Note 355 — Chapter XXIII

This is admitted by Ascham, who after boasting in one letter that Homer, Thucydides, and Xenophon are now critically studied at Oxford, is to be found very soon afterwards complaining that these authors are being neglected for others of an inferior calibre. It was no better at Cambridge, where, after the departure of Sir John Cheke, the classical revival died a natural death, the study of divinity having expired long before. “It would pity a man’s heart,” says Latimer, “to hear what I hear of the state of Cambridge. There be few that study divinity, save those who must of necessity furnish the colleges.”