the University, promoted the foundation of the Lady Margaret’s two colleges, Christ’s and St. John’s, which were to bring in the spirit of the Renaissance.  It is impossible to suppose that men of such position would have spent the greater part of their lives without Greek, if there had been any facilities for them to learn it when they were young.  Nor again would Erasmus, when teaching Greek at Cambridge in 1511, have chosen the grammars of Gaza and Chrysoloras to lecture upon, if his audience had been capable of anything better.  Eminent scholars do not teach the elements at a university if boys are already learning them at school.

The condition of things may fairly be gauged by Duke Humfrey’s collections for his library at Oxford.  Of 130 books which he presented to the University in 1439, not one is Greek; of 135 given in 1443, only one—­a vocabulary—­is certainly Greek, four more are possibly, but not probably so.  A little later in the century four Oxford men were pupils of Guarino in Ferrara; Grey (d. 1478) brought back manuscripts to Balliol and became Bishop of Ely; Gunthorpe (d. 1498) took his books with him to his deanery at Wells; but to only two of the four is any definite knowledge of Greek credited—­Fleming (d. 1483), who compiled a Greek-Latin dictionary, and Free (d. 1465), who translated into Latin Synesius’ treatise on baldness.

A discovery recently made by Dr. James of Cambridge has thrown unexpected light on the history of English scholarship at this period; and as it affords an example of the fruits to be yielded by careful research and synthesis, it may be detailed here.  New Testament scholars have long been interested in a manuscript of the Gospels known, from its present habitation in the Leicester town-library, as the Leicester Codex; its date being variously assigned to the fourteenth or fifteenth century.  In the handwriting there are some marked characteristics which make it easy to recognize; and in course of time other Greek manuscripts were discovered written by the same hand, two Psalters in Cambridge libraries, a Plato and Aristotle in the cathedral library at Durham, a Psalter and part of the lexicon of Suidas in Corpus at Oxford.  But no clue was forthcoming as to their origin, until Dr. James found at Leiden a small Greek manuscript in the same hand, containing some letters of Aeschines and Plato, and a colophon stating that it had been written by Emmanuel of Constantinople for George Neville, Archbishop of York, and completed on 30 Dec. 1468.  Where the various manuscripts were written and from what originals is not plain—­the Suidas perhaps from a manuscript belonging at one time to Grosseteste; but the classical manuscripts were probably done for Neville in England during the prosperous years before his deportation to Calais in 1472, the Psalters and Gospels probably after that date at Cambridge; for the Paston Letters show that some of his disbanded household made their way to Cambridge, and Dr. Rendel Harris has ingeniously demonstrated that one Psalter and the Gospels were in fact at Cambridge with the Franciscans early in the sixteenth century.  The presence of a Greek scribe in England about 1470 is an important fact.