EDUCATION 71

form of study were nearly dried up. The Greek
classics were entirely lost^ Even the few Latin
classics that the mediaevals possessed, they did not
understand aright. To Virgil's ^Sneid they gave a
Christian interpretation ! Grammar was the basis
of study, which dealt mainly with such works as
those of Cicero, Virgil, Boethius.

The fifteenth century, the last century of an age,
was a backwater in education, as in literature. The
great revival was to come, '^he fifteenth century
was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under
the almost placid surface of continuity and confor-
mity, there were forces of revolt at work, probing,
accumulating knowledge and experience, perhaps
unconsciously, for the day of liberation and changeJ
The Bible was not yet popularly available. Wiclif
had been a pioneer in the work of translation and
publication, but Tyndale and Coverdale in the
sixteenth century supplied what he had aimed at
doing in the fourteenth. The fifteenth century
was the quiet dark hour before the dawn. As Cole-
ridge expressed it: No sooner had the Revival of
I/earning " sounded through Europe like the blast of
an archangel's trumpet than from king to peasant
there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge, the dis-
covery of a manuscript became the subject of an
embassy: Erasmus read by moonlight because he
could hot afford a torch, and begged a penny, not
for the love of charity, but for the love of learning."
But even then, when the enthusiasm and the will
were there, such was the dearth of material for
learning that, as in the case of Erasmus, the pioneers
had practically nothing to work at but the classical
texts and a few meagre vocabularies with etymologies
of mediaeval scholarship. In 1491 Grocyn began to
teach Greek at Cterford. In 1499 Erasmus first