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privileges of the individual and of the whole society, placed with far too little reservation, at the discretion of its Head, it will readily be surmised that even the recreations of the young collegian were not free from an inquisitorial and somewhat irritating supervision. Bathing, as I have already noted, was forbidden under severe penalties. Among athletic exercises, football seems to have held a foremost place. I am not able to state what rules were generally observed in the game; but when we find the vice-chancellor issuing, in 1580, an injunction whereby no scholar "of what degree or condition soever," was permitted to play, except within the precincts of his own college, it will be inferred that the whole character of the game differed considerably from the modern sport conditioned by "Rugby rules." Let us hope it inclined to a more humane regard for limbs and for life. Archery was permitted in the open fields, and catch-ball (" pilae reciprocatio") within the the college,-in places, that is to say, where it could be carried on without risk of accidents. Bull-baiting and bear-baiting, diversions which had but recently been introduced into this country, possessed attractions too powerful for the proctor and his man to overcome. One of Dr. Caius' statutes for his own college descants at length on the unsuitableness of such sports, not simply on account of the danger, supposing the bull or the bear were to break loose, but because these "new sports,' the good doctor goes on to say, "extinguish the love of learning, empty the pocket, waste the useful hours, and turn men themselves into brutes."

The acting of plays was certainly a mode of diversion far more becoming a learned community. William Soone, who was for a short time professor of the civil law in the university, gives an account of these performances which reminds us somewhat of the modern newspaper puff. "In the months of January, February, and March," he says, in a letter to a friend, "the students, in order to beguile the long evenings, amuse themselves with exhibiting public plays, which they perform with so much elegance and graceful action, and such command of voice, countenance, and gesture, that if Plautus, Terence, or Seneca were to come to life

again, they would admire their own pieces and be better pleased with them than when they were performed before the people of Rome; and Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes would be disgusted at the performance of their own citizens."

So long as the players were content to confine themselves to the productions of the classic muse, the licence of these perform ances was kept within comparatively harmless limits, but occasionally an original composition, either in Latin or in the vernacular, evoked by its open or covert satire the liveliest resentment; while fellows, and even masters, of colleges did not disdain to resort to such compositions as affording the opportunity for effective ridicule of the opposite party or of personal foes. In the reign of Queen Mary, the scholars of Christ's College produced a Latin play, entitled Pammachius, assailing the abuses of the Papal court and the Roman faith, an act of temerity which called forth the prompt interference of Gardiner, and even threatened at one time to involve the whole college in serious difficulties. In such exercises of their talents, authors and performers alike seem to have been but very slightly restrained by a sense of their position in the university, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, the composition of a Master of Trinity, is at least as remarkable for its grossness as for its talent. The ancient feud between "town" and "gown" at no time raged more unintermittently than at the period of which I am now speaking; and it was a favourite device of the scholars, when bringing out one of these original compositions, to introduce the mayor of the town, or some other prominent member of the corporation, as sustaining a highly ridiculous part or occupying a ludicrous situation. Of one of these performances, entitled Club Law, which was given at Clare College in 1597, Fuller supplies us with an account enlivened by something more than his ordinary quaint humour :--

"The students," he says, "having gotten a discovery of some town privacies, from Miles Goldsborough (one of their own corporation), composed a merry but abusive comedy in English, as calculated for the capacities of such whom they intended spectators

thereof. Clare Hall was the place wherein it was enacted, and the mayor, with his brethren, and their wives, were invited to behold it, or rather themselves abused therein. A convenient place was assigned to the townsfolk (riveted in with scholars on all sides), where they might see and be seen. Here they did behold themselves in their own best clothes (which the scholars had borrowed) so lively personated, their habits, gestures, language, lieger-jests and expressions, that it was hard to decide which was the true townsman, whether he that sat by, or he who acted on the stage. Sit still they could not for chafing; go out they could not for crowding; but impatiently patient were fain to attend till dismissed at the end of the comedy."

It was probably one of the results of the little attention given to athletic sports, that we find the richer students constantly incurring the reprimands of the authorities by their excessive foppery. "Cut taffata doublets," "galligastion hose," silk and velvet, and excessive ruffs in their shirts, were the external signs by which the sons of wealthy men endeavoured to make manifest their superiority to the baser sort. While even fellows of colleges incur rebuke on account of unauthorized and irregular adornments of the academic gown with facings of velvet and satin.

Such are perhaps the most noteworthy features of college life at Cambridge in the latter part of the sixteenth century. When compared with those presented by St John's College (from whose annals they have mainly been taken) in the earlier part of the same century, the contrast is by no means in favour of the later picture, and I cannot but attribute the change which we mark for the worse, partly to the mental constraint placed upon the students by the enforcement of an uniform standard of religious faith, and partly to the too arbitrary limitation of their studies to a certain prescribed curriculum. Did space permit, it would be easy to supply a very different and very remarkable picture from the aspects of the same society half a century before, in years when these cramping restrictions had not yet come into force and the college was ruled by the able and kindly-hearted Dr. Metcalfe. The enthusiasm with

which a little band of its younger members,-among whom were Ascham, Cheke, Cecil, Ponet, Thomas Smith, of Queens', and Walter Haddon,-pursued the new study of Greek and interpreted the page of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and those other genii of the antique world whom the wave that rolled from Italy had recently brought to the English shores, is something almost astonishing. We have far better texts of those authors in the present day, and the best scholarship of the Cambridge of those times would, I fear, raise a somewhat contemptuous smile in the sixth form at Harrow or Shrewsbury, but when I note the genuine ardour with which these poor students were inspired, rising before the dawn to spell out, by the aid of their dim lamps, some masterpiece of ancient Hellas, combining together to effect a reform in the pronounciation of Greek itself which not even Gardiner's imperious prohibition, as chancellor, and the opposition of dull conservative prejudice could prevent from being carried to ultimate and permanent success,-building up, in this intellectual intercourse, friendships which are to be traced as influencing their whole subsequent careers, in noble rivalry, in honourable achievement, in marriage into one another's families, in many a kindly action as one or other needed a helping hand,-when, I say, I note all these subsequent features, the direct outcome of the former college life, it seems to me that the best results to be attained by academic culture, the genuine love of learning, the conception of more catholic views of life and of letters, the formation of honourable and soul-inspiring attachments -were fully realised.

THE LOLLARDS.

BY REV. A. JAMSON SMITH, M.A.

December 13th, 1883.

He

It is perhaps impossible to overrate the influence of Wiclif on the history of England in the latter part of the 14th century. had during his life many adherents among the upper and the learned classes of the country. Oxford, the University where he taught, was in the zenith of its fame, a fame, to which, no doubt, he contributed to an incalculable extent. He was employed by his Sovereign in important Embassies, and it is conjectured that he sat at one time as member of Parliament. He established an

order of poor Priests, that is to say, a great missionary body, who made it their chief aim to propagate his doctrines. Above all he, in company with other scholars, translated the Bible. The wellknown editors of this translation, Forshall and Madden, tell us that in its revised form, that is, in what is sometimes called Purvey's Bible, they examined 150 manuscripts in a more or less complete condition. These manuscripts were copied, we are assured, within forty years of the time that the translation was made. Nothing could be more significant than this fact of the enthusiasm and devotion of Wiclif's followers. In estimating its significance we have to consider the immense loss of such manuscripts that must have taken place as a consequence not only of the persecuting spirit of the age, but also of simple neglect. The survival, in truth, of so many manuscripts points to an existence at one time of other such manuscripts in numbers the extent of which it would be very rash to attempt to conjecture.*

In the Academy of December 16, 1882, it is pointed out in a most careful article, by Mr. Ramsay, that a majority of Chaucer's references to the Bible are from the Vulgate, that many are second-hand, and that some few appear to be directly from Wiclit's Bible; but that those quoted second-hand are from treatises in which Wiclif's Bible is cited. "In either case "-Mr. Ramsay concludes "Wiclif's work would be shown to have made its way into the general literature of the period."

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