wood," "the gray goose wing." Such are certain recurring turns of phrase like,

But out and spak their stepmother.

Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,

Or again,

She had'na pu'd a double rose,

A rose but only twae.

And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass,
And mony ane sings o' corn;
And mony ane sings o' Robin Hood,
Kens little whare he was born.

It was na in the ha', the ha',

Nor in the painted bower;

But it was in the gude green wood,
Amang the lily flower.

Stylistic peculiarities of ballad poetry.

Early ballad

Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the sixteenth century, printed in black letter "broadsides," or single sheets. Wynkyn de Worde collections. printed in 1489 "A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood," which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the seventeenth century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies called "Garlands." Early in the eighteenth century the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in "The Evergreen" and "Tea-Table Miscellany." But no large and important collection was put forth until Percy's "Reliques" (1765), a book which had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the eighteenth century, such as Jane Elliott's "Lament for Flodden and the fine ballad of "Sir Patrick Spence." Walter

Percy's
"Reliques."

The Renais

sance.

Scott's "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of the old ballad-makers.

In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and many Greek scholars, with their manuscripts, fled into Italy, where they began teaching their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato. There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin classics. Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin poet, Boethius, whose "De Consolatione Philosophiæ" had been translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called translation of the Æneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Cæsar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the fifteenth century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe. Manuscripts were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars, and spread abroad by means of the printing-press. Statues were dug up and placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect workmanship in letters and the fine arts.

In the latter years of the fifteenth century a number

of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England. William Grocyn and Greek scholarship in Thomas Linacre, who had studied at Florence under England. the refugee Demetrius Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek at Oxford, the former as early as 1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's and the founder of St. Paul's School, and his friend William Lily, the grammarian, and first master of St. Paul's (1500), also studied Greek abroad; Colet in Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More, afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford.

Thither also, in 1497, came, in search of the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost Erasmus. scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister university, where the first English Grecian of

his day, Sir John Cheke, who "taught Cambridge and Sir John Cheke King Edward Greek," became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John's College, Cambridge, was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nash testifies that it "was an universitie within itself; having more candles light in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of clock bell gave strokes."

The humanists.

Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent opposition from the conservative element, who were nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was More. undoubted and who went to the block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as chancellor,

Sir Thomas

was also a munificent patron of learning, and founded
Christ Church College at Oxford. Popular education
at once felt the impulse of the new studies, and over
twenty endowed grammar schools were established in
England in the first twenty years of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Greek became a passion even with English
ladies. Ascham in his "Schoolmaster," a treatise on
education, published in 1570, says that Queen Eliza-
beth"readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every
day than some prebendarie of this Church doth read
Latin in a whole week." And in the same book he
tells how, calling once on Lady Jane Grey, at Brode-
gate, in Leicestershire, he "found her in her chamber
reading 'Phædon Platonis' in Greek, and that with as
much delite as some gentleman would read a merry tale
in 'Bocase,'
"" and when he asked her why she had not
gone hunting with the rest, she answered, "I wisse,' all
their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure
that I find in Plato." Ascham's "Schoolmaster," as well
as his earlier book, "Toxophilus," a Platonic dialogue
on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek and
Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the
authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches
which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to
the time of Dryden.

One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the Scriptures in English out of the original tongues. In 1525 William Tyndale printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek. Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the whole Bible from the German and Latin. These were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong, beautiful 1 Surely; a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon gewis.

tion.

English of Tyndale's Testament is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version (1611). At first The Reformait was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England. Numbers of copies were brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation. After Henry VIII. had broken with the pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people. Tyndale and Sir Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue between the church and the Protestants. Other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary. The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52.

Liberal

More was, perhaps, the best representative of a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the church from the inside, but who refused to follow Catholicism. Henry VIII. in his breach with Rome. Dean Colet and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act confirming the king's divorce from Catharine of Arragon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his "Utopia," the descrip- More's tion of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's "Republic" and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place" (oй tóños), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The "Utopia" was in Latin, but More's "History of Edward V. and Richard III.,” written 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. It is the first example in the tongue of a history

"