New Learning was the knowledge of Greek, which had been to the
greater part of Europe a lost tongue. On this side of the Alps
there was not a school or college in which it could be learned.
So to Italy, where the Greek scholars had found a refuge, those
who wished to learn flocked.

Among them were some Oxford scholars. Chief of these were three,
whose names you will learn to know well when you come to read
more about this time. They were William Grocyn, "the most
upright and best of all Britons,"* Thomas Linacre, and John
Colet. These men, returning from Italy full of the New Learning,
began to teach Greek at Oxford. And it is strange now to think
that there were many then who were bitterly against such
teaching. The students even formed themselves into two parties,
for and against. They were called Greeks and Trojans, and
between these two parties man a fierce fight took place, for the
quarrel did not end in words, but often in blows.

*Erasmus.

The New Learning, however, conquered. And so keenly did men feel
the human interests of such things as were now taught, that we
have come to call grammar, rhetoric, poetry, Greek and Latin the
Humanities, and the professor who teaches these thing the
professor of Humanity.