Throughout these two hundred years--years of Renaissance, of
Reformation, of Revival, of Revolution--Cambridge poured forth an
unending stream of men destined for the highest places in church, in
state, in scholarship, and in letters. Coverdale, Fox, Ridley,
Latimer, Cranmer, Gardiner, Parker, Grindal, Whitgift, Bancroft,
Andrews, Cosin, Williams, Taylor, Stillingfleet, Sancroft, Tillotson,
Tenison are her divines; and of the seven "nonjuring" bishops, five,
including the Primate, were Cambridge men. The Protector Somerset,
Cecil the great Lord Burleigh, his kinsman of Salisbury, Walsingham,
Essex, Fulke Greville, Sir John Harrington, Chief Justice Coke, Sir
Nicholas Bacon and his son Francis, Lord Verulam (commonly but
wrongly styled Lord Bacon), Sir William Temple, Oliver Cromwell are
figures which are painted large upon the canvas of history; and in a
dark corner are inscribed the names, at once famous and infamous, of
Judge Jeffreys and Titus Gates. The lists of Cambridge scholars,
poets, and prose writers of this age is no less remarkable. Roger
Ascham, Sir John Cheke, Sir Thomas Smith, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas
Fuller; the poets Spenser, Harvey, Marlowe, Greene, Fletcher, Ben
Jonson, Heywood, Andrew Marvell, Milton, Cowley, Donne, Dryden,
Herbert, Herrick, are names likely to live so long as the English
language be spoken. Among Cambridge antiquaries we find the names of
Stowe, Leland, and Strype. In medicine Cambridge was the foremost
English school, and the names of Caius, Butler, Gilbert, and Harvey
have a permanent place in the history of that Faculty. Three
celebrated men of letters--Shirley, Lodge, and Lilley--migrated from
Oxford to Cambridge. Wolsey, when he founded in Oxford his
Cardinal's College--now styled Christ Church--came to King's College
and King's Hall in Cambridge for many of his first Fellows. A
Cambridge College, Pembroke, gave no fewer than four Heads to Oxford
Houses during the latter half of the sixteenth century; and of this
same College was Bishop Fox, the founder of Corpus Christi College in
Oxford, and of two professorships there. In the New World, with the
names of "the Pilgrim Fathers", are remembered those of Hooker of
Peterhouse, of Eliot the "Indian Apostle" who took his degree in
1622, and of John Harvard of Emmanuel, the founder of America's
oldest House of Learning. Horrocks and Flamsteed, the astronomers,
founded a Cambridge School of Astronomy which has since taken the
foremost place in the development of that science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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