by a shoeing horn', and this he did to gain the name of speculative man.

WEBSTER (Malfi 111. 3.) 1616-1623.

Some philosophers and a few critics, one of which critics hath lost his flesh with fishing at the measure of Plautus' verses; another has vowed to get the consumption of the lungs, or to leave to posterity the true orthography and pronunciation of laughing. A third hath melted a great deal o'sweat, worn out his thumbs with turning, read out his eyes, and studied his face out of a sanguine into a meagre, spawling, fleamy loathsomeness, and all to find out why mentula should be the feminine gender since the rule is etc.

MARSTON (The Fawn IV. 4.) 1606. Among the melancholy pickstraws that for a long period seriously engaged the attention of the erudite was a problem as to the exact number of Angels that could stand on the point of a needle. It was not until a far later date that Learning emerged from the slough in which it was so lamentably engulfed. Hobbes never opened Euclid until he was past forty; while he was at Oxford, Geometry formed. no part of the student's training. It was in fear lest the mathematic studies should "utterly sink into oblivion that in 1619 the professorships of Geometry and Astronomy were instituted by Sir Henry Savile, upon which Osborn relates "not a few of the then foolish gentry kept back their sons

I

Compare Lyly, "pulling on with the sweat of our studies a great shoe upon a little foot. What is the connection

between Cæsar's nose and a shoehorn ?

from the university lest they should be "smutted with the black art, mathematics being regarded as "Spells and its professors "limbs of the

devil.

Speaking of Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors, Mr Edmund Gosse observes, "We are too apt to suppose that in exposing vulgar errors Browne was attacking the errors of the vulgar. But this was not the case; he did not venture down into the vast hollows of popular superstition and ignorance. The tales he refutes are often so monstrous that we easily fancy that they must have been those of the unthinking masses but Brown particularly says that he has not addressed his pen or style unto the people,-whom books do not address, and who are in this way incapable of reduction,-but unto the knowing and leading part of Learning. Certainly a perusal of this volume may give us an astounding idea of what professors of both Universities, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and squires believed and perpetuated in the way of superstition while Charles I was still upon the throne of England. If Browne's light sometimes seems glimmering to us, like that twilight which astronomers say is all that illuminates the planet Jupiter at high noon, what are we to think of the darkness of his contemporaries? The obstinate fault they all indulged was the habit of saying, 'Such and such thing is not, because Pliny says it is not.' But it moves and grows at your very door; look and see !—'I will not look; Pliny says it is not, therefore it cannot be.' It was Browne's aim to awaken an intellectual conscience in the learned men of his time, and to prove to them that

they were doing a grave wrong to the race by shutting their eyes against the truth thus obstinately.

99 1

Ón the Continent things were no better. At the Universities of Strasburg, Geneva, Heidelburg, and Leyden, dogma had usurped the place of knowledge; learning was "in abeyance.

At Paris, amid the furious strife between the Guises and The League, Learning was so silenced that in 1584 Royalty itself uttered a formal lament over the University's disorganisation and its pitiable condition.

The student of the history of science, who, as Mullinger observes, amid the wearying strifes of theologians and the ceaseless reiteration of dogma, seeks to discern the glimmerings of a more real knowledge which should benefit the human race, is compelled reluctantly to admit that whatever was achieved at any rate at Cambridge-was the outcome of isolated genius rising superior to the prevailing influences of its surroundings.

1 (English Men of Letters; Sir T. Browne pp. 75-76).

CHAPTER IV

ECCLESIASTICISM

worse:

Bad as was the state of learning in the Elizabethan era, the state of Religion was even according to Robert Burton, it was "miserable and distressed." In their determination to eradicate abuses the Reformers seem to have uprooted wheat and tares together; raising such a tempest of Controversy that Charity was overclouded, and almost lost.

The endeavour to enforce the acknowledgment of Queen Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the Church in England, led to many parish priests relinquishing, or being evicted from, their benefices; but the troubles of this period were trifling in comparison with the misery caused a few years later (1583-85) by Whitgift's attempts to enforce uniformity. "How many godly, able, painful Ministers were outed all over England, I cannot tell," writes a pamphleteer in 1681 "but ex ungue leonem, I have seen a MS. which gives an account of the names of sixty odd in Suffolk, twenty-one in Lincolnshire, sixty-four in Norfolk, thirty-eight in Essex; which, though they seem comparatively few, yet are a great many when we consider that in Essex at that time, there was an account given of 163 Ministers that never

preach'd, only read Prayers and Homilies, and 85 more, Pluralists, Non-residents, or persons most notoriously debaucht. " 1

To replace the evicted non-conformers was found to be impracticable, and consequently parish after parish was left abandoned and forlorn. Some authorities assert that, out of a total of nine thousand benefices, one half were unoccupied and unserved during Elizabeth's reign; others place the total even higher. In a paper drawn up by Sir F. Knollys in 1584, it is asserted that "It is impossible to have so manye preachers as this byll [against pluralism and non-residence] doth require resydent, because there be nine thousand parishes, and but three thousand preachers in the realme.

The lack of teaching and the want of discipline had their inevitable results. Strype in his Annals records that the "abundance of parishes utterly destitute of ministers" led to led to "no small apprehension that in time a great part of the nation would become pagans."

Sampson's "Supplicatory to the Queen" quoted in Strype's Annals, * sets forth that "There are whole thousands of us left untaught; yea, by trial it will be found that there are in England whole thousands of parishes destitute of this necessary help to salvation, that is a diligent preaching and teaching.

1 History of Conformity, or the Proof of the Mischief of Impositions from the Experience of More than One Hundred Years. London : Printed by A. Maxwell and R. Roberts, 1681, p. 12.

2 A Book about the Clergy. J. C. Jeaffreson, Vol. 11. London,

1870 p. 59.

3 Vol. 1. pp. 512, 513. Oxford, 1824.

4 Vol. 111. Part 1, p. 327. Oxford, 1824.