The New Learning in Italy and Germany--The English "Pilgrim Scholars": Grey, Tiptoft, Linacre, Grocyn--The practical Genius of England--Bishops Rotherham, Alcock, and Fisher--Alcock, diplomatist, financier, architect--The Founder of Jesus College--He takes as his model Jesus College, Rotherham--His Object the Training of a Preaching Clergy--The Story of the Nunnery of S. Rhadegund--Its Dissolution--Conversion of the Conventual Church into a College Chapel--The Monastic Buildings, Gateway, Cloister, Chapter House--The Founder a Better Architect than an Educational Reformer--The Jesus Roll of eminent Men from Cranmer to Coleridge. The historical importance of the New Learning depends ultimately on the fact that its influence on the Western world broadened out into a new capacity for culture in general, which took various forms according to the different local or national conditions with which it came into contact. In Italy, its land of origin, the Classical Revival was felt mainly as an æsthetic ideal, an instrument for the self-culture of the individual, expressing itself in delight for beauty of form and elegance of literary style, bringing to the life of the cultured classes a social charm and distinction of tone, which, however, it is difficult sometimes to distinguish from a merely refined paganism. In France and Spain too, where the basis of character was also Latin, the æsthetic spirit of classical antiquity was readily assimilated. To a French or a Spanish scholar sympathy with the pagan spirit was instinctive and innate. The Teutonic genius, however, both on the side of Literature and of Art, remained sturdily impervious to the more æsthetic side of the Italian Renaissance. In Germany the æsthetic influence was evident enough--we can trace it plainly in the writings of Erasmus and Melancthon, though with them Italian humanism was always a secondary aim subservient to a greater end--but it had a strongly marked character of its own, wholly different from the Italian. The Renaissance in Germany indeed we rightly know by the name of the Reformation, and the paramount task of the German scholars of the New Learning we recognise to have been the elucidation of the true meaning of the Bible. Similarly in England the scholarly mind was at first little affected by the æsthetic considerations which meant so much to a Frenchman or an Italian. A few chosen Englishmen, it is true, "pilgrim scholars" they were called--William Grey, Bishop of Ely, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn stand out perhaps most conspicuously--were drawn to Italy by the rumours of the marvellous treasures rescued from monastic lumber rooms, or conveyed over seas by fugitive Greeks, but they returned to England to find that there was little they could do except to bequeath the books and manuscripts they had collected to an Oxford or a Cambridge College, and hope for happier