fully correspondent to, yea,
went beyond his desire, nevertheless, as thou mayest well understand, the
time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present,
neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had. For that time
was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of
the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set
footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine
goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with
such amendment and increase of the knowledge, that now hardly should I be
admitted unto the first form of the little grammar-schoolboys--I say, I,
who in my youthful days was, and that justly, reputed the most learned of
that age. Which I do not speak in vain boasting, although I might lawfully
do it in writing unto thee--in verification whereof thou hast the authority
of Marcus Tullius in his book of old age, and the sentence of Plutarch in
the book entitled How a man may praise himself without envy--but to give
thee an emulous encouragement to strive yet further.

Now is it that the minds of men are qualified with all manner of
discipline, and the old sciences revived which for many ages were extinct.
Now it is that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored,
viz., Greek, without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a
scholar, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaean, and Latin. Printing likewise is now in
use, so elegant and so correct that better cannot be imagined, although it
was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical
suggestion on the other side was the invention of ordnance. All the world
is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries;
and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato's time, nor
Cicero's, nor Papinian's, there was ever such conveniency for studying as
we see at this day there is. Nor must any adventure henceforward to come
in public, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well
polished in the shop of Minerva. I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters,
tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more
learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time.

What shall I say? The very women and children have aspired to this praise
and celestial manner of good learning. Yet so it is that, in the age I am
now of, I have been constrained to learn the Gree