[Illustration: FIG. 82. DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (1467-1536) A contemporary portrait by the German artist, Hans Holbein the Younger, in the Louvre, Paris] HUMANISM IN ENGLAND. Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet had introduced the new learning at Oxford, as we have already seen (p. 253), in the closing years of the fifteenth century (R. 133), but had made but little impression. They were ably seconded by Erasmus, who taught Greek at Cambridge (1510- 14), and who labored hard to substitute true classical culture for the poor Latin and the empty scholasticism of his time. He wrote textbooks [8] to help introduce the new learning, urged the importance of history, geography, and science as serving to elucidate the classics, edited editions of the classical authors, wrote two treatises of importance on education, [9] and in two other books [10] ridiculed those who mistook the form for the spirit of the ancient learning. His Latin Greek edition of the New Testament definitely fixed the place of the New Testament in the humanistic schools. In spite of the opposition of monks and scholastics in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and in the face of the coming religious turmoil in the days of Henry VIII, the new learning made steady progress in the universities, [11] with the court, and among the scholars and statesmen of the time. With the coming of Elizabeth to the throne, [12] in 1558, the court, from the Queen down, was imbued with the spirit of the new learning (R. 139). Elizabeth appointed new chancellors for the two universities, and these institutions were soon transformed from places for the training of mediaeval scholars and theologians into places for the production of a "due supply of fit persons to serve God in Church and State." As Sir Thomas Elyot so well expressed it, in his _The Governour_ (1544)--a book on the education of rulers for a State, and which was permeated by the new spirit--"the new political order requires qualified instruments for its administration, and a trained governing class must henceforth take the place of the privileged caste and the clerk [cleric] education under the mediaeval disciplines."