In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and many Greek scholars, with their manuscripts, fled into Italy, where they began teaching their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato.  There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin classics.  Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin poet, Boethius, whose De Consolatione Philosophiae had been translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer.  Little was known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue.  Caxton’s so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil’s epic.  Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus.  The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe.  Manuscripts were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars, and spread abroad by means of the printing-press.  Statues were dug up and placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect workmanship in letters and the fine arts.

In the latter years of the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England.  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 (1500), 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.  From Oxford the study spread to the sister university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir John Cheke, who “taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek,” became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540.  Among his pupils was Roger Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John’s College, Cambridge, was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nashe testifies that it “was an universitie within itself; having more candles light in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of clock bell gave strokes.”  Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent