Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/114

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
84

to improve their scholarship." The students had to pass a severe examination: "to write off a Latin letter; to compose fair verses; to be initiated into Logic, and to have some training in plain song." Mr. Wells, as an example of all this, cites the case of the famous Jewel, who began to study at four A.M., who went to bed at ten P.M., who spent whole days in the Library; who took no recreation but walking, and even then, if he did not meditate, or instruct the two boys who were his companions, "he argued in Aristotelian fashion." That he soon collapsed, physically and mentally, overladen with the weight of the honey of information he had sipped not only from the Tree of Knowledge and from the Flower of Learning, but from Greek Roots, is not surprising.

There is a medium to draw, in college life, between the unusual Jewel Boy and the Boy of the regulation Diamond, between too much argument in Aristotelian fashion, and too hard tackling in the football way!

Nicholas Udall, Dramatist and Scholar, went to Corpus in 1520, when he was but fifteen years of age. He received his degree of B. A. four years later, when he became a Probationary Fellow. He was one of the earliest adherents of the Protestant movement among the Oxford tutors, and