who arrested Buckingham, and to A man of mine, called Humphrey Banastaire, who betrayed his master. Banastaire is then cursed in eleven stanzas. "May Banastaire live to the age of eighty, and then be tried for theft. May his eldest son expire in a pig-sty; his second son be strangled in a puddle, and his daughter be smitten by leprosy." It cannot be denied that this tragedy, including as it does the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is rather too rich in terrible components, and does not, especially when Banastaire is being dealt with, affect us in the same measure as Dante's pictures of the Inferno. On the whole it is the manner, not the matter, of Sackville that contains more than mere promise: his management of the stanza and of the music of the line is far in advance of anything that had come from an English pen since the death of Chaucer. As for the gloom and horror, these were congenial to a people which, since the burning of the Maid of France (1431), had seen an endless sequence of violence, murder, martyrdoms, and massacres of peers, Princes, Queens, Bishops, and humble folk. CHAPTER XVIII. PROSE OF THE RENAISSANCE. A great, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this juncture, was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek poetry, and Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had little Greek, arrived in England and visited Oxford (1499), he found there Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet, who had acquired Greek on the continent; and, with Sir Thomas More, were already competent classical scholars. But their Greek learning was mainly turned into the channel of theology, the study of the sources of Christian doctrine, the New Testament, the Greek Fathers; and they were attracted by the philosophy of Plato which appeared to "utter a Christian voice" much more clearly than do the writings of the idol of the Middle Ages, Aristotle. Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The violent times of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable to severe study and exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, a most desirable corrective of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and of the English passion for horrors in stage plays. To most people knowledge of the contents of the Greek classics came through translations, and these translations, as in the case of the historian Thucydides, were done from French versions, while Plato was read through Italian commentators, much influenced by Plato's disciples in early Christian times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers of beautiful dreams concerning things that cannot be uttered.