be established in the universities of Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and Salamanca, the decree had not been carried out, and Greek was still regarded with suspicion by the orthodox.  Their opposition dies with their lives, these guardians of the thing that is.  Of the thing that cometh they know, that ‘if it be of God, they cannot overthrow it’.  The silent flooding in of the main is to them more to be desired than the swift wave which in giving may destroy.  Let us not think too lightly of them because they feared shadows which the light of time has dispelled.  It needs no eyes to see where they were wrong:  where they were right—­and they were right often enough—­can only be seen by taking trouble to inquire.

Of the condition of learning in England in the second half of the fifteenth century we do not yet know all that we might.  Manuscripts that men bought or had written for them, books that they read, catalogues of libraries now scattered can tell us much, even though the owners are dead and speak not.  Single facts, like cards for cardhouses, will not stand alone.  There is still much to be done.  Great libraries are only just beginning to gather up the manuscript minutiae which their books contain; to identify handwritings; to decipher monograms; to collect facts.  But some day when the work has been done, we may well hope to be able to put bone to bone and breathe new life into them in a way which will make valuable contributions to our knowledge.

There is sometimes an inclination now to underestimate the effect of the Renaissance.  The writers of that age were unsparingly contemptuous of their predecessors, and their verdict was for long accepted almost without question.  The reaction against this has led to an undue extolling of the Middle Ages.  It is true enough that many of the Schoolmen, though the humanists speak of them as hopelessly barbarous, were capable of writing Latin which, if not strictly classical, had yet an excellence of its own.  But in view of the extracts given above from Ebrardus and John Garland it can hardly be maintained that there was much knowledge of Greek in Western Europe before the Renaissance.  England was not ahead of France and Germany in the fifteenth century; and if Deventer school in 1475 was fed upon the monstrosities we have seen, it is not likely that Winchester and Eton had any better fare.  Some sporadic examples there may have been of men who added a knowledge of the Greek character to their reminiscences of the Graecismus; just as at the present day it is not difficult to acquire a faint acquaintance with Oriental languages, enough to recognize the formation of words and plough out the letters, without any real knowledge.  Colet and Fisher only began to learn Greek in their old age.  One, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, made a name for himself as a lecturer at Oxford, and was advanced to be Dean of St. Paul’s; the other, as head of a house at Cambridge and Chancellor of