all the neighbouring quarries stones for the future homes of the fair
humanities. Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute for the
Platonic Society of Florence. "He would hardly care much about going
to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there. When I
listen to Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself"; and
he praises the judgment and learning of those Englishmen, Grocyn and
Linacre, who had been taught in Italy.

In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten
at the root. Theology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it a
deadly blight. Our academic forefathers "drove at practice," and saw
everything with the eyes of party men, and of men who recognised no
interest save that of religion. It is Mr. Seebohm (Oxford Reformers,
1867), I think, who detects, in Colet's concern with the religious
side of literature, the influence of Savonarola. When in Italy "he
gave himself entirely to the study of the Holy Scriptures." He
brought to England from Italy, not the early spirit of Pico of
Mirandola, the delightful freedom of his youth, but his later
austerity, his later concern with the harmony of scripture and
philosophy. The book which the dying Petrarch held wistfully in his
hands, revering its very material shape, though he could not spell
its contents, was the Iliad of Homer. The book which the young
Renaissance held in its hands in England, with reverence and
eagerness as strong and tender, contained the Epistles of St. Paul.
It was on the Epistles that Colet lectured in 1496-97, when doctors
and abbots flocked to hear him, with their note-books in their hands.
Thus Oxford differed from Florence, England from Italy: the former
all intent on what it believed to be the very Truth, the latter all
absorbed on what it knew to be no other than Beauty herself.