PROFESSOR CHURCH'S NEW STORY.*

IN taking us in The Chantry Priest of Barnet to " fresh woods and pastures new," Professor Church still displays many of the characteristic excellences which have made his series of stories from Greek and Latin authors so justly popular. We find in his new book the same charm of style in which the picturesque simplicity of a bygone age is preserved, without the baldness and stiffness which less skilful writers seem to think are

synonymous with simplicity ; the same careful study of the period which he is illustrating ; and, above all, the thorough sympathy with his subject-matter, and with the persons about whom he writes, which is so essential if the ordinary reader is to be really interested.

Though the book is called " a Tale of the Two Roses," and though the battles of Blore Heath and Barnet are nar- rated in detail, yet the reader who expects a tale of military adventure or of party excitement will be dis- appointed. The life of the good priest who so simply tells us his story is almost devoid of incident or adventure, if, indeed, it is not a paradox to say so of one who had talked with Henry VI. at Windsor ; had been present as a spectator at the battle of Blore Heath, and as a Chaplain at that of Barnet; had administered the last rites of the Church to the dying Earl of Warwick ; and had accompanied the victorious Edward IV. to London in 1471 ; who bad visited Caxton at his house in the Almonry at Westminster ; had talked of Utopia with Sir Thomas More, and of the Greek Testament of Erasmus with Dean Colet. But Sir Thomas Aylmer, the Chantry priest, takes absolutely no interest in battles or parties. Every reference to the Wars of the Roses might be omitted, and yet the interest of the book would remain intact, as an admirable presentment of the life of a student-priest in the latter half of the fifteenth cen- tury. And here Mr. Church has shown that he possesses one of the rarest and most valuable qualities of a historian or a historical novelist. Looking back after four centuries upon the Wars of the Roses—the leading events of the times—they stand out before us with a prominence quite out of proportion to their real im- portance as affecting the life or happiness of the great mass of contemporary Englishmen. It is only by an effort that we can realise the fact that these events constituted in truth but an in- significant part of the real history of the period, and that the healthy business of life went on as usual, wholly unaffected by them. There is a story, which historians would do well to hear in mind, of an old gentleman who, during the Reign of Terror, lived in the same house and on the same floor with Robespierre, and who, when his grandchildren asked him to tell them some of his adventures during that dreadful period, and to give them some details of the terrible tribune, was wont to reply,—" Mes enfants, dans ce temps-I4 je m'occupais entierement d'ento- mologie 1" The Chantry priest, like nine-tenths of his countrymen, seems to have had no predilections for one side more than the other. His sympathy and regret for the sad fate of the gentle and religious Henry VI. do not prevent him from admiring the handsome person, the genial manners, and the popular adminis- tration of Edward IV. Literature and learning, and not battles or politics, are what interest him. The son of a Serjeant-at-law, educated first at the Royal College of Eton, then at the magnificent, but as yet unfinished, foundation of his kinsman, William of Waynflete, Sir Thomas Aylmer gives us a most interesting and admirable account of boy-life at Eton, and student-life at Oxford ; and no part of the book shows more

• The Chantey Priest of Barnet: a Tale of the Two Roses. By the Rev. Alfred J. Obareb, M.A., Professor of Latin in University College, London. London Seeley and Co.

clearly the great care and pains which Mr. Church has taken to reproduce some little known, but most interesting phases of the history of the life of the past. But on one point we are unable to agree with him. He says :-

" The description of life at Eton is taken from a document dating from about the middle of the sixteenth century. I have ventured to antedate it by about a hundred years. In so conservative a school the customs of 1550 might very well have bees traced back for a century."

Now, apart from the fact that we have no sort of evidence that Eton was in any sense conservative during the first century of its existence, Mr. Church seems to have forgotten the enormous revolution which the discovery of printing, the renaissance of learning, and the rise and progress of the reformation had made in all schools, in all methods of study between 1450' and 1550. Whatever may have been the case with Italy, England in 14.50 was still in the middle ages ; and indeed, as far as learning and literature are concerned, in that period of especial obscurity which came immediately before the dawn of the Renaissance. But in 1550 we are in the full light of modern times. Even at Cambridge as late as 1485, all that was taught was, as Erasmus tells us, the Parva logicalia of Alexander, the old Dictata of Aristotle, and the Questions of Scotus ; and we should require very strong evidence to convince us that at Eton in 1450, the younger scholars would read " The Sorrows of Ovid and Virgil's Pastorals, and the elder, Vigil's ..Erneicl, and The Letters of Cicero." While, if Thomas Aylmer, before being admitted to Eton, then being ten years old, knew "the accidence of the Latin tongue, and could make shift with some help given to put together a distich of Latin," we can only say that be had been much better grounded, and made much more progress than we had conceived to be possible in 1450. The Tristia of Ovid was no doubt at all times a popular book; but if The Letters of Cicero, his De Anticitia and De Oratore were read at Eton or even at Oxford (Aylmer was examined in these two last at Oxford) in the latter half of the fifteenth century,.

pure Latinity was studied in England at a period when the rest of Europe was steeped in barbarous mediaeval Latin, and before the Ciceronians had restored even in Italy the study of the great master of Latin style.

Mr. Church's description of student-life at Oxford is alto- gether admirable, and this notwithstanding the curiously modern air which the rigid conservatism of Oxford gives to some customs which are certainly more than three hundred.

years old. Since Universities existed, the friendships, the- quarrels, the sports, and last, and perhaps sometimes least, the- studies, of the students, have presented many points of resem- blance; and the friendship of Thomas Aylmer and John Eliot has its parallel, not only in the University of Paris two cen- turies earlier, but in that of Oxford four centuries later.

" I doubt me much whether there be anywhere in the world friend- ship so fast and so little marred by strife or jealousy, or any such thing as that which doth sometimes spring up between young men that, being under the roof of one college, do follow in company both study and sport. Nor is it of necessity for such friendship that the two should be altogether like in temper and liking and manner of life."

Nor does it appear that the examination for the B.A. degree in the Ethics of Aristotle in 1460 was quite so dissimilar to that of, shall we say,1850, as might be supposed, if, at least, we may take Thomas Aylmer's examination as a fair instance :—

" For one Master Lawrence posing in a book of Aristotle, being one that loved the reputation of asking each questions as none could answer, was like to have put me in a sore dilemma. Saith Master- Lawrence, Doth not St. Paul the Apostle commend the virtue of humility as being singularly fitting to a Christian man, and that more than once ?'—' Yea,' answered I, ' he doth.'—' And doth not Aristotle, when he placeth virtue in the mean between two extremes, name- humilitas or humility as an extreme which erreth by defect, even as arrogance erreth by excess, greatness of mind being in the mean 2 How dost thou reconcile these two ? Dost thou hold with. Aristotle or with Paul ?' And when I knew not 'what to answer; saith one of the Proctors, 'Nay, Master Lawrence, thou dealest• with this lad as thou wert a bishop holding inquisition of a Lollard or other heretic. Why dost thou shat him up to a choice which he may not conveniently make either this way or that ?' So did I joyfully escape from the jaws of Master Lawrence Especially well did we acquit ourselves in the School of Rhetoric, where one Master Butler, a master of Exeter College, did question us about the eighth and ninth book of the Ethica of Aristotle, wherein friendship is treated of. For these books, it so chanced, we had read together with notable care. And when Master Butler asked us of Cicero's treatise on Friendship, commonly called the Laelius, here also he found us well prepared. And when desirous to know whether we knew more of Cicero, it so chanced that he lighted upon his book Concerning the Orator, Which book also we had but lately read."

We fancy we remember, not more than five-and-thirty years since, that questions were put not absolutely dissimilar to that of Master Lawrence, and that a comparison of the treatment of Friendship by Aristotle in the Ethics with that of Cicero in the De Amicitia was not wholly unknown in the examinations.

When an Oxford Bachelor of Arts, Aylmer goes to Blore Heath, in the hope, which was not disappointed, of seeing a battle there, reminding us of the day's holiday given to Anthony

A. Wood and his schoolfellows nearly two centuries later to enable them to be present at the surrender of the King's garrison at Frstall. The detailed account which Mr. Church gives us of the battle of Blore Heath is perfectly accurate ; but he seems to have missed altogether its special significance and those features in which it illustrates in so marked a manner the characteristics of the Wars of the Roses

There Dutton Dutton kills, a Done doth kill a Done; A Booth a Booth, and Leigh by Leigh is overthrown ; There Venables in arms against a Venables doth stand, And Troutbeck fighteth with a Trontbeek hand to hand ; There Molinenx cloth make a Molineux to die, And Egerton the strength of Egerton doth try."

From his studies at Oxford, Aylmer is temporarily withdrawn by his friendship for John Eliot, and by his visits to his friend's home in Shropshire. And this brings us to a charmingly-told prose idyll, the simple pathos of which we will not spoil in an attempt to abridge or reproduce. Then he resolves to become a monk, is admitted to St. Albans in the days of the great Abbot, John of Wheathampsted, of whom he has much to say, and finds in his religions duties, and in the congenial work of the scriptorium, peace and content, if not actual happiness. How he comes to leave this retreat and to accompany Edward IV. to London and then to Barnet, and how he became priest of the King's Chantry there, we must leave the reader to discover for himself.

In the later, though by no means the least interesting, part of his Autobiography, Sir Thomas Aylmer, as is excusable in so old a man, becomes a little confused as to certain dates and facts, which his editor in a future edition may like to correct. He must have been mistaken in the date, the first day of September,

1477, when Master Goodere took him to visit William Caxton, and when the printer gave him a copy of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers as "the first book ever printed in this realm

of England ;" for the printing of the " Dictes " was not finished until the month of November in that year ; while if the great printer informed him that it was the first book printed in England, he authoritatively settled a question the answer to which has been hitherto in doubt, and on which our great authority for the history of Caxton's press, Mr. Blades, takes a different view. Mr. Blades thinks it probable that the Life of Jason was printed before " Dictes ;" while if we are to believe Robert Copland, one of hia workmen, and afterwards a master- printer himself, Caxton began " with small storyes and pamflets, and so to other." Nor can we think that in 1477 Caxton would have spoken of the art of printing " as having lived but twenty years at the most," for he could hardly have been ignorant that whatever the date of the invention of printing, it was certainly practised at Mentz as early as 1455.

In saying of Dean Colet, "'Tie certain that he hath studied the Greek tongue ; yea, and did lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of St. Paul as so written," Mr. Church has, perhaps,

only intended to convey the common idea among his contem- poraries of the extent of Colet's learning. But, in fact, if he

had any knowledge of Greek (which is doubtful), it was of a most rudimentary character, and he himself laments his inability to read the Greek Testament of Erasmus. His lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul—fragments and notes of which in his own handwriting are still extant—did not follow either of the then established methods. He neither makes each text the subject of wire-drawn dissertations, dividing it into as many senses and in- terpretations as possible, nor forms a catena aurea by linking to- gether the comments of the Fathers or the Schoolmen, but aims, in a manner previously unknown, at least in England, to bring out the direct practical meaning which the Apostle wished to convey. But the lectures are entirely upon the Vulgate, and show no trace of any knowledge of the original, which, indeed, considering the date at which they were delivered, 1496, it would be most remarkable if they had done, for it will be remembered at that date Erasmus himself knew hardly any Greek, and was entirely unacquainted with the Greek Testament.

We have left ourselves no apace to speak of the admirable repro-

ductions of contemporary illuminations and drawings with which the book is illustrated, and we only add that though we cannot

anticipate for The Chantry Priest the popularity of some others of Mr. Church's books,— one of which, we see, has reached its fifteenth thousand,—we can cordially recommend it to all who wish to see the life and manners of a bygone and interesting period portrayed with that fidelity of detail, that picturesqueness of colouring, and that delicacy of touch, in which Mr. Church never fails.