"Latimer tells us that in his own recollection, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays in succession without fear of complaint. Even the devout More, in that ingenious romance which he designed as a covert satire on many of the abuses of his age, while giving an admirably conceived description of a religious service, has left the sermon altogether unrecognised. In the universities, for one master of arts or doctor of divinity who could make a text of Scripture the basis of an earnest, simple, and effective homily, there were fifty who could discuss its moral, analogical, and figurative meaning, who could twist it into all kinds of unimagined significance, and give it a distorted, unnatural application. Rare as was the sermon, the theologian in the form of a modest, reverent expounder of Scripture was yet rarer. Bewildered audiences were called upon to admire the performances of intellectual acrobats. Skelton, who well knew the Cambridge of these days, not inaptly described its young scholars as men who when they had "once superciliously caught A lytell ragge of rhetoricke, A lesse lumpe of logicke, A pece or patch of philosophy, Then forthwith by and by They tumble so in theology, Drowned in dregges of divinite That they juge themselfe alle to be Doctours of the chayre in the Vintre, At the Three Cranes To magnifye their names."[69] It was to remedy this state of things that, in the first instance, Fisher set himself to work. The Divinity professorship was soon supplemented by the Lady Margaret preachership, the holder of which was to go from place to place and give a cogent example in pulpit oratory: one sermon in the course of every two years at each of the following twelve places:-- "On some Sunday at S. Paul's Cross, if able to obtain permission, otherwise at S. Margaret's, Westminster, or if unable to preach there, then in one of the more notable churches of the City of London; and once on some feast day in each of the churches of Ware and Cheshunt in Hertfordshire; Bassingbourne, Orwell and Babraham in Cambridgeshire; Maney, St. James Deeping, Bourn, Boston, and Swineshead in Lincolnshire."[70] We have already spoken in the chapter on Queens' College of the work of Erasmus at Cambridge. He was summoned to Cambridge in 1511 to teach Greek and to lecture on the foundation of Lady Margaret. He himself tells us that within a space of thirty years the studies of the University had progressed from the old grammar, logic, and scholastic questions to some knowledge of the New Learning, of the renewed study at any rate of Aristotle, and the study of Greek.