70. We should still look in vain to England for either learning or native genius. The reign of Edward IV. may be reckoned one of the lowest points in our literary annals. The universities had fallen in reputation and in frequency of students; where there had been thousands, according to Wood, there was not now one; which must be understood as an hyperbolical way of speaking. But the decline of the universities, frequented as they had been by indigent vagabonds withdrawn from useful labour, and wretched as their pretended instruction had been, was so far from an evil in itself, that it left clear the path for the approaching introduction of real learning. Several colleges were about this time founded at Oxford and Cambridge, which, in the design of their munificent founders, were to become, as they have done, the instruments of a better discipline than the barbarous schoolmen afforded. We have already observed, that England was like seed fermenting in the ground through the fifteenth century. The language was becoming more vigorous, and more capable of giving utterance to good thoughts, as some translations from Caxton’s press show, such as the Dicts of Philosophers, by Lord Rivers. And perhaps the best exercise for a schoolboy people is that of schoolboys. The poetry of two Scotsmen, Henryson and Mercer, which is not without merit, may be nearly referred to the present decade.[393] [393] Campbell’s Specimens of British Poets, vol. i. |Mathematics.| |Regiomontanus.| 71. The progress of mathematical science was regular, though not rapid. We might have mentioned before the gnomon erected by Toscanelli in the cathedral at Florence, which is referred to 1468; a work, it has been said, which, considering the times, has done as much honour to his genius as that so much renowned to Bologna at Cassini.[394] The greatest mathematician of the fifteenth century, Muller, or Regiomontanus, a native of Königsberg, or Königshoven, a small town in Franconia, whence he derived his latinised appellation, died prematurely, like his master Purbach, in 1476. He had begun at the age of fifteen to assist the latter in astronomical observations; and having, after Purbach’s death, acquired a knowledge of Greek in Italy, and devoted himself to the ancient geometers, after some years spent with distinction in that country, and at the court of Mathias Corvinus, he settled finally at Nuremberg; where a rich citizen, Bernard Walther, both supplied the means of accurate observations, and became the associate of his labours.[395] Regiomontanus died at Rome, whither he had been called to assist in rectifying the calendar. Several of his works were printed in this decade, and among others his ephemerides, or calculations of the places of the sun and moon, for the ensuing thirty years; the best, though not strictly the first, that had been made in Europe.[396] His more extensive productions did not appear till afterwards; and the