to this period, and in the reflected light of the Renascence[1], Oxford had retained her relative superiority over Cambridge; which has no group of names to compete with those of Selling, Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and Sir Thomas More. It may also be observed that, in the year 1476[2], Oxford had obtained her printing-press; but Cambridge was possessed of no such instrument when Erasmus quitted it in 1514.
We now pass into the sixteenth century; the age of specifically national development, and one singularly prolific, as I conceive, of powerful minds and characters. But it was not great as an academic age, while the relative positions of the two Universities also underwent a total change. To her manifest and indeed hardly measureable superiority in the earlier centuries, Oxford had now bidden a long farewell.
It was indeed a century too polemical to be favourable to the development of a vigorous academic life. An interesting Table, with which Mr. Mullinger has supplied us in his recent sketch of the history of Cambridge, shows that, between 1500 and 1560, the Baccalaureate[3] was only given to a number averaging annually less than 50. This decline impartially includes the religious extremes of Mary and of Edward VI. With the reign of Elizabeth an improvement began; but it is also true that, from the date of her accession, the theo-
- ↑ I have ventured upon following several writers of credit in the employment of this word in preference to borrowing Renaissance, which has no advantaged over it, from the French.
- ↑ See Ames's History of Printing.
- ↑ Which she now confers upon some 700 persons annually.
