The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift of those manuscripts (to which the very beauty of their illuminations proved ruinous in Puritan times), was the establishment of a printing-press at Oxford, and the arrival of certain Italians, ‘to propagate and settle the studies of true and genuine humanity among us.’ The exact date of the introduction of printing let us leave to be determined by the learned writer who is now at work on the history of Oxford. The advent of the Italians is dated by Wood in 1488. Polydore Virgil had lectured in New College. ‘He first of all taught literature in Oxford. Cyprianus and Nicholaus, _Italici_, also arrived and dined with the Vice-President of Magdalen on Christmas Day. Lily and Colet, too, one of them the founder, the other the first Head Master, of St. Paul’s School, were about this time studying in Italy, under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus. Oxford, which had so long been in hostile communication with Italy as represented by the Papal Courts, at last touched, and was thrilled by the electric current of Italian civilisation. At this conjuncture of affairs, who but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua? Till the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that ‘huge barbarian pupil,’ and had revelled in vast Rabelaisian suppers: ‘of fat beeves he had killed three hundred sixty seven thousand and fourteen, that in the entering in of spring he might have plenty of powdered beef.’ The bill of fare of George Neville’s feast is like one of the catalogues dear to the Curé of Meudon. For Oxford, as for Gargantua, ‘they appointed a great sophister-doctor, that read him Donatus, Theodoletus, and Alanus, in _parabolis_.’ Oxford spent far more than Gargantua’s eighteen years and eleven months over ‘the book de Modis significandis, with the commentaries of Berlinguandus and a rabble of others.’ Now, under Colet, and Erasmus (1497), Oxford was put, like Gargantua, under new masters, and learned that the old scholarship ‘had been but brutishness, and the old wisdom but blunt, foppish toys serving only to bastardise noble spirits, and to corrupt all the flower of youth.’