We cannot afford to regret the choice that England and Oxford made.
The search for Truth was as certain to bring "not peace but a sword"
as the search for Beauty was to bring the decadence of Italy, the
corruption of manners, the slavery of two hundred years. Still, our
practical earnestness did rob Oxford of the better side of the
Renaissance. It is not possible here to tell the story of religious
and social changes, which followed so hard upon each other, in the
reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. A few
moments in these stormy years are still memorable for some terrible
or ludicrous event.

That Oxford was rather "Trojan" than "Greek," that men were more
concerned about their dinners and their souls than their prosody and
philosophy, in 1531, is proved by the success of Grynaeus. He
visited the University and carried off quantities of MSS., chiefly
Neoplatonic, on which no man set any value. Yet, in 1535, Layton, a
Commissioner, wrote to Cromwell that he and his companions had
established the New Learning in the University. A Lecture in Greek
was founded in Magdalen, two chairs of Greek and Latin in New, two in
All Souls, and two already existed, as we have seen, in C. C. C.
This Layton is he that took a Rabelaisian and unquotable revenge on
that old tyrant of the Schools, Duns Scotus. "We have set Dunce in
Bocardo, and utterly banished him from Oxford for ever, with all his
blind glosses . . . And the second time we came to New College we
found all the great quadrant full of the leaves of Dunce, the wind
blowing them into every corner. And there we found a certain Mr.
Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering up part of the
same books' leaves, as he said, therewith to make him sewers or
blanshers, to keep the deer within his wood, thereby to have the
better cry with his hounds." Ah! if the University Commissioners