re.
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
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 centur