La vita dello scolaro Tudor: i dialoghi di Juan Luis Vives

were but four books in English, and those upon religious subjects, all beside _vetusta et inutilia_. We have not a single historian in English prose before the reign of Richard II., when John Trevisa translated the _Polychronicon_ of Randulph Higden. Boston of Bury, who seems to have consulted all the monasteries in England, does not mention one author who had written in English; and Bale, at a later period, has comparatively but an insignificant number; nor was Leland so fortunate as to find above two or three English books in the monastic and other libraries which he rummaged and explored under the King’s Commission.”[5] The classical writers of Greece and Rome, however, have always drawn towards them a large proportion of the well-trained scholarly men of each generation. _Before the vernacular literature existed, necessarily it was to the ancient classical languages that the literary scholar turned._ In Greek, Plato and Aristotle had written; so, too, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, as dramatists, and the historians Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, and the “divine poet” Homer. Amongst the Latin prose writers were Cicero, Terence, Livy; and amongst the poets, Horace and Vergil. On any showing, such classical writers hold their own high place even if brought into comparison with the greatest of the moderns. The intellectual discipline received by reading their works in the original Greek and Latin had its value. Hence the sixteenth-century English student was trained on those ancient Greek and Latin authors, all unconscious of the great awakening that was to be of modern English literature, into which the twentieth-century reader so lightly enters. The whole of the well-educated, scholarly, learned men of the sixteenth century, in England and on the continent of Europe, all entered into the _same_ classical heritage. They all honoured the same great names of Greek and Latin authors.…