I do not think I can quite make you understand what this New Learning was.  It was indeed but the old learning of Greece.  Yet there was in it something that can never grow old, for it was human.  It made men turn away from idle dreaming and begin to learn that the world we live in is real.  They began to realize that there was something more than a past and a future.  There was the present.  So, instead of giving all their time to vague wonderings of what might be, of what never had been, and what never could be, they began to take an interest in life as it was and in man as he was.  They began to see that human life with all its joys and sorrows was, after all, the most interesting thing to man.

It was a New Birth, and men called it so.  For that is the meaning of Renaissance.  Many things besides the fall of Constantinople helped towards this New Birth.  The discovery of new worlds by daring sailors like Columbus and Cabot, and the discovery of printing were among them.  But the touchstone of the New Learning was the knowledge of Greek, which had been to the greater part of Europe a lost tongue.  On this side of the Alps there was not a school or college in which it could be learned.  So to Italy, where the Greek scholars had found a refuge, those who wished to learn flocked.

Among them were some Oxford scholars.  Chief of these were three, whose names you will learn to know well when you come to read more about this time.  They were William Grocyn, “the most upright and best of all Britons,"* Thomas Linacre, and John Colet.  These men, returning from Italy full of the New Learning, began to teach Greek at Oxford.  And it is strange now to think that there were many then who were bitterly against such teaching.  The students even formed themselves into two parties, for and against.  They were called Greeks and Trojans, and between these two parties man a fierce fight took place, for the quarrel did not end in words, but often in blows.

Erasmus.

The New Learning, however, conquered.  And so keenly did men feel the human interests of such things as were now taught, that we have come to call grammar, rhetoric, poetry, Greek and Latin the Humanities, and the professor who teaches these thing the professor of Humanity.

Chapter XXXVII THE LAND OF NOWHERE

WHILE the New Learning was stirring England, and Greek was being for the first time taught in Oxford, a young student of fourteen came to the University there.  This student was named Thomas More.  He was the son of a lawyer who became a judge, and as a little boy he had been a page in the household of Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Archbishop was quick to see that the boy was clever.  “This child here waiting at the table, whoever will live to see it, will prove a marvellous man,"* he would say.  And so he persuaded More’s father to send the boy to Oxford to study law.