A few years Crichton’s senior in point of time, although, from the precociousness of Crichton’s genius, his junior in reputation, was Lancelot Andrews, Bishop of Winchester. He was born in London in 1555, and, after a distinguished career in the university, rose, through a long course of ecclesiastical preferments, to the see of Winchester. Beyond the general praises of his scholarship in which all his biographers indulge, few particulars are preserved respecting his attainments. Among his contemporaries he was regarded as a prodigy. Wanley says[168] that “some thought he might almost have served as interpreter-general at the confusion of tongues;” and even the more prosaic Chalmers attributes to him a profound knowledge of the “chief Oriental tongues, Greek, Latin, and many modern languages.”[169] John Gregory, who was born at Agmondesham in Buckinghamshire, in the year 1607, would probably have far surpassed Andrews as a linguist, had he not been cut off prematurely before he had completed his thirtieth year. He was a youth of unexampled industry and perseverance, devoting sixteen hours of the twenty-four to his favourite studies. Even at the early age at which he died he had mastered not only the Oriental and classical languages, but also French, Italian, and Spanish, and, what was far more remarkable in his day, his ancestral Anglo-Saxon. But he died in the very blossom of his promise, in 1646. These, however, must be regarded as exceptional cases. The study of languages, it must be confessed, occupied at this period but little of public attention in England. It holds a very subordinate place in the great scheme of Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning.” In the model Republic of his “New Atlantis” only four languages appear, “ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, good Latin of the School, and Spanish.”[170] Gregory’s contemporaries, the brothers John and Thomas Greaves, though both distinguished Persian and Arabic scholars, never made a name in other languages. Notwithstanding the praise which Clarendon bestows on Selden’s “stupendous learning in all kinds and _in all languages_,”[171] it is certain that the range of his languages was very limited. So, also, what Hallam says of Hugh Broughton as a man “deep in Jewish erudition,”[172] must be understood rather of the literature than of the languages of the East; and although Hugh Broughton’s namesake, Richard, (one of the missionary priests in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and an antiquarian of considerable merit, mentioned by Dodd[173]) was a learned Hebraist, there is no evidence of his having gone farther in these studies. Indeed, strange as it may at first sight appear, the first epoch in English history really prolific in eminent scholars is the stormy period of the great Civil War. It is not a little remarkable that the most creditable fruit of English scholarship, Walton’s Polyglot Bible, was matured, if not brought to light, under the Republic.