Humanism flowed through many schools during the 16th century -Stratford-on-Avon, among others, which Shakespeare attended. Elyot and Ascham (1515-1568) were along with Mulcaster its literary prophets.

In the institutions of the men whom I have named we find the best types of the Humanistic school. There was in all of them, as in the earlier Italian school of Da Feltre, a combination of religious with Humanistic aims. The classical fervour of Italy and the religious earnestness of the North met in the educational leaders; and many other teachers throughout Germany, France, and the Low Countries, though less personally distinguished, carried the same combined influences into the daily work of instruction. Nor did these combined aims ever after wholly cease to characterize the secondary schools of Europe. The general curriculum was, however, soon narrowed and the methods degenerated.

The narrowing of the educational aim and the return to mere verbalism was, in truth, not long of coming. If it be the essence of Humanism in its larger meaning that it was an opening of men's eyes afresh to nature and life, the exhaustion of the new movement can be easily understood. For it is given to few men, and those chiefly of poetic temperament, to keep their eyes open for long. There is an instinctive craving for dogma and form; for without these there is no intellectual repose. Each man's philosophy of life is fixed at the point where he grows tired of thinking, it has been said. Even the educated man begins to build his own prison-house very early. Especially must this be the case with teachers, simply because they have to teach; and for this a schoolroom creed of some sort is necessary. They gladly accept what is offered them in the name of authority and tradition, and it is the letter of the doctrine, not the spirit, that governs. They imitate what they have seen done, or apply the technique of a new doctrine which they have once accepted as if it were a revelation. Some schoolmasters will resent this estimate; but the fact is, it is

only those who recognize the truth of what I say as to the tendency of the pedagogic mind who do think, and keep themselves fresh and open. The intellectual effort and the moral courage required to organize, and the personal enthusiasm required to maintain, the inner life of the Humanistic school of the 15th and 16th centuries must have been the endowment of few.

The second period of the Renaissance saw the philological and textual movement in full activity, and was distinguished by the names, among others, of the younger Scaliger and Casaubon, and on the religious side by the formulation of Protestant dogma. The schools unfortunately felt the movement at once, because of the tendency of all teaching to content itself with form and formula and precept. There was no agency for maintaining a scholastic aim and method; the scholastic profession in short was not a profession: it took the colour of the time. It had no independent vitality and no philosophic basis.

But every great movement, even when it is spent, leaves some gain for the world. When we ask ourselves what the 16th century did for the secondary schools of Europe, we have only to compare the work of the old cathedral and monastery schools with those of the 16th and 17th centuries. The classical authors of Greece and Rome were now firmly established as instruments of instruction. It is true that the

spirit of Vittorino da Feltre, of Neander and Sturm and Ascham was lost in the 17th century; but classical books remained, and could not be taken away. Grammar, though then (and now) badly taught, was simplified, because the text-books had been simplified. These were two solid facts which survived and defied the dullest of teachers.

But it appears to me that this was all. The glimmerings of

method and the ethical fervour born of the alliance of Humanism with the reformed Christianity had disappeared, and grammar and flagellation, twin brothers, had reasserted themselves

indeed from many schools they had never disappeared. Many causes contributed to this: the school cannot be permanently in advance of the time, and every organ of progressive civilization must wait for peace among the nations.

Meanwhile the great scheme of the evangelical Humanists which contemplated a vernacular education for all had received practical effect in many towns; but as a universal scheme it had to wait (except in Scotland, and, later, in Saxony) on political enfranchisement for its full recognition; and this was a business of about 300 years. The extension, however, of primary vernacular religious schools, which had existed in towns before the Reformation, had received a powerful impulse, and continued to advance wherever the reformed religion was honestly held as a religion of personal conviction and soulexperience. The central position of the Reformers was that between man and God in Christ the personal relation was immediate. No external authority could relieve a man of his duty to work out his own salvation. For this, knowledge of the truth assimilated by himself was essential, and this, again, was impossible without instruction. Popular education was thus

a logical necessity of the position.

CHAPTER IV.

UNIVERSITIES.

In the Universities the permanent gain to the Humanists was chiefly the introduction of Latin literature, of Greek, a little mathematics, and the genuine Aristotle (though still taught chiefly through a Latin medium), aided by scholastic text-books and bald epitomes. The study of Civil Law had now also more reference to the spirit and life of antiquity, and Medicine began to be more scientific in its ground-work. These higher institutions were however essentially conservative and responded very slowly and unwillingly to the claims of Humanism and of the modern spirit generally.

It has to be remembered that universities were for long placed in a difficult position. They were scholae publicae to which all might go, fit or unfit; and so long as the secondary schools were few in number they had themselves to discharge the function of secondary schools, as they still do at Oxford and Cambridge in the case of all who are unable to pass the previous examination on entrance', and also in the case of the ordinary pass-man. The necessity thus imposed on universities, and which led to their being attended by boys of 13 or 14, had in mediaeval times been fully accepted, especially at Paris. The result must have been a low standard

1 In the Scottish Universities all have to pass a preliminary examination

on entrance.

of general attainment, except for a select few. Then, the practice of giving school instruction at the universities reacted everywhere throughout Europe to prevent the erection of secondary schools. But the general conception of a university as a school of the higher faculties, law, medicine, theology, and of philosophy (which also was practically a higher faculty) was never quite lost sight of. In Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries Professors of Latin and Greek literature gathered round them at University and Court centres all who desired culture as opposed to professional instruction, but the universities themselves were not re-organized on a Humanistic basis. The lecturers were in truth constantly moving from place to place like the Greek Rhetoricians in Roman imperial times.

Prior to the 16th century the higher university intellect occupied itself in the department of Arts mainly with logic and metaphysics, as interpreted by the schoolmen in unclassical Latin, and too often based on a partially understood Aristotle. But in the midst of all this they were trying to read for themselves the riddle of life and thought, and they were accomplishing great things, when we consider the conditions under which they worked and the complex dogmatism which they had to rationalize. "Scarcely thirty years ago," says Erasmus (1516) in a letter to a friend (quoted in Seebohm's Oxford Reformers, p. 399), “nothing was taught at Cambridge but the parva logicalia of Alexander, antiquated exercises from Aristotle, and the 'Quaestiones' of Scotus. In process of time improved studies were added, viz., mathematics, a new, or at all events a renovated Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek letters." After the 15th century, though scholastic logic and disputations still occupied the field, yet the ultimate reference was now to a better understood authority.

Luther desired to see the curriculum relieved from the Aristotelian metaphysics, ethics, and physics, as taught from text-books, and confined to the logic, rhetoric, and poetics in the original, or studied in epitomes of the original. Cicero's