forgot the Latin tonge, and would, by themselves, without a Scholemaster, in short tyme, and with small paines, recover a sufficient habilitie, to understand, speake and write Latin." Just how the book would assist forgetful maturity to recover its youthful Latinity may not be clear. Yet it has an abundance of Latin and Greek quotations, with some seasonable advice on the education of children and a considerable amount of formal pedantic definitions. It is not so strongly and personally put together as Elyot's Gouvernour.

These earlier examples of study and scholarship in England are suggestive of several points. First, that the progress of English scholarship in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came through the studies of Englishmen upon the continent, or through the coming of learned foreigners to England. Secondly, profane studies with Englishmen might quickly turn to serve the ends of a rational Christian piety, and proceed hand in hand with study of the Sacred Text and the Church Fathers, as was indeed the case with Erasmus, who after all was England's chief enlightener. Thirdly, through the sixteenth century, Englishmen will contribute little to pure scholarship, profane or sacred; but in secular life and church reform will make practical English application of their studies. Fourthly, when, as in the case of the Scotchman George Buchanan,13 these islanders confine

13 George Buchanan, 1506-1582, was Scotland's chief humanist, nor did any contemporary Englishman equal him in reputation. The ties were close between Scotland and France, and at the age of fourteen Buchanan was sent to study in Paris. He spent the better part of twelve years studying and teaching at that University. After a brief visit to Scotland, he next is found spending three years at Bordeaux and five in Portugal, where he suffered at the hands of the Inquisition. But he had gained fame from his metrical Latin version of the Psalms, which rendered them with pseudo-classic taste and feeling. This complete humanist returned to stay in Scotland at the age of fifty-five. He became a sort of court poet to the Queen of Scots, and although a follower of the Reform, preserved her favor. Upon Darnley's murder and Mary's marriage with Bothwell, and subsequent flight to England, Buchanan turned against her in his Detectio. He was afterwards tutor to the young King James, and wrote a Latin history of Scotland. His repute was great while he lived and for another century. But when one thinks of his metrical rendering of the Psalms and his great poem "De Sphaera," which was also written in classic metre and consecrated to a presentation of a rapidly exploding theory of the universe, one is impressed with the futility of his accomplishment,

themselves to pure scholarship, and the production of polite pseudo-classic literature, the result is empty. For their energy passed out from scholarship into politics, church reform, voyages of discovery and the creation of an English literature which was not classical. English scholarship had also its ups and downs. The suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII cut off a considerable supply of funds used in the support of scholars at the Universities. Because of this and the distraction and confusion of ecclesiastical changes, the cult of letters was unfavorably affected by the English Reformation during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary.14 In Elizabeth's reign, especially the latter half, the genius of the time passed beyond the cult of classic letters, however much it had directly or indirectly drawn from them.

14 Ascham's letters - e.g. Ep. LXXIX (Giles' Ed.) of 1547 speak of the decline of learning at Cambridge. See more at large Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, II, I, Chapter XXXI, and II, II, Chapter XXIV.

CHAPTER XIX

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: WYCLIF

HISTORICAL events are not always to be accepted under the tags which have been attached to them, nor for what their movers assumed or supposed them to be. The socalled English Reformation was not predominantly a religious movement having to do with the saving of souls and their lot in the world to come. Its chief dramatic incidents sprang from the political constitution of England. In its entire course it was a catholic expression of the taste and temper and the formative genius of the English people. It cannot be treated by itself, separate from the consideration of all the rest that made England. For it was a part and parcel of the whole, and scarcely more other-worldly than the rest.

The Lutheran revolution was German, and the French Reform was French. But, among other obvious traits, one vital circumstance distinguishes them essentially from the English Reformation. The inspiration of the German Reformation, the explosion which it was, flared from the personality of perhaps the greatest of Germans, Martin Luther. The French Reform finds its form and culmination, its intensive actualization, in the work and genius of Calvin. In either case Luther or Calvin centres the human interest of the modern student upon himself. But the course of the English Reformation, unless at the very beginning in Wyclif, offers no man whose personal genius dominates and impels the story. It is a social, political, and if one will, religious, movement among a people; moulded by the political and social conditions of the country, and dominated by no single personality, except when temporarily driven by the passions and policy of Henry VIII. It has very little that is intellectually original; it borrows ideas from abroad, from any quarter.

Its makers, the English people, were neither blessed nor burdened with abstract conceptions. In the end we find ourselves interested in the ecclesiastical-political-social form which is worked out.

The English Reformation, so convincingly and amusingly English, was composite, even heterogeneous, in its antecedents and moving elements. Underlying, enveloping, and through attraction or repulsion, affecting the whole movement was the Roman Catholic Church. Although this was to be cast loose from as an organization, it supplied the bulk of the doctrines which any reformed national Christian church must retain. Assuming this Catholic matrix, a vital element of the reform was the new learning" from abroad, both sides of it, secular and sacred: that is to say, the "new learning" in the sense of the humanistic revival and extension of classical studies, Greek as well as Latin; and the "new learning" lying in the study of Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek, and in the Pauline teachings of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the legion of their followers. English factors were the indigenous Protestant tendencies, obscurely traceable to the tenets of Wyclif and the Lollards. An immediate efficient cause was the lust of Henry VIII and his desire for a son and heir. The vicissitudes of politics and the consolidation of the royal prerogatives under Henry VII had placed autocratic power in the hands of his successor, and contributed to the realization of his will to supersede the Pope as Supreme Head of the English Church.

There were two long strains of preparatory and at last efficient forces entering the English reform of religion and separation from the Church of Rome - two strains which might collaborate, but more constantly exhibited intolerance on the one side, and on the other dissent and occasional revolt. The one was the self-assertion of the English realm against papal encroachments; 1 the other

1 The course of the royal and parliamentary self-assertion of the realm, expressed in statutes, will be noticed as introductory to the statutes of Henry VIII. Post, Chapter XXII.

the protest of an evangelical and independent conscience against an ecclesiastical authority which seemed both irrational and unjustified by the faith of Christ.

Both of these strains joined in Wyclif, at whose preaching, says Milton, "all the succeeding reformers more effectually lighted their tapers." That preaching, continues Milton, "was to his countrymen but a short blaze, soon damped and stifled by the pope and prelates for six or seven kings' reigns." 2

There were gusts of righteous anger in the air which Wyclif breathed. Some one had experienced and given utterance to those powerful allegorical visions of human life, called after Piers Plowman.3 They voiced the indignation of a man who saw, as the people should have seen, the clergy and laity in their evil shortcomings and haphazard repentances. One will find no obvious plan in these visions, but ample denunciations of all forms of greed and sham, and declarations of the worth of Truth, which lies in honest virtues and the soul practising them. The author recoiled as sharply from the spiritual falsity of absolution purveyed to the wicked through the Church, as from the sins which need the pardon that only repentance and right conduct can merit or receive. Christian verities are taught by precept and by the illustrative drama of the vices, virtues, and sorrows of a society composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The writer is very close to the Bible, and always gives the pregnant Scripture text which sums up his alliterative speech. He is English in the savor of his scenes and personages, as in his language and verse. The vision of the ills of laity and clergy does not bring him to rebel against king and state, or refuse obedience to the Church. Yet his words

2 Of Reformation in England.

3 The authors, one or several, are unknown, or disputed. The massive edition is by Skeat in four volumes (Early Eng. Text Society). For a vivid presentation of its contents, see Jusserand's Piers Plowman (Putnam's, 1894). For discussion of authorship, see J. M. Manly in the Cambridge Hist. of Eng. Lit., and The Piers Plowman Controversy (Manly, Jusserand, Chambers, Early Eng. Text Soc. 1910). The sincerity and power of these poems will impress any reader who can overcome his repugnance to alliterative verse, which is as disagreeable to us as it was to Chaucer, and less familiar.