More's Utopia is indeed duller than the ideal of the severest socialist; it is a picture of the stationary state which leaves nothing to be hoped for, in all senses of the term. The book is itself charming because it reveals the simplicity, delicacy, and refinement of the mind that wrote it; it is at all times a most efficient vehicle for satire on the tyranny and despotism of the king, on the luxury and idleness of the nobility, on the frightful international immorality of Europe, caused by the caprice and ambition of kings careless of human life, on religion and science alike fruitless and barren, careless of result in practice, on the absence of toleration, on the extravagance, carelessness, and irresponsibility of the upper classes-but the society of which it gives a picture is a most unstimulating ideal; its healthy, comfortable, completely regulated life could only nourish mediocrity.

PART III.—Its Work in Education.

ASCHAM, Roger, b. 1515; studies at St. John's College, Cambridge; made public orator; appointed Latin secretary and classical tutor to Princess Elizabeth, 1554; d. 1568.-Toxophilus written, 1544.—The Schoolmaster published, 1570.

A review of the New Learning would not be at all complete without noticing what was perhaps its greatest practical achievement, viz. its educational work. Apart from the general stimulus which it gave to thought and intellectual life, it made a very definite reform by supplanting the old system of education, invented and conducted by the Schoolmen, by a new system making classics the foundation and the aim of all education, and employing a more humane and gentle method in the process of instilling them into the pupil. It is this system-first originated when the classics alone represented humanism as opposed to scholasticism—that has held its ground to our own day. It is only now being gradually modified by that view which conceives other subjects to be of equal value as training, and of greater value as a preparation, for the business of life.

In 1510 Colet had founded St. Paul's School. It was his intention that in this school should be taught good literature, both Latin and Greek. The works of such authors "as have with wisdom joined pure chaste eloquence," specially Christian authors who wrote their "wisdom in clean and chaste Latin, whether in prose or verse. "My interest in this school," he said, "is specially to increase the knowledge and the wor

shipping of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, and good Christian life and manners, to the children." In this school Latin and Greek were made the elements of education, and the process of teaching was conducted with mildness and gentleness, instead of with that roughness and severity which teachers on the scholastic method had thought it necessary to employ in order to prepare youth for a life, which in these ages was but a painful and weary struggle, in which the only virtues were endurance and selfsacrifice. Thus youth from the beginning must be trained to endure pain. Erasmus, in a work written to expose and hold up to public scorn the private schools of his time, including those of monasteries and colleges, to which parents as a matter of course sent their children, tells a story which illustrates the nature of the discipline every right-minded teacher considered it necessary to employ. "I once knew a divine, a man of reputation, who seemed to think that no cruelty to scholars could be enough, since he never would have any but flogging masters. He thought this was the only way to crush the boys' unruly spirits and to subdue the wantonness of their age. Never did he take a meal with his flock without making the comedy end in tragedy, so at the end of the meal one or another boy was dragged out to be flogged. . . . I myself was once by, when after dinner as usual he called out a boy, I should think about ten years old. He had only just come fresh from his mother to school. His mother, it should be said, was a poor woman, and had specially commended the boy to him. But he at once began to charge the boy with unruliness, since he could think of nothing else, and must find something to flog him for, and made signs to the proper official to flog him. Whereupon the poor boy was forthwith flogged then and there, and flogged as though he had committed sacrilege. The divine turned round to me and said, 'he did nothing to deserve it, but the boy's spirit must be subdued.'"

The boys in Colet's school were to be drawn to study by liking and inclination, and if there was ever any possibility of confounding Colet with the divine of whom Erasmus told the story, this possibility must be removed by the preface which Colet wrote to his little Latin grammar. It was this grammar which superseded Linacre's, and which, with additions made by Erasmus and Lilly, was ultimately known as Lilly's Grammar. In writing this little book Colet said that he had studied clearness and simplicity above all: "Judging that nothing may be too soft nor too familiar for little children specially learning a tongue with them at all strange; in which little book I have left

many things out on purpose, considering the tenderness and capacity of small minds. Wherefore I pray you all, little babes, all little children, learn gladly this little treatise and commend it diligently unto your memories, trusting of this beginning ye shall proceed and grow to perfect literature, and come at the last to be great clerks. And lift up your little white hands for me, which prayeth for you to God, to whom be all honour and imperial majesty and glory."

Colet also endeavoured to raise the position of those who taught, and Erasmus explains what was the high ideal held by the school of the New Learning, with regard to the duties of this profession. "In order that the teacher might be thoroughly up to his work, he should not merely be a master of one particular branch of study. He should himself have travelled through the whole circle of knowledge. In philosophy he should have studied Plato and Aristotle, Theophrastus and Plotinus; in theology the Sacred Scriptures, and after them Origen, `Chrysostom, and Basil among the Greek fathers, and Ambrose and Jerome among the Latin fathers; among the poets, Homer and Ovid; in geography, which is very important in the study of history, Pomponius, Mela, Ptolemy, Pliny, Strabo. He should know what ancient names of rivers and mountains, countries, cities, answer to the modern ones; and the same of trees, animals, instruments, clothes, and gems, with regard to which it is incredible how ignorant even educated men are. He should take note of little facts about agriculture, architecture, military and culinary acts, mentioned by different authors. He should be able to trace the origin of words, their gradual corruption in the languages of Constantinople, Italy, and France. Nothing should be beneath his observation which can illustrate history or the meaning of poets." It is not known whether this ideal was realised by Lilly, the grammarian, the godson of Grocyn, who had learnt Latin in Italy, Greek in the East, who had travelled to Jerusalem, and Rhodes, but he it was who was chosen to be headmaster of Colet's school. He was without doubt one of the most cultivated men of his time, and Colet, duly acknowledging the value of his services, gave him a salary of £35 a year, a sum which meant a great deal in those days, when the value of money was so much greater than it is now; the occupant of the most dignified post in the kingdom, the Lord Chancellor, only receiving £133 a year, including the perquisites of his office.

Colet and Erasmus, in exalting the dignity of the teaching

profession, had, however, to struggle against much prejudice. Even when Bacon, in the seventeenth century, published The Advancement of Learning, the importance of the profession had not been thoroughly vindicated. One of the aspersions cast by the prejudice of the time on learned men was that they occupied themselves with the meanest of all employments, the education of youth. "But how unjust this traducement is (if you will reduce things from popularity of opinion to measure of reason) may appear in that we see, men are more curious what they put into a new vessel than into a vessel seasoned, and what mould they lay about a young plant than about a plant corroborate, so as the weakest terms and times of all things use to have the best applications and helps." But "things" at the time of the New Learning had not been reduced even by cultivated minds to "measure of reason." Erasmus, when Professor of Greek at Cambridge, helped Colet to find an undermaster for his school. He relates a conversation he had with a divine of the University. 'Who," said this divine, "would put up with the life of a schoolmaster if he could get a living in any other way?" Erasmus replied that he thought the education of youth one of the most honourable of all callings; "there can be no labor more pleasing to God than the Christian training of boys." The divine replied: "If any one wants to give himself up entirely to Christ let him go into a monastery. He must leave all worldly ties and duties and follow Christ," he continued, ignoring Erasmus's reminder that St. Paul places true religion in works of charity: "in forsaking all is found alone the true perfection of Christianity." "He can scarcely be said to leave all," returned Erasmus, "who, when he has a chance of doing good to others, refuses the task because it is too humble in the eyes of the world." And thus having had the last word, and "lest," as he says, "I should get into a quarrel, I bade the man good-bye."

Colet's school became popular and flourishing, supported almost entirely by Colet's money. It succeeded in spite of those who marked it as a dangerous place, where was taught "heretical Greek." Colet is remarkable among liberal founders as having had respect for the changing circumstances of the future, and having left great discretionary liberty to those that came after him in the disposal of funds and in the organisation of the school. "Notwithstanding these statutes and ordinances before written in which I have declared my mind and will: yet because in time to come many things may and shall survive and grow by many occasions and causes which by the making

of this book was not possible to come to mind, trusting in the assured truth and circumspect wisdom and faithful goodness of the most honest and substantial fellowship of the mercery of London. . . . Both all this that is said, and all that is not said which hereafter shall come into my mind while I live to be said, I leave it wholly to their discretion and charity." But the work of Colet remained, altered only in details by posterity; his views on education, both as to subject and to method, remained those of posterity for three centuries.

A work which expounds the literary views of the New Learning is one of the first prose works written in English which appeared at the beginning of the Renaissance. Although Roger Ascham was not born till 1515, and although the Schoolmaster was not published till 1570, after his death, yet his book may be considered a representative work of the New Learning, so thoroughly does it reflect the educational views of Colet and Erasmus, its aim being merely to put them into a popular form. Ascham had come before the public as an author in 1545, when he presented his Toxophilus, written in 1544, to the King. This book in its subject and in its style showed direct traces of the stimulus of the Renaissance. It illustrates not only the interest taken in physical culture, but also the healthy impulse that classic culture had given to the cultivation of the native tongue. In the preface Ascham says that "he wishes to be read by all the gentlemen and yeomen of England." He wishes to show that the art of writing in English prose can be an art as well as writing in Latin or Greek. There can be the same scholarly care, the same choice and ordering of words. "He that will write well in any tongue must follow the counsel of Aristotle; to speak as the common people do, and to think as wise men do, and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.' The book consists of two books of dialogue between Philologus and Toxophilus, the first book containing several arguments to commend shooting, the second a particular description of the art of shooting with the long-bow. Ascham, in the treatment of his subject, shows that he was no mediæval mystic, holding that the soul shone more brightly and purely in a thin and emaciated body, looking out of sunken and hollow eyes. But physical culture, Ascham allowed, is only one side of life: it is only one of the many requirements of the human being. Shooting," he says, "should be a waiter and not a master over learning;" it is but a recreation,—a necessary one, for the man who would be healthily developed, but merely a