opposition from the conservative element, who were nicknamed Trojans.  The opposition came in part from the priests, who feared that that new study would sow seeds of heresy.  Yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the block for his religion.  Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as chancellor, was also a munificent patron of learning, and founded Christ Church College at Oxford.  Popular education at once felt the impulse of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were established in England in the first twenty years of the 16th century.  Greek became a passion even with English ladies.  Ascham in his Schoolmaster, a treatise on education, published in 1570, says that Queen Elizabeth “readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week.”  And in the same book he tells how, calling once on Lady Jane Grey, at Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he “found her in her chamber reading Phaedon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delite as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Bocase,” and when he asked her why she had not gone hunting with the rest, she answered, “I wisse,[18] all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato.”  Ascham’s Schoolmaster, as well as his earlier book, Toxophilus, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek and Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden.

One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the Scriptures into English out of the original tongues.  In 1525 William Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek.

[Footnote 18:  Surely; a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon gewis.]

Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the whole Bible from the German and Latin.  These were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful English of Tyndal’s Testament is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version (1611).  At first it was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England.  Numbers of copies were brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation.  After Henry VIII. had broken with the pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people.  Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants.  Other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul’s Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary.