Of Eton we need not speak. The fame of that college is written large on the page of English history. And that fame and its founder's memory we may safely leave to the "scholars of Henry" in its halls and playing fields to-day. "Christ and His Mother, heavenly maid, Mary, in whose fair name was laid Eton's corner, bless our youth With truth, and purity, mother of truth! O ye, 'neath breezy skies of June, By silver Thames' lulling tune, In shade of willow or oak, who try The golden gates of poesy; Or on the tabled sward all day Match your strength in England's play, Scholars of Henry giving grace To toil and force in game or race; Exceed the prayer and keep the fame Of him, the sorrowful king who came Here in his realm, a realm to found Where he might stand for ever crowned."[51] It was on the 12th of February 1441, when Henry of Windsor was only nineteen years old, that the first charter for the foundation of King's College, Cambridge, was signed. On the 2nd of April in the same year he laid the first stone. It is difficult to say from whence the first impulse to the patronage of learning came to the King. He had always been a precocious scholar, too early forced to recognise his work as successor to his father. Something of his uncle Duke Humfrey of Gloucester's ardent love of letters he had imbibed at an early age. No doubt, too, the Earl of Warwick, "the King's master" for eighteen years, had faithfully discharged his duty to "teach him nurture, literature, language, and other manner of cunning as his age shall suffer him to comprehend such as it fitteth so great a prince to be learned of," and had made his royal pupil a good scholar and accomplished gentleman: though perhaps he had suffered the young king's mind to take somewhat too ascetic and ecclesiastic a bent for the hard and perilous times which he had to face: a feature of his character which Shakespeare emphasises in the speech which he puts into the mouth of Margaret of Anjou, his affianced bride, in the first act of the play in which he draws the picture of the decay of England's power under the weak and saintly Lancastrian king with so masterly a pencil:-- "I thought King Henry had resembled (Pole) In courage, courtship, and proportion: But all his mind is bent to holiness, To number _Ave-Maries_ on his beads: His champions are the Prophets and Apostles: His weapons holy saws of sacred writ: His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves Are brazen images o' canonized saints. I would the college or the cardinals Would choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome, And set the triple crown upon his head: That were a state fit for his holiness."[52]