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Chaucer by Sir Adolphus William Ward
page 39 of 216 (18%)
end of all academical teaching--the encouragement and spread of the
highest forms of national culture. To what use could a gentleman of
Edward III's or Richard II's day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of
Oxenford" in Aristotelian logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of
Priscian, and the rhetorical works of Cicero? Chaucer's scholar, however
much his learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may
commend him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in
which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the means with
which to purchase more of his beloved books. Probably no trustworthier
conclusions as to the literary learning and studies of those days are to
be derived from any other source than from a comparison of the few
catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to us; and these help to
show that the century was approaching its close before a few sparse rays
of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence reached England. But this ray
was communicated neither through the clergy nor through the Universities;
and such influence as was exercised by it upon the national mind, was
directly due to profane poets,--men of the world, who like Chaucer quoted
authorities even more abundantly than they used them, and made some of
their happiest discoveries after the fashion in which the "Oxford Clerk"
came across Petrarch's Latin version of the story of Patient Grissel: as
it were by accident. There is only too ample a justification for leaving
aside the records of the history of learning in England during the latter
half of the fourteenth century in any sketch of the main influences which
in that period determined or affected the national progress. It was not
by his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living contact
with the current of popular thought and feeling. The Universities were
thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of previous ages; but the
ascendancy was passing away to which Oxford had attained over Paris--
during the earlier middle ages, and again in the fifteenth century until
the advent of the Renascence, the central university of Europe in the
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