owes many advantages, without remembering or knowing its benefactors.-Ascham soon resolved to unite himself to those who were enlarging the bounds of knowledge, and immediately upon his admission into the college, applied himself to the study of Greek. Those who were zealous for the new learning, were often no great friends to the old religion; and Ascham, as he became a Grecian, became a protestant. The reformation was not yet begun; disaffection to popery was considered as a crime justly punished by exclusion from favour and preferment, and was not yet openly professed, though superstition was gradually losing its hold upon the public. Greek was reputable enough, and Ascham pursued it with diligence and success equally conspicuous."

The study of

It has been before observed, that the restoration of ancient literature, notwithstanding its beneficial influence on taste and general refinement, tended in the first instance to check the progress of the English language: for all persons of education, ambitious of the character of erudition, wrote in Latin. From the introduction of the ancient classics to the publication of Ascham's Toxophilus, no man

of literary eminence (with the exception of sir Thomas More) published any piece of consequence in English. On this account, the vernacular language, long after the invention of printing, instead of being refined, was corrupted by various affected additions and barbarisms. In the extract from the Toxophilus, we have seen Ascham complaining of this; and feeling its impropriety, he was the first, after More, who had the resolution to throw off the fetters of a learned language. The Toxophilus (as above noticed) was published the last year of Henry VIII. or in 1545.

This universal attention to polite literature, the prominent feature in the literary character of the age of which we are treating, had one bad effect: it excluded philosophy We need not regret, perhaps, that the redoubted logicians and metaphysicians Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas were abandoned; but we have reason to lament that words usurped the place of things, to the knowledge of which they are merely secondary and subser vient. The improvement of society can never be greatly advanced by mere verbalists. These men had their use in their day; but it re

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quired the genius of a Bacon to illumine, with a light full and clear, the Benighted intellects of men, by instructing them, that it is only by the successive accumulation of facts susceptible of useful or refined applications, to which society can be indebted for a certain and rapid progression.

FOX.

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JOHN Fox, divine, and ecclesiastical histo rian, was born at Boston, in Lincolnshire, in 1517, being the same year that Luther began the reformation in Germany. His father dying when he was young, the care of his early education was undertaken by a father-inlaw; and at the age of sixteen, he entered at Brazen-nose College, Oxford, where, in the years 1538, and 1543, he took his degrees in

arts.

He engaged with great ardour in the study of divinity, and had embraced the principles of the reformers without any previous intercourse with any of them. But in order to make himself master of the theological controversies which then disturbed and divided all Europe, he began to examine into the history of the church, both in ancient and modern

times. In this course of study, before the age of thirty, he had read over all the Greek and Latin fathers, the schoolmen, the councils, the consistories, and had also attained a competent skill in the Hebrew language. The consequence of this examination was, that he adopted on principle the tenets of the reform ers; was convicted of heresy, and in 1545, was expelled the university, narrowly escaping with life.

He afterwards became preceptor successively to the children of sir Thomas Lucy, of Warwickshire, and to those of the earl of Surry, nephew of the duchess of Richmond, under whose inspection the children had been from the committment of the earl, and his father the duke of Norfolk, to the Tower. In this last situation he continued during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII. the reign of Edward VI. and part of that of Mary; when through fear of Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, who had issued a warrant to apprehend him, he was compelled to fly his country; and at Basil in Germany, a common resort of our countrymen of those times from the persecutions of bigotry, supported himself