we find ourselves interested in the ecclesiastical-political-social form which is worked out.

The English Reformation, so convincingly and amusingly English, was composite, even heterogeneous, in its antecedents and moving elements. Underlying, enveloping, and through attraction or repulsion, affecting the whole movement was the Roman Catholic Church. Although this was to be cast loose from as an organization, it supplied the bulk of the doctrines which any reformed national Christian church must retain. Assuming this Catholic matrix, a vital element of the reform was the "new learning" from abroad, both sides of it, secular and sacred: that is to say, the "new learning" in the sense of the humanistic revival and extension of classical studies, Greek as well as Latin; and the "new learning lying in the study of Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek, and in the Pauline teachings of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the legion of their followers. English factors were the indigenous Protestant tendencies, obscurely traceable to the tenets of Wyclif and the Lollards. An immediate efficient cause was the lust of Henry VIII and his desire for a son and heir. The vicissitudes of politics and the consolidation of the royal prerogatives under Henry VII had placed autocratic power in the hands of his successor, and contributed to the realization of his will to supersede the Pope as Supreme Head of the English Church.

There were two long strains of preparatory and at last V efficient forces entering the English reform of religion and separation from the Church of Rome two strains which might collaborate, but more constantly exhibited intolerance on the one side, and on the other dissent and occasional revolt. The one was the self-assertion of the English realm against papal encroachments; 1 the other

1 The course of the royal and parliamentary self-assertion of the realm. expressed in statutes, will be noticed as introductory to the statutes of Henry VIII. Post, Chapter XXII.