" In the
general dulness and squalor two things were remarkable: one, the
last splendour of the feudal time; the other, the first dawn of the
new learning from Italy. In 1452, George Neville of Balliol, brother
of the King-maker, gave the most prodigious pass-supper that was ever
served in Oxford. On the first day there were 600 messes of meat,
divided into three courses. The second course is worthy of the
attention of the epicure:
SECOND COURSE
Vian in brase. Carcell.
Crane in sawce. Partrych.
Young Pocock. Venson baked.
Coney. Fryed meat in paste.
Pigeons. Lesh Lumbert.
Byttor. A Frutor.
Curlew. A Sutteltee.
Against this prodigious gormandising we must set that noble gift, the
Library presented to Oxford by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester. In the
Catalogue, drawn up in 1439, we mark many books of the utmost value
to the impoverished students. Here are the works of Plato, and the
Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, translated by Leonard the Aretine.
Here, among the numerous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and
Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna, Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum,
Apuleius, Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch. Here, with
Ovid's verses, is the Commentary on Dante, and his Divine Comedy.
Here, rarest of all, is a Greek Dictionary, the silent father of
Liddel's and Scott's to be.
The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift of
those manuscripts (to which the very beauty of their illuminations
proved ruinous in Puritan times), was the establishment of a
printing-press at Oxford, and the arrival of certain Italians, "to
propagate and settle the studies of true and genuine humanity among
us.
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