arning was, though
only very gradually, ceasing to be a possession of the clergy alone.
Much doubt remains as to the extent of education--if a little reading,
and less writing deserve the name--among the higher classes in this
period of our national life. A cheering sign appears in the
circumstance that the legal deeds of this age begin to bear signatures,
and a reference to John of Trevisa would bear out Hallam's conjecture,
that in the year 1400 "the average instruction of an English gentleman
of the first class would comprehend common reading and writing, a
considerable knowledge of French, and a slight tincture of Latin."
Certain it is that in this century the barren teaching of the
Universities advanced but little towards the true end of all academical
teaching--the encouragement and spread of the highest forms of national
culture. To what use could a gentleman of Edward III's or Richard II's
day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of Oxenford" in Aristotelian
logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of Priscian, and the
rhetorical works of Cicero? Chaucer's scholar, however much his
learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may commend
him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in
which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the means
with which to purchase more of his beloved books. Probably no
trustworthier conclusions as to the literary learning and studies of
those days are to be derived from any other source than from a
comparison of the few catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to
us; and these help to show that the century was approaching its close
before a few sparse rays of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence
reached England. But this ray was communicated neither through the
clergy nor through the Universities; and such influence as was
exercised by it upon the national mind, was directly due to profane
poets,--men of the world, who like Chaucer quoted authorities even more
abundantly than they used them, and made some of their happiest
discoveries after the fashion in which the "Oxford Clerk" came across
Petrarch's Latin version of the story of Patient Grissel: as it were by
accident. There is only too ample a justification for leaving aside
the records of the history of learning in England during the latter
half of the fourteenth century in any sketch of the main influences
which in that period determined or affected the nationa