system of England according to the advanced ideas of Italy was begun. In the early years of the fifteenth century, the old learning had ceased to satisfy, and the new had not yet come. At Oxford the spirit of free inquiry, stimulated by Wyclif, had been sternly suppressed. Versifiers worked painstakingly after the pattern set by Chaucer; but literature, like learning, waited the breath of a new impulse. So England lay "Between two worlds, One dead, the other powerless to be born." * Foundation of Colleges. Then the new life manifested itself amid the breaking up of the old order. At Oxford, between 1430 and 1485, three colleges were established, and a Library was founded by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. About the middle of the century Henry VI. founded King's, and Margaret of Anjou Queen's College, Cambridge, and, in the same reign, the great school of Eton was established. Three Universities arose in Scotland between 1410 and 1494. But even more important than the increased opportunities for education, was the introduction of new methods and subjects of study. The knowledge of Greek life and literature, almost wholly lost during the Middle Ages, had stirred Italy with the power of a fresh revelation. Chrysoloras, an ambassador from Constantinople, had begun to teach Greek in Florence in 1395, and upon the Fall of Constantinople (1453) numbers of Greek scholars took refuge in Italy, bringing precious manuscripts and the treasures of an old thought which Europe hailed as "new." Italy became the University of Europe, and, toward the end of the fifteenth century, English scholars learned at Padua, at Bologna, or at the Florence of * Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse." Lorenzo di Medici, what they taught at Oxford or at Cambridge. Cornelius Vitelli, an Italian exile, taught Greek at Oxford before 1475; there, too, William Grocyn lectured on Greek, in 1491, after he had studied under Vitelli, and in Florence and Venice. Among Grocyn's hearers was the young Sir Thomas More, who was later to embody the new spirit in his history of Richard III., and in the Utopia. We have thus an illustration of the way in which the New Learning sprung from Italian to Englishman, and from the English scholar to the English writer, thus passing out of the college into the wider sphere of literature. Among this band of reformers was Thomas Linacre, a learned physician; John Colet, who studied the New Testament in the original, and who started a system of popular education by founding in 1510 the Grammar School of St. Paul; Erasmus, the famous Dutch scholar, who taught Greek at Cambridge, and wrote at More's house his Praise of Folly. Printing. Side by side with the new learning came the new means men had found for its diffusion. William Caxton, who had learned the strange art of printing at Bruges, returned to England in 1476(?), and set up his press at Westminster at "the sign of the Red Pale." Here he published the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), the first book printed in England. Caxton was no mere tradesman; he was prompted by a deep and unselfish love for literature. His press gave England the best he knew-the poems of Chaucer, the Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, a noble book on which Tennyson has based his Idyls of the King. Our first printer was himself an industrious translator; the favorite of royal and noble patrons of learning. "Many noble and divers gentlemen" discussed literary matters with him in his humble workshop; among the rest, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, the first English scholar of his time, who has been called "the first fruits of the Italian Renaissance in England." While the touch of Greek beauty and philosophy, restored and immortal after their burial of a thousand The discovery of years, was thus reanimating Europe, the the new world. horizon of the world was suddenly enlarged by a series of great discoveries. In 1486 Diaz discovered the Cape of Good Hope; in 1492 Columbus penetrated the sea of darkness and gave to civilization a new world; and in 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and made a new path to India. England shared in this fever of exploration, and in 1497 the Cabots, sent by Henry VII., " to subdue land unknown to all Christians," saw the main land of America. We can hardly overestimate the impetus given to the mental life of Europe by such a sudden rush of new ideas. The opportunities for life and action were multiplying; man's familiar earth was expanding on every side. The air was charged with wonder and romance; the imaginations of explorers were alive with the dreams of a poet, and cities shining with gold, or fountains of perpetual youth, were sought for in the excitement of sensation which made the impossible seem a thing of every day. In the midst of all the new activity, Copernicus (1500) put forth his theory that, instead of being the center of the universe, round which the whole heavens revolved, the solid earth was but a satellite in motion round the central sun. While this conception, so startling to men's most fundamental notions, was slow to gain general acceptance, it was another element of wonder and of change. Copernicus. The Church was quickened by the currents of this new life. Men chafed at its corrupt wealth, and narrow mediæval views. The Bible was translated and made the book of the people. Luther, the type of the unfettered, individual conscience, faced pope and cardinal with his "Here I stand, Martin Luther; I cannot do otherwise: God help me." This mighty upheaval The Reformashook England as well as Germany. The tion. year of 1526 saw the introduction of Tyndale's translation of the Bible, and ten years later the policy of Henry VIII. withdrew the Church in England from the headship of the pope. Thus England came to share in the diverse activities of the Renaissance, intellectual, maritime, and religious; in the revival of learning, the discovery of the world, and the Reformation. In the fifteenth century, she had absorbed and stored up many vital influences; early in the sixteenth century these slowly accumulated forces, these new emotions and ideas, began to find an outlet in the work of a new class of writers, and we reach the threshold of the Elizabethan era, the time when the Renaissance found utterance in English literature. Summary. THE EXPRESSION OF THE NEW LEARNING IN The first conspicuous example of the influence of Italy on English verse is found in the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. These noblemen belonged to the new class of Wyatt and "Courtly Makers,"* poets of the court Surrey. circle, in whose brilliant and crowded lives the making of verses was but the graceful and incidental accomplishment of the finished cavalier. Poetry was a court fashion, and Henry VIII., a patron of the new learning, was himself a writer of songs. Both Wyatt and Surrey were translators as well as imitators of the Italian poetry, and * Maker is a poet, one who creates. Poet from Greek woɩhing, a maker. Troubadour, or trouvère, from the French trouver, to find; one who invents, or makes. their effect on literature was even greater than the intrinsic value of their work. They introduced the sonnet, which Petrarch had recently brought to great perfection—almost the only highly artificial poetic form ever successfully transplanted to England. Surrey did even more for the future of English poetry. In his partial translation of Virgil's Eneid, he adopted from the Italian the unrhymed ten-syllable measure (iambic pentameter), which we call blank verse. This metre the dramatists of Elizabeth's time thus found ready to their hand. Used in the first English tragedy, the Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, of Sackville and Norton (1562), improved by Marlowe and by Shakespeare, it was made the epic verse of English poetry in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. But Wyatt and Surrey did more than use Italian metres and poetic forms; they had absorbed, also, the sentiment and thought of Italy, and, in their songs and sonnets, deal with "the complexities of love," and kindred themes, according to the best Italian models. While we may weary of their conventional gamut of sighs and groans, we must think of these Courtly Makers as doing a great work by bringing to English poetry that new Italy which was the fairy godmother of Elizabethan literature. The publication, in 1557, of the work of these two poets, in a collection known as Tottel's Miscellany of Uncertain Authors. did much to popularize the new style of writing; and with that year the Elizabethan period may conveniently be said to begin. The extent and importance of Italy's influence in England, whether on education or literature, Italian Influence. can be appreciated only by careful study. "Every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and of Italy." Sir Thomas More wrote a life of Pico di Mirandola, a great leader in the new Italian * Lowell's Essay on Spenser in "Among My Books," p. 149. |