[356] The University of Oxford, according to Wood, as well as the church generally, stood very low about this time: the grammar schools were laid aside; degrees were conferred on undeserving persons for money. A.D. 1455, 1466. He had previously mentioned those schools as kept up in the university under the superintendence of masters of arts. A.D. 1442. The statutes of Magdalen College, founded in the reign of Edward, provide for a certain degree of learning.--Chandler’s Life of Waynflete, p. 200. [357] Lowth’s Life of Wykeham. He permits in his statutes a limited number of sons of gentlemen (gentilium) to be educated in his school. Chandler’s Life of Waynflete, p. 5. [358] Waynflete became the first head master of Eton in 1442. Chandler, p. 26. [359] Vol. i., p. 301. Of William Paston, author of these lines, it is said, some years before, that he had “gone to school to a Lombard called Karol Giles, to learn and to be read in poetry, or else in French. He said, that he would be as glad and as fain of a good book of French or of poetry as my master Falstaff would be to purchase a fair manor,” p. 173. (1459). |Paston letters.| 41. But the Paston letters are, in other respects, an important testimony to the progressive condition of society; and come in as a precious link in the chain of the moral history of England, which they alone in this period supply. They stand indeed singly, as far as I know, in Europe; for though it is highly probable that in the archives of Italian families, if not in France or Germany, a series of merely private letters equally ancient may be concealed, I do not recollect that any have been published. They are all written in the reigns of Henry VI., and Edward IV., except a few, that extend as far as Henry VII., by different members of a wealthy and respectable, but not noble, family; and are, therefore, pictures of the life of the English gentry in that age.[360] We are merely concerned with their evidence as to the state of literature. And this, upon the whole, is more favourable than, from the want of authorship in those reigns, we should be led to anticipate. It is plain that several members of the family, male and female, wrote not only grammatically, but with a fluency and facility, an epistolary expertness, which implies the habitual use of the pen. Their expression is much less formal and quaint than that of modern novelists, when they endeavour to feign the familiar style of ages much later than the fifteenth century. Some of them mix Latin with their English, very bad, and probably for the sake of concealment; and Ovid is once mentioned as a book to be sent from one to another.[361] It appears highly probable, that such a series of letters, with so much vivacity and pertinence, would not have been written by any family of English gentry in the reign of Richard II., and much less before. It is