STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

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acrostics, lampoons, and translations of the Clelia and the chap-Grand Cyrus. - : —

The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gen- Literarytlemen of that generation, seem to have been somewhat less meets ofsolid and profound than at an earlier or a later period. Greek me°n. le "learning, at least, did not flourish among us in the days ofCharles the Second, as it had flourished before the civil war,or as it again flourished long after the Revolution. Therewere undoubtedly scholars to whom the whole Greek litera-ture, from Homer to Photius, was familiar: but such scholarswere to be found almost exclusively among the clergy residentat the Universities, and even at the Universities were few,and were not fully appreciated. At Cambridge it was notthought by any means necessary that a divine should be ableto read the Gospels in the original.* Nor was the standard atOxford higher. When, in the reign of William the Third,

Christ Church rose up as one man to defend the genuinenessof the Epistles of Phalaris, that great college, then consideredas the first seat of philology in the kingdom, could not mustersuch a stock of Attic learning as is now possessed by severalyouths at every great public school. It may easily be sup-posed that a dead language, neglected at the Universities,was not much studied by men of the world. In a former agethe poetry and eloquence of Greece had been the delight ofRaleigh and Falkland. In a later age the poetry and eloquenceof Greece were the delight of Pitt and Fox, of Windham andGrenville. But during the latter part of the seventeenth cen-tury' there was in England scarcely one eminent statesman whocould read with enjoyment a page of Sophocles or Plato.

Good Latin scholars were numerous. The language ofRome, indeed, had not altogether lost its imperial character,

* Roger North tells us that his brother John, who was Greek pro-tessor at Cambridge, complained bitterly of the general neglect of theGreek longue among the academical clergy.