[252] Bulæus. Hist. Univ. Paris, apud Heeren, p. 118. [253] Crevier, iv. 43. Heeren, p. 121. |Much more so in England.| 26. Of classical learning in England we can tell no favourable story. The Latin writers of the fifteenth century, few in number, are still more insignificant in value; they possess scarce an ordinary knowledge of grammar; to say that they are full of barbarisms and perfectly inelegant, is hardly necessary. The university of Oxford was not less frequented at this time than in the preceding century, though it was about to decline; but its pursuits were as nugatory and pernicious to real literature as before.[254] Poggio says, more than once, in writing from England about 1420, that he could find no good books, and is not very respectful to our scholars. “Men given up to sensuality we may find in abundance; but very few lovers of learning; and those barbarous, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than in literature. I visited many convents; they were all full of books of modern doctors, whom we should not think worthy so much as to be heard. They have few works of the ancients, and those are much better with us. Nearly all the convents of this island have been founded within four hundred years: but that was not a period in which either learned men, or such books as we seek, could be expected, for they had been lost before.”[255] [254] No place was more discredited for bad Latin. “Oxoniensis loquendi mos” became a proverb. This means that, being disciples of Scotus and Ockham, the Oxonians talked their master’s jargon. [255] Pogg. Epist. p. 43. (edit. 1832.) |Library of Duke of Gloucester.| 27. Yet books began to be accumulated in our public libraries: Aungerville, in the preceding century, gave part of his collection to a college at Oxford; and Humphry, duke of Gloucester, bequeathed six hundred volumes, as some have said, or one hundred and twenty-nine only, according to another account, to that university.[256] But these books were not of much value in a literary sense, though some may have been historically useful. I am indebted to Heeren for a letter of thanks from the duke of Gloucester to Decembrio, an Italian scholar of considerable reputation, who had sent him a translation of Plato de Republica. It must have been written before July, 1447, the date of Humphry’s death, and was probably as favourable a specimen of our Latinity as the kingdom could furnish.[257] [256] The former number is given by Warton; the latter I find in a short tract on English monastic libraries (1831), by the Rev. Joseph Hunter. In this there is also a catalogue of the library in the priory of Bretton in Yorkshire, consisting of about 150 volumes. No date is given; but I suppose it was about the first part of the sixteenth century.