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.

It is perhaps impossible to overrate the influence of Wiclif on the history of England in the latter part of the 14th century. He 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."

According to the contemporary witness, Knighton, the Lollards —and I must, for the sake of convenience, use this term, which, if it included many who were in no sense true followers of Wielif, also included all who were-were so powerful that they gained over to their sect half or more of the people of England. They effected this, he assures us, in the energetic language that comes of virulence, by all the arts of proselytizing, menace, persuasion and an assumption of superior piety. This old chronicler is however not merely virulent; he is sadly convinced of the evil which the heretics were bringing on the country. Thanks to their misdoings the kingdom was divided against itself. They stirred up son against father, and father against son, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, and, as it were, every man against his neighbour. Knighton, it is true, writes as an alarmed ecclesiastic and as Canon of Leicester, that is, as an inhabitant of a county in which Wielif had held a benefice during the last eight years of his life, and where in consequence his followers would naturally be specially numerous. Still, allowing for some exaggeration on Knighton's part, his testimony goes to show that the Lollards had gained in his time an influence that was seriously alarming to himself and other orthodox churchmen.

A well-known passage from the same writer, while it illustrates the zeal with which he and kindred spirits would, so far as lay in their power, suppress the translation of the Bible, shows at the same time their panic at its wide-spread diffusion. "The gospel which Christ committed to the clergy and doctors of the church, that they might sweetly dispense it to the laity and weaker persons according to the exigency of the times and the wants of the people hungering after it in their mind, this John Wielif has translated out of the Latin into the Anglican, not angelic language, whence through him it has been published, and disclosed more openly to laymen and women able to read than it used to be to the most learned and intelligent of the clergy. And so the golden pearl is cast abroad and trodden under foot of swine, and what was dear to clergy and laity is now rendered, as it were, the

common jest of both, so that the gem of the church becomes the derision of laymen, and that is now theirs for ever, which before was the special property of the clergy and doctors."

Take this passage in connexion with the Constitution of Arundel, which enacted that Wiclif's books were to be examined by the University authorities, or a Commission appointed by them, and afterwards to be expressly approved by the Archbishops; take it in connexion with the large, though unknown number of copies made within so short a time after the publication of this hated translation, and we may beyond question infer that both the translation and Wiclif's books generally had an extensive circulation, and that this circulation was extensive in the face. of the bitter hostility and declared opposition of those in high places.

The strength of Lollard influence in the University is indicated by the Statute enacting that all University officials should, under penalty of loss of degree and office, take an oath not knowingly to admit within their "hospitium" any master, bachelor, or scholar, or even servant, who was suspected with any show of probability of heretical or Lollard depravity.

Nor is the Parliamentary action of the time less significant. The celebrated statute of 1401 attaching to heresy the awful punishment of burning, and its confirmation, with additional still more vigorous clauses in 1414, are typical of the ordinary abhorrence among the respectable classes of speculative innovation. On the other hand, the proposal in the Parliament of 1410, so well known from Shakspere's account in the early part of Henry V., to confiscate Ecclesiastical property, indicates some sympathy among these very classes with the practical reforms urged by the Lollards, or perhaps, indeed, indicates a Lollard element in Parliament itself. It must be carefully observed that there might be a party in the House of Commons which could justly be described as Lollard, in so far as it heartily advocated a social reformation within the church, but which would nevertheless oppose in characteristic English fashion novel doctrinal theories. This was

* Statute of 1412. See Munimenta Academica, R. S., pp., 268-270.