"Such was the infelicity of those times, that the Greek tongue was not taught in any of our grammar-schools; nor was there thought to be any great need of it in the two Universities by the generality of scholars. It is worth notice that [John] Standish, who was a bitter enemy to Erasmus, in his declamation against him styles him _Græculus iste_; which was a long time after the phrase for an heretic." "But," he adds, "Dr. John Fisher ... was of another mind, and very sensible of this imperfection, which made him desirous to learn Greek in his declining years." The Bishop, however, who through Erasmus was recommended to William Latymer, one of the foremost Philhellenists of the day, could not persuade that scholar to enter on the task, as he considered the prelate too old to acquire the language; and Knight tells us that, in order to escape from the application, he advised Fisher to send for a professor out of Italy. Englishmen, even at a later period than this, occasionally went to Florence or elsewhere to learn Greek; but Erasmus made himself, with the assistance of Linacre, tolerably proficient in it, on the contrary, during his first visit to England in the time of Henry the Seventh (1497-8), and was sufficiently versed, at all events in the rudiments, to give lessons to others while he remained at Cambridge. Doubtless he did so in aid of his expenses. "In Cambridge," observes Knight, "Erasmus was the first who taught the Greek grammar. And so very low was the state of learning in that University, that (as he tells a friend) about the year 1485, the beginning of Henry the Seventh's reign, there was nothing taught in that public seminary besides Alexander's _Parva Logicalia_ (as they called them), the old axioms of Aristotle, and the questions of John Scotus." Erasmus himself was for some time Greek Reader at Cambridge, and was contemporary there with Richard Croke, of King's College, who did valuable service in promoting the cause of classical learning at that University, and published several tracts relating to the Greek literature and tongue, including _Introductiones ad Linguam Græcam_ and _Elementa Grammaticæ Græcæ_--the earliest attempts to place before students in a handy form the alphabet of the subject. At Oxford it was an Italian, Cornelius Vitellius, who became the first Greek professor, and William Grocyne, who with Latymer and Linacre was the earliest Greek scholar in England, was among his pupils. It is to be suspected that, while a man of genius like Erasmus could scarcely have failed to make something of whatever he seriously undertook, his conversance with Greek was always comparatively superficial, and it is merely an additional piece of evidence how little the language was cultivated at Cambridge at that epoch, that he was enabled to earn money as a teacher of it.