"The time for going away from the college to avoid contagion of the plague or of the air shall be settled by the Dean and prebendaries in residence. The masters and boys shall meet at the house belonging to the church, built at Chiswick, when and as often as the Dean shall see fit. There they shall have their prayers, lessons, and the rest of the usual school exercises and advantages, and shall live altogether under the same rules as if they were staying in our college of Westminster. One of the officers, to be named by the Sub-dean, shall go into the country with them, as governor of all, and one of the chaplains, and one butler, one cook, and a scullion shall serve them."

There is a subsequent clause absolutely prohibiting any alienation of Chiswick Manor.

We will conclude this chapter by quoting, presumably, Mr. Garvin, writing in the editorial columns of the Pall Mall Gazette (December 18th, 1913). Says the writer :

"The Westminster Play is again a thing of the past, College Dormitory has once more been filled to overflowing for three nights with an audience which laughed in the wrong places to show that it understood the Latin; once more the applause has been led by the most efficient claque in existence; once more the great and the notorious in the land have been lampooned in elegiacs which make up in vigour for what they lack in polish. Needless to say that the words MARCONI, Bogota, LARKIN, and Tango were audible amid the Latin of the Epilogue. . . . We suspect that the Epilogue of the Play at Westminster would have appealed to the populace of Rome itself more than the Andria. But, after all, Prologue, Play, and Epilogue are only contributory to the enjoyment of an evening in College Dormitory. It is the old-time atmosphere, the old customs rigidly observed, the names inscribed on the walls, which appeal not only to Old Westminsters but to sympathetic visitors whose youthful days were passed at other ancient schools. There is unquestionably a magic about the Westminster Play which we trust may be long preserved. Floreat Alma Domus !"

Though, so far as the poor and needy are concerned, Westminster's bays, like Eton's, are a trifle wilted!

CHAPTER XII

ST. PAUL'S SCHOOL

PRODUCT OF THE DEMOCRATIC RENAISSANCE SPIRIT-JOHN COLET-
PIGEONS OF PAUL'S AND PIGS OF ST. ANTHONY-EARLY PREDILECTION
FOR REFORM-THE SMOKE OF THE BURNING ENGLAND'S NUMEROUS
Autos da Fé CAUSE WOOD TO RISE IN PRICE-COLET'S SIMPLICITY
of Character-HIS REAL TITLE TO FAME-SINGULAR PRESCIENCE IN
CHOICE OF TRUSTEES-THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND DEMOS-AN
OLD STORY-ANOTHER OXFORD DON AND A MODERN DEAN OF A
OF COLET-MagnificenT MUNIFICENCE-The
"PROLOGUS "-STATUTORY EMOLUMENts-Bars" BlotteraturE
"LIFT UP YOUR LITTLE WHITE HANDS"-THE MERCERS' LIVERY
COMPANY-THE CHILD Bishop-Erasmus on Barbarous DisciplINE—
Anecdote referring to Colet?—The Acme of SeRVILITY.

CATHEDRAL-Death

"

JUST as Winchester owed its inception to an enlightened ecclesiastic of the best period of the Middle Ages, so this school of St. Paul's, one of the first free schools established in England, was the creation of a divine of the English Renaissance infused with its spirit of dedication to learning and democratic insistence upon equality of opportunity for all. John Colet, humanist, the friend of Erasmus and Sir Thos. More, and Dean of St. Paul's in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., was not, as was Wykeham, the son of a poor man, for his father, Sir Henry Colet (a wealthy citizen of "unblemished reputation"), had been twice Lord Mayor of London.

At the ancient foundation of St. Anthony's School the son received his education—a school, long since decayed, which "commonly presented the best scholars . . . in those days," according to Stow, who goes on to say that "the Scholars of Paul's meeting with them of St. Anthony's, would call them St. Anthony's pigs, and they again would call the others pigeons of Paul's-because many pigeons were bred in St. Paul's Church, and St. Anthony was always figured with a pig following him.

G.E.S.

177

M

These, mindful of the former usage, did for a long season disorderly in the open street provoke one another" with challenges to grammatical disputations. "And so proceeding from questions in grammar, they usually fell from words to blows, with their satchels full of books, many times in great heaps, that they troubled the streets and passengers; so that finally they were restrained with the decay of St. Anthony's School."*

The Reformation movement was beginning, and Colet, said then to have been a tall and comely person with pleasing manners, who might easily have been a successful courtier had he chosen, had just left Magdalen College, Oxford, where Wolsey, the precocious "boy bachelor," had been his companion. He turned his attention to the Church, and promotion showered upon him. But very soon Colet was denouncing the corruption of the contemporary establishment, and, accordingly, was cited to appear before Fitzjames, Bishop of London-this at a time when, as the Italian poet, Andrea Ammonio, one of Henry VIII.'s secretaries, wrote: "Lignorum pretium auctum esse non miror; multi quotodie hæretici holocaustum nobis præbent, plures tamen succrescunt," i.e., "I do not wonder that the price of wood has increased; daily many heretics we see burning, but nevertheless they are increasing yet more." That is to say, the charge of heresy was so common, and the burnings so frequent, that the price of wood had actually increased! Fortunately for himself, Colet managed to defeat the bishop's malevolence, though, as Latimer says in one of his sermons, the future dean I would have been burnt "if God had not turned the King's heart to the contrary."

John Colet appears to have been a man of much simplicity of character, unostentatious, and not afflicted with an itch for the purple pomp of ecclesiastical vestments and the glory of academic robes. In London, for example, whilst dean, he wore a plain black robe instead * Stow's Survey of London, ed. 1603, p. 75.

of the rich purple vestments of his predecessors, and frugality, although not meanness, marked his domestic arrangements. The death of his father, in October, 1505, left him master of an immense fortune, which he contemplated devoting to purposes of public philanthropy. Parenthically, we may explain that Colet was the eldest of twenty-two children, eleven sons and eleven daughters, none of whom had been spared to maturity save himself. Colet preached frequently in English, and by Sir Thos. More was called "his spiritual director."

Of virile intellect, Colet was yet neither a great writer nor scholar, measured by the intellectual standards of his own age, and his memory would probably have sunk into oblivion in after times had it not been for the consummation of his ideals as a democratic educator. Perhaps one of the most important results of Colet's achievement was his diminishing of the ecclesiastical control over education, at the same time as he inspired it with a distinctly religious tone. One of the first to introduce Greek into the school curriculum, Colet was also the first to let his high master be a married man and a layman.

About 1509 he commenced the erection of scholastic buildings on a site, which he had probably inherited from his father, in the eastern end of St. Paul's churchyard. Facing the street, he put up the inscription Schola catechizationis puerorum in Christi Opt. Max. fide et bonis literis . . . annis verbi incarnate MDX" ("Boy's Catechism school in Christ's teaching, with instruction in faith and good letters . . . in the year of the incarnate word, 1510"). With a remarkable foresight and shrewd sagacity, much in advance of his generation, Colet, in the words of Erasmus, "after he had finished all, left the perpetual care and oversight of the estate, and government of it, not to the clergy, not to the Bishop, not to the Chapter, nor to any great Minister at Court, but amongst the married laymen, to the Company of Mercers, men of probity and reputation." And when he was asked the