Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna, Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum,
Apuleius, Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch. Here, with
Ovid's verses, is the Commentary on Dante, and his Divine Comedy.
Here, rarest of all, is a Greek Dictionary, the silent father of
Liddel's and Scott's to be.

The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift of
those manuscripts (to which the very beauty of their illuminations
proved ruinous in Puritan times), was the establishment of a
printing-press at Oxford, and the arrival of certain Italians, "to
propagate and settle the studies of true and genuine humanity among
us." The exact date of the introduction of printing let us leave to
be determined by the learned writer who is now at work on the history
of Oxford. The advent of the Italians is dated by Wood in 1488.
Polydore Virgil had lectured in New College. "He first of all taught
literature in Oxford. Cyprianus and Nicholaus, Italici, also arrived
and dined with the Vice-President of Magdalen on Christmas Day. Lily
and Colet, too, one of them the founder, the other the first Head
Master, of St. Paul's School, were about this time studying in Italy,
under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus. Oxford, which had
so long been in hostile communication with Italy as represented by
the Papal Courts, at last touched, and was thrilled by the electric
current of Italian civilisation. At this conjuncture of affairs, who
but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua? Till
the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that "huge
barbarian pupil," and had revelled in vast Rabelaisian suppers: "of
fat beeves he had killed three hundred sixty seven thousand and
fourteen, that in the entering in of spring he might have plenty of
powdered beef." The bill of fare of George Neville's feast is like
one of the catalogues dear to the Cure of Meudon. For Oxford, as for