Erasmus, writing, shortly after the settlement of the society, to John Claymond, the first President, in 1519, speaks (_Epist._, lib. 4) of the great interest which had been taken in Foxe’s foundation by Wolsey, Campeggio, and Henry VIII. himself, and predicts that the College will be ranked “inter praecipua decora Britanniae,” and that its “trilinguis bibliotheca” will attract more scholars to Oxford than were formerly attracted to Rome. This language, though somewhat exaggerated, shows the great expectations formed by the promoters of the new learning of this new departure in academical institutions. Of the subsequent history of the College, the space at my command only allows me to afford very brief glimpses. In 1539, John Jewel (subsequently the celebrated Bishop of Salisbury) was elected from a Postmastership at Merton to a scholarship at Corpus. From the interesting life of Jewel by Laurence Humfrey (published in 1573), we gather that at the time when Jewel entered it, and for some years subsequently, Corpus was still the “bee-hive” which its founder had designed it to be. His Merton tutors, we learn, were very anxious to place him at Corpus, not only for his pecuniary, but also for his educational, advancement. The lectures, disputations, exercises, and examinations prescribed by the founder seem still to have been retained in their full vigour, though it is curious to find that the author with whom young Jewel was most familiar was Horace, whose works, as we have seen, were strangely omitted from the list of Latin books recommended in the original statutes. But that the College shared in the general decay of learning, which accompanied the religious troubles of Edward VI.’s reign, is apparent from two orations delivered by Jewel: one in 1552, in commemoration of the founder; the other probably a little earlier, a sort of declamation against Rhetoric, in his capacity of Praelector of Latin. In the latter oration, he contrasts unfavourably the present with the former state of the University, referring its degeneracy, its diminished influence, and its waning numbers, to the excessive cultivation of rhetoric, and especially of the works of Cicero, “who has extinguished the light and glory of the whole University.” In the former, and apparently later, oration, he deals more specifically with the College, and admonishes its members to wash out, by their industry and application to study, the stain on their once fair name, to throw off their lethargy, to recover their ancient dignity, and to take for their watchword “Studeamus.”