John Fisher, who came, as we have seen in the last chapter, from the Abbey School at Beverley, where, some twenty years or so before, he had been preceded by Bishop Alcock, was Proctor of the University in 1494, and three years later, in 1497, was made Master of his College, Michaelhouse. The duties of the proctorial office necessitated at that time occasional attendance at Court, and it was on the occasion of his appearance in this capacity at Greenwich that Fisher first attracted the notice of the Lady Margaret, who in 1497 appointed him her confessor. It was an auspicious conjunction for the University. Under his inspiration the generosity of his powerful patron was readily extended to enrich academic resources. It was the laudable design of Fisher to raise Cambridge to the academic level which Oxford had already reached. Already students of the sister university had been to Italy, and had returned full of the New Learning. The fame of Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre made Oxford renowned, and drew to its lecture-rooms eager scholars from all the learned world. It hardly needed that such a man as Erasmus should sing the praises of the Oxford teachers. "When I listen to my friend Colet," he wrote, "I seem to be listening to Plato himself. Who does not admire in Grocyn the perfection of training? What can be more acute, more profound, or more refined than the judgment of Linacre? What has nature ever fashioned gentler, sweeter, or pleasanter than the disposition of Thomas More?"[68] It was natural therefore that Fisher should be ambitious in the same direction for his own university. He began wisely on a small scale, with an object of immediate practical usefulness, the foundation of a Divinity professorship, which should aim at teaching pulpit eloquence. On this point he rightly thought that the adherents of the Old and the New Learning might agree. And there was desperate need for the adventure. For with the close of the fifteenth century both theology and the art of preaching had sunk into general neglect. Times, for example, had greatly changed since the day when Bishop Grosseteste had declared that if a priest could not preach, there was one remedy, let him resign his benefice. But now the sermon itself had ceased to be considered necessary.