ubted and who went to the block
for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as chancellor,
was also a munificent patron of learning, and founded Christ Church
College at Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse of the new
studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were established in
England in the first twenty years of the 16th century. Greek became a
passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his _Schoolmaster_, a
treatise on education, published in 1570, says that Queen Elizabeth
"readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarie
of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week." And in the same book he
tells how, calling once on Lady Jane Grey, at Brodegate, in
Leicestershire, he "found her in her chamber reading _Phaedon Platonis_
in Greek, and that with as much delite as some gentlemen would read a
merry tale in _Bocase_," and when he asked her why she had not gone
hunting with the rest, she answered, "I wisse,[18] all their sport in
the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato."
Ascham's _Schoolmaster_, as well as his earlier book, _Toxophilus_, a
Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek
and Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority
of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion
in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden.

One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the
Scriptures into English out of the original tongues. In 1525 William
Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament
from the Greek.

[Footnote 18: Surely; a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon _gewis_.]

Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the
whole Bible from the German and Latin. These were the basis of numerous
later translations, and the strong beautiful English of Tyndal's
Testament is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version
(1611). At first it was not safe to make or distribute these early
translations in England. Numbers of copies were brought into the
country, however, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation.
After Henry VIII. had broken with the pope the new English Bible
circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried
on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue
between the Church and the Protestants. Other important contributions to
the literatu