We may well in this chapter take together the twin foundations of Christ's College and S. John's which both had the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, and mother of Henry VII. for their foundress. The father of this lady was John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and her mother was Margaret, daughter and heiress of Sir John Beauchamp, of Bletso. "So that," says Fuller, punning on her parents' names, "_fairfort_ and _fairfield_ met in this lady, who was fair body and fair soul, being the exactest pattern of the best devotion those days afforded, taxed for no personal faults but the errors of the age she lived in. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preached her funeral sermon, wherein he resembled her to Martha in four respects: firstly, nobility of person; secondly, discipline of her body; thirdly, in ordering her soul to God; fourthly, in hospitality and charity." In that assemblage of noble lives, who from the earliest days of Cambridge history have laboured for the benefit of the University, and left it so rich a store of intellectual good, there are no more honoured names than these two:--the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, and her friend and confessor, Bishop Fisher, under whose wise and cautious supervision Cambridge first tasted of the fruits of the Renaissance, and welcomed Erasmus, I fear with but a very tempered enthusiasm, to the newly-founded Lady Margaret chair, and yet, nevertheless, in that encouragement of the New Learning laid the foundation of that sound method and apparatus of criticism which has enabled the University in an after age to take all knowledge for its province, and to represent its conquest by the foundation of twenty-five professorial chairs.