ailed
from Oxford. But Greene and Nashe were of Cambridge--of St John's both,
and Day of Caius. They sought to London, and there (for tragic truth
underlay that Christmas comedy of "The Pilgrimage of Parnassus") many of
them came to bitter ends: but before reaching their sordid personal
ruin--and let the deaths of Marlowe and Greene be remembered--they built
the Elizabethan drama, as some of them lived to add its last ornaments.
We know what, meanwhile, Spenser had done. I think it scarcely needs
further proof that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth century,
was fermenting with a desire to read, criticise, yes and write, English
literature, albeit officially the University recognised no such thing.

There remains a second question--How happened it that Cambridge, after
admitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chair
of Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so to speak, a mushroom (call
it not toadstool!) of yesterday? Why simply enough. Latin continued to be
the working language of Science. In Latin Bacon naturally composed his
"Novum Organum" and indeed almost all his scientific and philosophical
work, although a central figure of his age among English prose-writers.
In Latin, in the eighteenth century, Newton wrote his "Principia": and I
suppose that of no two books written by Englishmen before the close of
that century, or indeed before Darwin's "Origin of Species," can it be
less extravagantly said than of the "Novum Organum" and the "Principia"
that they shook the world. Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos
(founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great names of Bentley and
Porson, we may observe it as generally true, that whenever and wherever
large numbers of scientific men use a particular language as their
working instrument, they have a disposition to look askance on its
refinements; to be jealous of its literary professors; to accuse these of
treating as an end in itself what is properly a means. Like the Denver
editor I quoted to you in a previous lecture, these scientific workers
want to 'get there' in a hurry, forgetting that (to use another
Americanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice it is likely to cut. You
may observe this disposition--this suspicion of 'literature,' this thinly
veiled contempt--in many a scientific man to-day; though because his
language has changed from Latin to English, it is English he now chooses
to cheapen. Well, we cannot help it