Note 956 — Chapter X

It is probable that Cambridge was at this time better furnished with learning than Oxford. Even Wood does not give us a favourable notion of the condition of that university in the first part of the queen’s reign. Oxford was for a long time filled with popish students, that is, with conforming partisans of the former religion; many of whom, from time to time, went off to Douay. Leicester, as chancellor of the university, charged it, in 1582, and in subsequent years, with great neglect of learning; the disputations had become mere forms, and the queen’s lecturers in Greek and Hebrew seldom read. It was as bad in all the other sciences. Wood’s Antiquities and Athenæ, passim. The colleges of Corpus Christi and Merton were distinguished beyond the rest in the reign of Elizabeth; especially the former, where Jewel read the lecture in rhetoric (at an earlier time, of course), Hooker in logic, and Raynolds in Greek. Leicester succeeded in puritanizing, as Wood thought, the university, by driving off the old party, and thus rendered it a more effective school of learning.