stic scholars in Europe. While in Florence he
came in contact with Lorenzo the Magnificent's younger son, who
afterwards became Leo X. The friendship thus formed lasted all during
Linacre's lifetime, and later on he dedicated at least one of his
books to Alexander de' Medici after the latter's elevation to the
papal throne.

It is no wonder that Linacre always looked back on Italy as the Alma
Mater--the fond mother in the fullest sense of the term--to whom he
owed his precious opportunities for education and the broadest
possible culture. In after-life the expression of his feelings was
often tinged with romantic tenderness. It is said that when he was
crossing the Alps, on his homeward journey, leaving Italy after
finishing his years of apprenticeship of study, standing on the
highest point of the mountains from which he could still see the
Italian plains, he built with his own hands a rough altar of stone and
dedicated it to the land of his studies--the land in which he had
spent six happy years--under the fond title of _Sancta Mater
Studiorum_.

At first, after his return from Italy, Linacre lectured on Greek at
Oxford. Something of the influence acquired over English students and
the good he accomplished may be appreciated from the fact that with
Grocyn he had such students as More and the famous Dean Colet. Erasmus
also was attracted from the Netherlands and {89} studied Greek under
Linacre, to whom he refers in the most kindly and appreciative terms
many times in his after life. Linacre wrote books besides lecturing,
and his work on certain fine points in the grammar of classical
Latinity proved a revelation to English students of the old classical
languages, for nothing so advanced as this had ever before been
attempted outside Italy. In one of the last years of the fifteenth
century Linacre was appointed tutor to Prince Arthur, the elder
brother of Henry VIII, to whom it will be remembered that Catherine of
Aragon had been betrothed before her marriage with Henry. Arthur's
untimely death, however, soon put an end to Linacres' tutorship.

As pointed out by Einstein, the reputation of Grocyn and Linacre was
not confined to England, but soon spread all over the Continent. After
the death of the great Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, who
had no worthy successors in the Italian peninsula, these two men
became the principal European representatives of the New Learning.
There were other distinguished men