d by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon
rejected the Copernican system. English literature had had its great
Elizabethan age; but little of the genius of that literature had
penetrated the Puritan mind. It is doubtful if a copy of Shakespeare had
found its way to these shores in 1636. Milton's star was just climbing
its native horizon, invisible as yet to the Western world.
The College was founded for the special and avowed purpose of training
young men for the service of the Church. All its studies were arranged
with reference to that object: endless expositions of Scripture,
catechetical divinity, "commonplacing" of sermons,--already, one
fancies, sufficiently commonplace,--Chaldee, Syriac, Hebrew without
points, and other Semitic exasperations. Latin, as the language of
theology, was indispensable, and within certain limits was practically
better understood, perhaps, in Cambridge of the seventeenth century,
than in Cambridge of the nineteenth. It was the language of official
intercourse. Indeed, the use of the English was forbidden to the
students within the College walls. _Scholares vernacula lingua intra
Collegii limites nullo praetextu utuntor_, was the law,--a law which
Cotton Mather complains was so neglected in his day "as to render our
scholars very unfit for a conversation with strangers." But the purpose
for which chiefly the study of Latin is now pursued--acquaintance with
the Roman classics--was no recognized object of Puritan learning. Cicero
appears to have been for a long time the only classic of whom the
students were supposed to have any knowledge. The reading of Virgil was
a daring innovation of the eighteenth century. The only Greek required
was that of the New Testament and the Greek Catechism. The whole rich
domain of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Theokritos, was as
much an unexplored territory as the Baghavad-Gita or the Mababharata.
Logic and metaphysic and scholastic disputations occupied a prominent
place. As late as 1726, the books most conspicuous in Tutor Flynt's
official report of the College exercises, next to Cicero and Virgil, are
such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense
obsoleteness,--Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's
Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a
curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have
recommended in irony to the student who sought his counsel.
With the multi
|