No
amount of University Commissions, nor of well-meant reforms, will
change the nature of Englishmen. It is impossible, by distributions
of University prizes and professorships, to attract into the career
of letters that proportion of industry and ingenuity which, in
Germany for example, is devoted to the scholastic life. Politics,
trade, law, sport, religion, will claim their own in England, just as
they did at the Revival of Letters. The illustrious century which
Italy employed in unburying, appropriating, and enjoying the
treasures of Greek literature and art, our fathers gave, in England,
to dynastic and constitutional squabbles, and to religious broils.
The Renaissance in England, and chiefly in Oxford, was like a bitter
and changeful spring. There was an hour of genial warmth, there
breathed a wind from the south, in the lifetime of Chaucer; then came
frosts and storms; again the brief sunshine of court favour shone on
literature for a while, when Henry VIII. encouraged study, and Wolsey
and Fox founded Christ Church and Corpus Christi College; once more
the bad days of religious strife returned, and the promise of
learning was destroyed. Thus the chief result of the awakening
thought of the fourteenth century in England was not a lively delight
in literature, but the appearance of the Lollards. The intensely
practical genius of our race turned not to letters, but to questions
about the soul and its future, about property and its distribution.
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