In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten at the root. Theology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it a deadly blight. Our academic forefathers ‘drove at practice,’ and saw everything with the eyes of party men, and of men who recognised no interest save that of religion. It is Mr. Seebohm (_Oxford Reformers_, 1867), I think, who detects, in Colet’s concern with the religious side of literature, the influence of Savonarola. When in Italy ‘he gave himself entirely to the study of the Holy Scriptures.’ He brought to England from Italy, not the early spirit of Pico of Mirandola, the delightful freedom of his youth, but his later austerity, his later concern with the harmony of scripture and philosophy. The book which the dying Petrarch held wistfully in his hands, revering its very material shape, though he could not spell its contents, was the _Iliad_ of Homer. The book which the young Renaissance held in its hands in England, with reverence and eagerness as strong and tender, contained the Epistles of St. Paul. It was on the Epistles that Colet lectured in 1496–97, when doctors and abbots flocked to hear him, with their note-books in their hands. Thus Oxford differed from Florence, England from Italy: the former all intent on what it believed to be the very Truth, the latter all absorbed on what it knew to be no other than Beauty herself. We cannot afford to regret the choice that England and Oxford made. The search for Truth was as certain to bring ‘not peace but a sword’ as the search for Beauty was to bring the decadence of Italy, the corruption of manners, the slavery of two hundred years. Still, our practical earnestness did rob Oxford of the better side of the Renaissance. It is not possible here to tell the story of religious and social changes, which followed so hard upon each other, in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. A few moments in these stormy years are still memorable for some terrible or ludicrous event.