e,
afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of
Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came in search of
the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost
scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister
university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno. Cheke,
who "taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek," became the incumbent of
the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger
Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John's College, Cambridge,
was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nash testifies
that it "was as an universitie within itself; having more candles light
in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of
clock bell gave strokes." Greek was not introduced at the universities
without violent {62} opposition from the conservative element, who were
nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who
feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the
most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among
them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted 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 Elisabeth "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 upon 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, 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 {63} classics, and with that perpetual
reference to the authority of ant