0 Unpublished Letters of an English Humanist TH With an Introductory Note By J. E. Spingarn HE history of Humanism in England is still to be written. For fifty years English text societies and German specialists have been making accessible to us dreary treatises in prose and verse of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but not in them shall we find the whole secret of the hundred years which stretch like a tangled waste behind Wyatt and Surrey. Elizabethan youth, whose intellectual nourishment was derived from the Latin Grammar of Colet and Lily and the Sententia Pueriles,' received in the schools a training of which the inspiring source was less Middle English and scholastic than Italian and classical. But though the spiritual ancestry of such men as Cheke, Colet, Ascham and Mulcaster is the ancestry of a hundred greater than they whose academic environment and early culture they definitely fixed and furnished, the philosophic historian of Eng“And when that once Pueriles I had read, And newly had my Cato construéd. . . . And first read to me honest Mantuan, Then Virgil's Eclogues."-Drayton, To Henry Reynolds, Esq., Of Poets and Poesie. lish Humanism has a broader and more difficult task than merely to trace the portrait of the schoolmaster who quotes Mantuan in Love's Labour's Lost and dog-Latin in Sidney's Lady of May. The title which Leland the antiquary gave to a work of his no longer extant, De Origine et Incremento Bonarum in Britannia Literarum, might serve to indicate the real scope of such a task. Biographies of individual humanists are not wanting, and sidelights have been cast upon the subject by Warton, Seebohm, Gasquet, the historians of the Universities, and the contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography. The external setting is thus partly given, but the secrets of countless Latin treatises and letters, and the vast bulk of Latin verse, for the most part unpublished or difficult of access, must be gleaned, before scholarship can do for England and for France' what Voigt, Burckhardt, and a thousand monographists have done for the Italian Renaissance. The letters here published for the first time furnish scanty but not unimportant material for such "What is needed first of all," says M. Brunetière, in the preface of his Evolution des Genres, referring to French literature, "before the first chapter of a History of Criticism can be written, is a History of Humanism. Criticism commenced by being philological, in Italy as in France, grammatical, or purely erudite; and what information have we concerning our érudits, our grammarians, our philologists, concerning a Budaeus or a Turnebus, a Scaliger or an Estienne? Yet it was they alone who for more than a century held in their hands the key of all that then passed for science, who were the real masters and the true instructors of our men of genius. Rabelais in his Pantagruel, Ronsard in his Odes, even Calvin in his Christian Institution, and Montaigne in his Essays are but disciples of these humanists." an undertaking.' Their author, John Phreas, or Free, a fellow of Balliol College, was one of the pioneers of the humanistic movement in Britain, and one of a brave but slender band of English scholars who about the middle of the fifteenth century crossed the channel and the Alps to absorb the learning of the Italian Renaissance. After receiving his B. A. at Oxford in 1449 and his M. A. in 1454, he left England in company with John Gunthorpe, another Balliol scholar, perhaps at the instigation of Italian merchants at Bristol, as Leland suspects, but certainly at the expense of William Grey, Bishop of Ely. To this patron all but four of the letters below are addressed. The first alludes to the recent accession of Pius II. to the Papacy, which had occurred in 1458. Another dated Ferariæ septimo kalendas Novembres,' refers to the death of Lorenzo Valla, which had taken place August 1, 1457, as a very recent occurrence. The whole correspondence would therefore seem to belong to the autumn of 1457 and a part of the following year. The tales of poverty and homesickness in which the letters abound do not suggest long residence in Italy, nor that success which came to him within a few years 'These letters are from the Bodleian Library, MS. 587. Another MS. of Phreas may be found in Balliol College Library; a third, supposed to be in Lincoln Cathedral Library, seems to be lost. 2 The details of Phreas' life are given in Leland, Comment. de Script. Britann. ii. 466 sq., Dict. of Nat. Biog. s. v. Phreas, and Einstein, Ital. Ren. in Eng. p. 20 sq. The last of these has made extensive use of the letters here published; thanks are due to its author, Mr. Lewis Einstein, for a careful transcript of the MS., to Dr. G. N. Olcott of Columbia University for assistance in correcting the proofs. and and which obtained for him the Bishopric of Bath and Wells shortly before his death at Rome in 1465. The letters were probably for the most part written at Ferrara, where Phreas was studying under Guarino Veronese, and it is to this famous teacher that the most interesting of the letters is addressed. Written after hearing Guarino lecture for the first time, it is filled with respect and enthusiasm, but most significant of all is the allusion to his own rustic style, which Guarino's instruction is to polish and perfect. There is no conception of his master's broader and higher ideals of education, just as in the allusion to Lorenzo Valla there is praise for the Latinity, but no apprehension of the critical method of the author of the Elegantia. Phreas was later to study with distinction medicine, civil law, philosophy, and history, but the influence of the Renaissance was external in him as in all the other English scholars of the time, and was shown rather by his enthusiasm, his industry, and the extent of his studies than by the application of the newly found critical canons to classical culture. Yet Poggio has been said to have rifled his translation of Diodorus Siculus,' and half a century later the tradition of his fame was still abroad. In 1515 his Latin version of the jeu d'esprit of Synesius, De Laudibus Calvitii, was published at Basel by Frobenius with Erasmus's Encomium Moria, and the dedicatory epistle of the eminent German humanist, Beatus Rhenanus, speaks of him in these 'Cf. Bayle, Dict. s. v. Phrea, note D, where the authorities are given. terms: "Ioannes Phrea, quod non sine publico Britanniae, quam nunc Angliam vocant, honore dixerim, utramque linguam egregie percalluit, bonas literas summa cum laude non paucos annos idque in Italia professus." The version was simply an exercise in translation, and light is apparently shed on it by one of the letters published below. A recent writer has seen in him an illustration of the many-sidedness of the Renaissance, but this point of view is scarcely the true one, for his numerous studies suggest rather the mediæval encyclopedic mood, with an added enthusiasm, a feeling for style, and the more pagan spirit of the Renaissance, yet wholly lacking in simpleness of literary purpose, in philosophic grasp or originality, and especially in that critical method which was being pursued by the men about him under the inspiration of Flavio Biondo and Lorenzo Valla. Yet this seed-time of English Humanism was soon to develop its harvest. Less than a half century later, the gracious urbanity of Erasmus could find at Oxford such marvellous learning, "not hacknied and trivial, but deep, accurate, ancient Latin and Greek," as almost to dissuade him from crossing the Alps; and in 1534, in far-off Portugal, André de Resende could with literal accuracy place England beside France and Germany, as "in this age of ours contending with Italy itself for the palm of letters." 'This passage is cited by Leland, ii. 468, but the whole epistle has been reprinted by Horawitz and Hartfelder, Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus, Leipzig, 1886, p. 72. Phreas' translation was republished in 1519, 1521, 1522, 1524 and 1551. Fleming's English version appeared in 1579. |