Brunet-Debaines
has sketched, was not finished till 1640. The world owes it to Dr.
Fell. The Oriel niches, designed in the illustration, are of rather
later date.) The streets were crowded with carts, dragging in from
all the neighbouring quarries stones for the future homes of the fair
humanities. Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute for the
Platonic Society of Florence. "He would hardly care much about going
to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there. When I
listen to Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself"; and
he praises the judgment and learning of those Englishmen, Grocyn and
Linacre, who had been taught in Italy.
In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten
at the root. Theology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it a
deadly blight. Our academic forefathers "drove at practice," and saw
everything with the eyes of party men, and of men who recognised no
interest save that of religion. It is Mr. Seebohm (Oxford Reformers,
1867), I think, who detects, in Colet's concern with the religious
side of literature, the influence of Savonarola. When in Italy "he
gave himself entirely to the study of the Holy Scriptures." He
brought to England from Italy, not the early spirit of Pico of
Mirandola, the delightful freedom of his youth, but his later
austerity, his later concern with the harmony of scripture and
philosophy.
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