im" graven beneath
it. "Lift up your little white hands for me," wrote the Dean to his
scholars in words which prove the tenderness that lay beneath the stern
outer seeming of the man,--"for me which prayeth for you to God." All the
educational designs of the reformers were carried out in the new
foundation. The old methods of instruction were superseded by fresh
grammars composed by Erasmus and other scholars for its use. Lilly, an
Oxford student who had studied Greek in the East, was placed at its head.
The injunctions of the founder aimed at the union of rational religion
with sound learning, at the exclusion of the scholastic logic, and at the
steady diffusion of the two classical literatures. The more bigoted of the
clergy were quick to take alarm. "No wonder," More wrote to the Dean,
"your school raises a storm, for it is like the wooden horse in which
armed Greeks were hidden for the ruin of barbarous Troy." But the cry of
alarm passed helplessly away. Not only did the study of Greek creep
gradually into the schools which existed, but the example of Colet was
followed by a crowd of imitators. More grammar schools, it has been said,
were founded in the latter years of Henry than in the three centuries
before. The impulse only grew the stronger as the direct influence of the
New Learning passed away. The grammar schools of Edward the Sixth and of
Elizabeth, in a word the system of middle-class education which by the
close of the century had changed the very face of England, were the
outcome of Colet's foundation of St. Paul's.

[Sidenote: The Universities]

But the "armed Greeks" of More's apologue found a yet wider field in the
reform of the higher education of the country. On the Universities the
influence of the New Learning was like a passing from death to life.
Erasmus gives us a picture of what happened in 1516 at Cambridge where he
was himself for a time a teacher of Greek. "Scarcely thirty years ago
nothing was taught here but the _Parva Logicalia_, Alexander, those
antiquated exercises from Aristotle, and the _Quaestiones_ of Scotus. As
time went on better studies were added, mathematics, a new, or at any rate
a renovated, Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek literature. What has been
the result? The University is now so flourishing that it can compete with
the best universities of the age." William Latimer and Croke returned from
Italy and carried on the work of Erasmus at Cambridge, where Fisher,
Bisho