CHAP. usefulness: they are as immortal as the superstitions they expose. John Colet's name is preserved to our days by the pious memory of those who have been educated at the school which he founded in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral, and endowed with a large part of his patrimonial wealth, to the amount of 30,000 or 40,000l. of our money. Among the amiable parts of Colet's character was fondness for children. He placed an image of the youthful Jesus as the guardian and example of his school. But Colet had wider views than the indulgence of such feelings, remarkable as they may be in one who had denied himself by his ordination vows, and on whose strict adherence to those vows there never was the slightest impeachment, the luxury of the parental affections. He sought to train up generation after generation in the broad and liberal, but devout Christianity which was dawning on his mind and that of his friend Erasmus. His school was to be strictly religious but not monastic. With the rules of the school and the studies to be pursued he took infinite pains. He was assisted by the advice of Erasmus, who, as has been said, drew up a grammar and other elementary books for the school. Colet was fortunate in his master, the once-celebrated John Lily, the model of grammarians. He took the greatest pains to provide a second master to act under Lily. Colet deviated in many respects from the usage of the founders of such schools. 8There was an ancient cathedral 'school, on which. . . . Richard de 'Belmeis bestowed the house of Durandus, near the Bell Tower." This school obtained other endow'ments, and the privileges granted by Henry of Blois, who administered the 'diocese, that no one should presume 'to teach school in the city of London 'without the master's licence, except 'the masters of S. Mary-le-Bow and of S. Martin-le-Grand.' Dugdale, p. 9. • The masters Colet chose were married men; a tacit repudiation, as Mr. Lupton observes, of the austerer views about the Celibacy of the Clergy in his Book of the Sacraments.' Schools attached to cathedrals were usually under the care and control of the Chapters. But Colet and his Chapter were not in harmony: the Chapter, no doubt, like the Bishops, looked with jealousy on the new learning, with which they were but slightly gifted. They had repudiated Colet's statutes. Colet left the whole conduct of the school and its endowments to the Mercers' Company, to which his father had belonged, and of which himself by descent might claim to be a member. The property, therefore, never being mixed up with that of the Chapter, was probably better managed. To all appearance it has been carefully and justly administered by that honourable company.1 There are other remarkable provisions in the statutes of Colet's school. In general the founders of those schools had encumbered them with narrow and inflexible regulations, sure to become obsolete, as to the scholars to be admitted, and the studies to be cultivated. In such schools there is a constant strife with the knowledge and the manners of succeeding ages. With a wise prescience Colet threw aside all these manacles on posterity. There is no limitation whatever as to admission of descent, kin, or country, or station. It is a free school in the broadest sense. Of all the multitudes who then or thereafter might flow to central, busy, metropolitan London, no children were proscribed or excluded. It is a more singular instance of prophetic sagacity, that Colet should have anticipated the truth so long undreamed of, that education must conform itself to the social state, the habits, manners, wants, and progressive knowledge of the day. The studies in S. Paul's School are absolutely without statutable restrictions. They may 1 With Mr. Siebold, I reject the application of the Orbilian ideal of a schoolmaster, whose whole skill was in frequent flagellation, to Colet, to CHAP. VI. VI. CHAP. adapt themselves, or be adapted by the wisdom of the master, to the demands of every period and stage of civilisation. And this from a man of the profound religion of Colet! But Colet saw that the dominant religion, or rather the form of that religion, was drawing to a close, and who should determine where that change would be arrested? Christianity would never fail; but what was to be the Christianity of the future, John Colet presumed not to foresee.2 Colet was meditating retirement from his labours; it is said, from the petty harassing persecutions of Bishop Fitz James. His health had suffered from more than one attack of the fatal malady of the times, the sweating sickness. The survivor of twenty-two children might well tremble for the precarious tenure of life. His retirement could be hardly anywhere but to a monastery—a monastery sufficiently religious, but not too monastic. This was difficult to find. Colet chose the house of the Carthusians at Sheen, but, before he could enter into his earthly repose, he was carried off by his obstinate enemy, the sweating sickness, at the age of fifty-three. No one who would do justice to the wisdom and the religion of Colet, will hesitate to read the famous letter of Erasmus to Justus Jodocus, in which he describes, with eloquence which comes from the heart, and, as far as we can judge, with unquestionable truth, the two most perfect Christians whom the world, in his time, had seen. One of them was John Colet, Dean of S. Paul's. 2 S. Paul's School, Colet's, must have risen rapidly to eminence. See the very curious account of the plays performed by the scholars before the King at Gravesend, in 1527, in Mr. THE CHAPTER OF S. PAUL'S.-REVENUES.-FABRIC OF THE CATHEDRAL. SOME of the earlier authorities give the appellation of monastery to S. Paul's. This is, no doubt, erroneous. It arose from the desire of making S. Paul's a counterpart to the great monastery of S. Peter's in Thorney Island (Westminster). But, from their foundation, the members of the Chapter of S. Paul's were secular priests, and constantly bore the name of Canons, or, improperly, Prebendaries, from the prebends or portions attached to each stall. S. Paul's was surrounded, indeed, with great monastic establishments. At its feet were the Black Friars (the Dominicans), near the opening on Blackfriars Bridge: beyond, the White Friars (Carmelites), whose precincts degenerated into what was called Alsatia. Beyond was the magnificent abode of the Templars. On the north side of Ludgate Hill were the Grey Friars (Franciscans), who occupied the site of Christ's Hospital. Further back, the rich Priory of S. John's, Clerkenwell, and a convent of Sisters of S. Clare. Then the Priory of S. Bartholomew's, Smithfield; the Holy Trinity, within Aldgate; and the Carthusians (the Charter House), those brothers who so intrepidly resisted and so nobly died for their faith at the beginning of the Reformation. But S. Paul's had no relation with any of these institutions. Even to the Bishop K CHAP. VII. 130 THIRTY CANONS OF S. PAUL'S. CHAP. these monasteries acknowledged but doubtful, limited, and contested subjection. VII. The Bishop, with the Dean and his thirty Canons, constituted the great Chapter. To the Dean and Canons belonged, in theory and in form, the election of the Bishop. But it was usually as barren and unreal an honour as in our days. As the Pope or the King were in the ascendant, came the irresistible nomination, which it would have been perilous for the Chapter to refuse—impossible to elude. But the right of confirmation was always claimed by the Pope; who, by provisions, and those other ingenious devices by which the Papal Court secured to itself the appointment to so many sees in England, frequently nominated directly the Bishop of London. Yet, even in the high days of Papal usurpation, no Italian appeared on the episcopal throne of the English capital. A dean, indeed, appears exhibiting this abuse in its most monstrous form. Clement V., the first Avignonese pontiff (how he obtained the Pontificate is a dark history1), had a nephew, the Cardinal Deacon, Raymond de la Goth. The Pope thrust him in, by his assumed power, successively (he did not hold more than two deaneries together) into the rich deaneries of London, Salisbury, and Lincoln, with other fat benefices. This act of nepotism made no favourable impression in England. He was a youth too much well-disposed, but too lux 'beloved by the Pope; he was 'urious'—a pregnant word! 2 During the earlier period, the Bishop appears at the head and as the active ruling authority in the Cathedral. After the demolition of the old Anglo-Saxon building by fire, soon after the Conquest, it is the Bishop Maurice who undertakes and defrays the cost of the new cathedral. Latin Christianity, vol. vii. p. 171. 2 Hist. Dunelm., quoted by Wharton, p. 214. |