It was not apparently till 1524 that Greek type was introduced into our printing-offices. Linacre's book _De Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis_, published in that year, is generally received as containing the first specimen found in any production of the English press. The Greek alphabet occurs in the Primer of 1548. II. Florence, Rome, Padua, and Rhodes were four great centres whither foreigners were then accustomed to resort for the study and mastery of Greek. In the _Life of Dean Colet_ it is shown how he travelled in Italy, and met with two of his countrymen at Florence, Grocyn and Linacre, and with a third at Rome, Lily, afterwards the famous grammarian, who, after learning Greek at Rhodes, had proceeded to Rome to render himself equally adept in Latin, so that, when he finally settled in London, he had served a laborious apprenticeship and taken unusual pains to become an instructor of others. Colet himself, it is to be noted, displayed in earlier life a bent towards theology and the Fathers, though he had scanty sympathy with the survivals whom he found around him, both at home and abroad, of the monastic schoolmen and expounders of the old divinity. "He had observed these schoolmen," says his biographer indeed, "to be a heavy set of formal fellows, that might pretend to anything rather than to wit and sense, for to argue so elaborately about the opinions and the very words of other men: to snarl in perpetual objections, and to distinguish and divide into a thousand niceties: this was rather the work of a poor and barren invention than anything else." Knight preserves a rather diverting anecdote of a preacher who spoke in his sermon before Henry VIII. against the Greek tongue, and of a conference which Henry caused to be arranged after the discourse, at which in his presence the divine and More should take opposite sides, the former attacking, and the latter vindicating, the language. More did his part, but the other fell down on his knees and begged the King's pardon, alleging that what he did was by the impulse of the Spirit. "Not the spirit of Christ," says the King to him, "but the spirit of infatuation." His majesty then asked him whether he had read anything of Erasmus, whom he assailed from the pulpit. He said "No." "Why then," says the King, "you are a very foolish fellow to censure what you never read." "I have read," says he, "something they call _Moria_." "Yes," says Richard Pace, "may it please your highness, such a subject is fit for such a reader." The end of it was that the preacher declared himself on reflection more reconciled to the Greek, because it was derived from the Hebrew, and that Henry dispensed with his further attendance upon the Court.