Note 668 — Chapter V

Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the Life of Ascham by Grant, prefixed to the former’s Epistles, he enumerates the learned of Cambridge about 1530. Ascham was himself under Pember, homini Græcæ linguæ admirabili facilitate excultissimo. The others named are Day, Redman, Smith, Cheke, Ridley, Grindal (not the archbishop), Watson, Haddon, Pilkington, Horn, Christopherson, Wilson, Seton, et infiniti alii, excellenti doctrinâ præditi. Most of these are men afterwards distinguished in the church on one side or the other. This is a sufficient refutation of Wood’s idle assertion of the superiority of Oxford; the fact seems to have been wholly otherwise. Ascham himself, in a letter without date, but evidently written about the time that the controversy of Cheke and Gardiner began, praises thus the learning of Cambridge. Aristoteles nunc et Plato, quod factum est etiam apud nos hic quinquennium, in sua lingua a pueris leguntur. Sophocles et Euripides sunt hic familiariores, quam olim Plautus fuerat, cum tu hic eras. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, magis in ore et manibus omnium tenuntur, quam tum Titus Livius, etc. Ibid. p. 74. What then can be thought of Antony Wood when he says, Cambridge was in the said king’s reign overspread with barbarism and ignorance, as ’tis often mentioned by several authors? Hist. and Antiq. of Oxford, A.D. 1545.