We have said that he studied under Vitelli. It was Cornelio Vitelli who, some time before 1475, first "introduced polite literature to the schools of Oxford," by a lecture as prelector of New College, upon which the warden, Thomas Chandler, complimented him in a set Latin speech. This was probably that Cornelius who, in company with two other Italians, Cyprian and Nicholas by name, dined with the President of Magdalen on Christmas Day, 1488. And from the lips of this pioneer William Grocyn himself learned Greek. Grocyn was a fellow of New College (1467-1481), but he afterwards removed to Magdalen as Reader in Theology. He completed his study of Greek and Latin by a sojourn of two years (1488) at Florence, under Demetrius Chalcondylas and Politian. On his return to Oxford he took rooms in Exeter College (1491), and gave a course of lectures on Greek. A few years later (1496-7) the first step in the revolution against the system under which the study of the Bible had been ousted by the study of the Sentences was taken. A course of lectures by John Colet on the Epistles of S. Paul was the first overt act in a movement towards practical Christian reform. It was from Grocyn and Linacre that Thomas More and Erasmus learnt Greek. For Gibbon's epigram that Erasmus learned Greek at Oxford and taught it at Cambridge is true, if we qualify it by the reminder that he knew a little before he came to England and learned more in the years which intervened between the time when, much to the chagrin of Colet, he left Oxford and went to Cambridge as an instructor in that language.